Page:Durham Report.pdf/14

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.

did not investigate every public report of an alleged violation of law in connection with the intelligence and law enforcement activities directed at the 2016 presidential campaigns.

In addition to the Special Counsel, the Office has been staffed by experienced FBI and Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation Division Agents; Department attorneys and prosecutors; support personnel; and contractor employees.

The Office’s investigation was broad and extensive. It included investigative work both domestically and overseas. It entailed obtaining large document productions from businesses, firms, government agencies, universities, political campaigns, internet service providers, telephone companies, and individuals. The Office interviewed hundreds of individuals, many on multiple occasions. The Office conducted the majority of interviews in classified settings; for some interviewees and their counsel security clearances needed to be obtained. The Office conducted interviews in person and via video link, with the vast majority of the latter occurring after the COVID-19 pandemic-related closures began in March 2020. Although a substantial majority of individuals voluntarily cooperated with the Office, some only provided information under a subpoena or grant of immunity. Some individuals who, in our view, had important and relevant information about the topics under investigation refused to be interviewed or otherwise cooperate with the Office. As of April 2023, with two trials completed, the Office has conducted more than 480 interviews; obtained and reviewed more than one million documents consisting of more than six million pages; served more than 190 subpoenas under the auspices of grand juries; executed seven search warrants; obtained five orders for communications records under 18 U.S.C. § 2703(d); and made one request to a foreign government under a Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty.

The Office would like to express its appreciation to, among others, the FBI’s Office of General Counsel (“OGC”)[1] and Inspection Division; the Litigation Technology Support Services Unit in the National Security Division (“NSD”); the eDiscovery Team in the Office of the Chief Information Officer of the Justice Management Division (“JMD”); and JMD’s Service Delivery Staff. The NSD and JMD entities created and maintained the databases and technology infrastructure needed to organize and review the large amount of data we obtained. The Office would also like to express its appreciation to the Department’s Office of Privacy and Civil Liberties for its guidance on appropriate information to include in a public report.

  1. ↑ The FBI’s OGC produced more than 6,580,000 pages of documentation in response to our multiple requests. We note that it did so at the same time it was coping with the personnel shortages brought about by the COVID-19 crisis, working to comply with various production demands from congressional committees, and addressing requests from other government entities. Moreover, FBI leadership made it clear to its personnel that they were to cooperate fully with our inquiry, which, in all but a few instances involving some personnel in the Counterintelligence Division, proved to be the case. In those few instances in which individuals refused to cooperate, FBI leadership intervened to urge those individuals to agree to be interviewed. Similarly, both the Central Intelligence Agency (“CIA”) and the National Security Agency (“NSA”) made their employees available for interview, including former CIA Director John Brennan and former NSA Director Mike Rogers, who voluntarily made themselves available for interviews.

4

This article is issued from Wikisource. The text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 unless otherwise noted. Additional terms may apply for the media files.