Not only did the Durham Report find fault with the FBI’s investigation into allegations of ties between Russia and Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, it also debunked various claims made by leading Democrats in the first two years of Trump’s presidency.
Among the Democrats the report makes look bad is U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff of California. In a March 2017 interview with MSNBC, when asked by Chuck Todd if all he had was a circumstantial case against Trump, Schiff said, “Actually, no, Chuck, I can tell you that the case is actually more than that. I can’t go into particulars, but there is more than circumstantial evidence now.”
When pressed by Todd if he had seen direct evidence of collusion between Trump and Russia, Schiff said: “I don’t want to go into specifics, but I will say that there is evidence that is not circumstantial and is very much worthy of investigation. That is what we ought to do.”
A Twitter thread by journalist Tom Elliott spotlights several Democrats making claims about collusion between Russia and Trump that turned out to be debunked by the Durham Report. Here are highlights:
- Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., on July 13, 2017: “This week, we saw cold, hard evidence of the Trump campaign, indeed the Trump family eagerly intending to collude possibly with Russia, a hostile foreign power, to influence American elections. In the month as we celebrate the courage of our founders, Republicans in Congress have become enablers of the Trump-Russia assault on our democracy.”
- Former CIA Director John Brennan, on May 23, 2017: “I saw information intelligence that was worthy of investigation by the bureau to determine whether or not such operation of collusion was taking place.”
- Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., on Nov. 13, 2018: “It has become very clear that the Trump campaign colluded with Russians in trying to subvert the election.”
When asked why he could say that so definitively, Nadler said: “The fact that [Paul] Manafort and [Donald] Trump Jr. met with Russian agents who told them they wanted to give them dirt on Hillary [Clinton] as part of the Russian government’s attempt to help them and they said, ‘fine.’ It’s clear that the campaign colluded and there’s a lot of evidence to that.”
However, the Durham Report determined that all “highly concerning claims of Trump-related contacts with Russian intelligence were untrue.”
- Nadler, on Feb. 16, 2018: “We know the attack is continuing, and our intelligence agencies tell us that it’s going to certainly continue through the next election. The president and the Republicans in the House for that matter refuse to do anything about protecting us from attack. Imagine if [Franklin Delano Roosevelt] had denied that the Japanese had attacked us at Pearl Harbor and didn’t react. That’s the equivalent.”