# John Durham The Connecticut prosecutor (b. 1950) whom Attorney General [[William Barr]] tasked in May 2019 with investigating the origins of the FBI's 2016 Russia inquiry, and converted to a Part 600 [[Special Counsel]] on October 19, 2020 so that the work would survive the election. Durham was the Justice Department's institutional choice for hard cases — the Whitey Bulger–FBI corruption inquiry in Boston, the CIA interrogation-tapes review — and his appointment was sold on that reputation. The right promoted the probe for four years as the vehicle that would expose the "deep state" plot against Trump; Barr said publicly he expected it to show the investigation had been "a travesty." ## What it produced One guilty plea — [[Kevin Clinesmith]], an FBI lawyer who altered an email in a surveillance application, sentenced to probation — and two acquittals: the Democratic lawyer Michael Sussmann (May 2022) and the dossier source [[Igor Danchenko]] (October 2022), both charged with lying to the FBI, both cases collapsing on the government's own witnesses. The final report (May 15, 2023; see [[Durham Report]]) found that the FBI had opened Crossfire Hurricane on "raw, unanalyzed and uncorroborated intelligence" and applied a lower standard than it had to Clinton-related matters, and recommended no new charges and no institutional changes beyond what the Inspector General had already proposed. It did not find the conspiracy; it did not find that the investigation should not have been opened. Durham resigned as U.S. Attorney in February 2021 and closed the office with the report. ## Why he matters here Durham is the control case for the [[Special Counsel]] page's argument. The mechanism worked as designed — an independent prosecutor, four years, subpoena power, a Republican Attorney General's full backing — and returned a result the movement could not use, so the movement kept the claim and discarded the finding. The [[Mueller Investigation]] is the mirror image: a probe whose findings its opponents discarded. The [[Deep State (Media Vocabulary)]] page tracks how the phrase survived the report that was supposed to prove it, and the second term's revived prosecutions of the same figures — Comey, Brennan — are the sequel, pursued without the inconvenience of a special counsel. ## See Also - [[Special Counsel]] · [[William Barr]] · [[Mueller Investigation]] · [[Robert Mueller]] · [[Deep State (Media Vocabulary)]]