Special counsel John Durham has concluded that the FBI should not have launched an investigation about the alleged link between Donald Trump’s 2016 election campaign and Russia.

The report, published this Monday after a four-year investigation, consists of more than 300 pages and in it Durham indicates that the FBI used “uncorroborated” intelligence informationwithout processing or analysis” to launch inquiries into the campaign team of the former Republican president and his possible ties to Moscow.

Durham was appointed in 2019 by then-Attorney General William Barr, during Trump’s tenure, to review the federal agency’s previous investigation into the alleged links between the Republican electoral team and Russia.

The special counsel now argues, after reviewing the FBI investigation and other intelligence activities, that the Department of Justice and the FBI “they failed to fulfill their mission of strict fidelity to the lawin connection with certain events and activities described in this report.”

Durham argues that FBI officials showed “a serious absence” of analytical rigor in the treatment of the information they received, especially that related to people and entities with political affiliations. In sum, the FBI’s handling of several key aspects of this case was “seriously flawed,” according to the prosecutor, who believes this caused “severe damage” to his reputation.

The Russian plot and the investigation

in his day, Barr opened this investigation after Trump’s insistence that his campaign had been the object of espionage before the 2016 elections by US intelligence, under the orders of then-president Barack Obama.

Thus, the Department of Justice investigated itselfsince this supposed espionage would have been carried out by the FBI, an agency with which Trump was very critical since he came to power.

With this inquiry, Trump intended to get to the root of the investigation into the call “Russian plot” led by Robert Mueller, which tormented him during the first two years of his term and which ended in March 2019 with the conclusion that neither he nor anyone around him worked with the Kremlin to win the 2016 elections.

The reaction of Trump and the FBI

Following the publication of this report, the trump reaction It has not been long in coming: in a message on his social network, Truth, the former president has asserted that the Americans have been “ripped off.”

“WOW! After Extensive Investigation, Special Counsel John Durham Concludes The FBI Should Never Have Launched The Trump-Russia Inquiry! In Other Words, the American public was ripped offas it is being done now by those who do not want to see GREATNESS for the USA!”, he has sentenced.

For his part, he fbi has assured in a statement that his dome “has already applied dozens of corrective actionswhich have been in place for a long time” in response to the behavior denounced by Durham. The note adds that, if “those reforms” had been in place in 2016, “the missteps” identified in the report could have been prevented.