The 29 pages, external<\/a> from Special Counsel John Durham’s inquiry cites a March 2016 memo from a US intelligence source stating that Hillary Clinton, the Democratic White House candidate that year, had approved a plan to smear Trump as a Russian asset. <\/p>\nDurham cites “what appear or purport to be original” emails that hackers affiliated with Russian intelligence might have obtained from an employee with a non-profit run by liberal donor George Soros.<\/p>\n
One of the messages appeared to have been sent by Leonard Benardo, senior vice-president at Open Society Foundations, Soros’ philanthropic arm. It apparently refers to a Clinton foreign policy adviser, Julianna Smith.<\/p>\n
The email, dated 26 July 2016, reads: “Julie says it will be a long-term affair to demonize Putin and Trump. Now it is good for a post-convention bounce. Later the FBI will put more oil into the fire.”<\/p>\n
There is nothing illegal about a political smear, but Trump allies suggested the email, if genuine, showed that federal investigators could have been part of the scheme. Durham, however, found no proof of such an FBI conspiracy.<\/p>\n
According to the appendix, Benardo told Durham that “to the best of his recollection” he did not draft the email, although he noted that some of the verbiage further down sounded like something he would have said.<\/p>\n
The special counsel also interviewed Smith, who said she did not recall receiving such an email from Benardo.<\/p>\n
Durham made no determination in his appendix whether the emails were authentic, or if they had been doctored by Russian spies.<\/p>\n
His main 306-page report, published in 2023, found the original FBI probe into Trump’s campaign had lacked “analytical rigor” and relied on “raw, unanalysed and uncorroborated intelligence”.<\/p>\n
US officials found the Russian meddling in 2016 included bot farms on social media and hacking of Democratic emails, but they ultimately concluded the impact was probably limited and did not actually change the election result.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The debate over Russiagate was reinvigorated last week when an appendix to another justice department investigation into the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":318816,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5311],"tags":[49,978,659],"class_list":{"0":"post-318815","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-united-states","8":"tag-united-states","9":"tag-us","10":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114974101717278194","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/318815","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=318815"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/318815\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/318816"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=318815"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=318815"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=318815"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}