# Durham Report > [!abstract] 🏛️ Official government report > **Issued by:** Special Counsel [[John Durham]], [[Department of Justice]] · **Legal basis:** 28 C.F.R. § 600.8(c) · **Dated:** May 12, 2023 · **Made public:** May 15, 2023 *Report on Matters Related to Intelligence Activities and Investigations Arising Out of the 2016 Presidential Campaigns* — 306 pages, the product of the investigation Attorney General [[William Barr]] opened in May 2019 to examine the origins of [[Crossfire Hurricane]] and converted to a special-counsel appointment in late 2020. ## What it found - The FBI opened Crossfire Hurricane as a **full investigation** on "raw, unanalyzed, and uncorroborated intelligence," when at most a preliminary inquiry was warranted, and did not use the least intrusive means available. - Senior FBI personnel showed **confirmation bias**, and the Bureau held Trump-related matters to a different standard than Clinton-related ones. - The FBI relied on the [[Steele Dossier]] without verifying it — a criticism that overlaps heavily with the [[Horowitz FISA Report]] three and a half years earlier. ## What it did not find It did not find the conspiracy the investigation was launched to prove. It confirmed the FBI's own account of how the case began — with an Australian diplomat's report about [[George Papadopoulos]] — rather than any hidden scheme. It recommended no new charges and no structural reforms beyond those the Inspector General had already proposed. ## The prosecutions Four years produced three cases: a guilty plea from FBI lawyer [[Kevin Clinesmith]] for altering an email in a FISA application, and two jury acquittals — [[Michael Sussmann]] (May 31, 2022) and [[Igor Danchenko]] (October 18, 2022). ## How it is cited Both sides read it selectively. The movement cites the criticism of the FBI's judgment as vindication of the "[[Deep State]]" narrative; critics such as Lawfare's Benjamin Wittes note that the report buried its own most important finding — that the conspiracy theories about the investigation's origins were false. See [[John Durham]] for why the vault treats Durham as the control case for the [[Special Counsel]] mechanism. ## See Also - [[John Durham]] · [[Crossfire Hurricane]] · [[Horowitz FISA Report]] · [[Mueller Report]] · [[Special Counsel]] · [[Reports Hub]]