The vaporousness of the predication for the FBI’s Trump–Russia investigation, “Crossfire Hurricane,” was described Tuesday in our editorial on the Durham Report (and in my post the same day). For years, I have maintained that the probe was opened on false pretenses. But now that we have Special Counsel John Durham’s careful and comprehensive account of the debacle, the bureau and its allied Russiagate agonistes ought to be humiliated. They deranged the country for years over what, at the time they opened the case, FBI leaders knew was a grossly irresponsible basis for commencing any serious investigation, let alone for intruding the bureau into the politics of a presidential election. The damage this sordid affair has done to the FBI as an institution may not be reparable.

It is totally predictable and in character that “collusion” cheerleaders, including some of the former FBI officials who were fired, are now mewling that Durham’s report is a “nothing burger.” But it’s still tough to abide.

As we’ve noted, amid the media–Democratic-complex hysteria resulting from the publication of hacked DNC emails during the 2016 Democratic Convention, the FBI opened the investigation in late July 2016. This was not a normal case, so the decision was made by top officials at headquarters, based on a strained interpretation of casual comments made two months earlier by George Papadopoulos to a pair of Australian diplomats at a bar in London.

Papadopoulos was a green, unpaid Trump campaign aide. At the time they were made, his remarks were sufficiently incomprehensible — and un-comprehended — that the Aussies thought little of them. In summarizing what Papadopoulos said in a contemporaneous memo, the best one of the diplomats could come up with was that he’d made a suggestion of some kind of suggestion:

[Papadopoulos] also suggested the Trump team had received some kind of suggestion from Russia that it could assist this process [of exploiting the “baggage” of Hillary and Bill Clinton] with the anonymous release of information during the campaign that would be damaging to Mrs Clinton (and President Obama).

Papadopoulos did not claim to know what, if anything, Russian intelligence had on Hillary Clinton. He did not use the word “emails” or even “dirt.” The diplomats were not intelligence agents, but they knew enough to be dismissive. (As I detailed in Ball of Collusion, one of them, Alexander Downer, had intriguing relationships with both British intelligence officers and such American politicians as the Clintons, to whose foundation he had arranged a $25 million Australian contribution.) Any competent intelligence analyst would have known that, if Trump actually were in some kind of “conspiracy of cooperation” with Vladimir Putin, the last person in the world who’d have known anything about it was George Papadopoulos. It’s unlikely Trump could have picked Papadopoulos out of a line-up. (Sure, they once sat at the same crowded table, and there’s a photograph of it; but there’s also a photograph of Trump chatting with a woman who accused him of rape, and at a deposition he mistook her for his second wife.)

Russian intelligence is very capable. Donald Trump, by contrast, has exhibited neither awareness nor habits of intelligence craft through his half-century in public life. If the Aussie diplomats had been intelligence agents, they would have realized that Moscow’s spies would hardly have needed the chaotic Trump campaign’s help to gather or disseminate kompromat on Hillary Clinton. More to the point, though, if the kind of cryptic speculation attributed to Papadopoulos were a sufficient rationale for opening a counterintelligence investigation, the FBI might as well have opened one on its own then-director.

Recall that Director Jim Comey held a July 5, 2016, press conference at which he laid out the evidence against Clinton that the FBI had uncovered during the emails investigation — flouting Justice Department guidelines against public statements about misconduct by uncharged persons. As recounted in DOJ inspector general Michael Horowitz’s eventual report, Comey’s statement was months in the making: He had started drafting it in late April and early May — i.e., even before Papadopoulos’s mid-May meeting with the Aussie diplomats (but, as I’ve previously pointed out, only shortly after President Obama’s nationally televised assertion that he did not want Clinton charged with a crime).

This means that prior to Papadopoulos’s supposed “suggestion of some kind of suggestion,” there were already internal discussions at FBI headquarters about how former secretary Hillary Clinton, all by herself, had given the Russians all the help they needed to undermine her presidential bid. Specifically, Comey had been briefed that, because she recklessly used a homebrew email server to do her State Department work, Clinton was uniquely vulnerable not just to hacking, but to hacking that could capture her sensitive communications with Obama while she was in Russia.

It is not enough to say that Clinton’s private-server system was so non-secure that it could easily have been penetrated by competent foreign intelligence services. The FBI assessed that it probably had been penetrated. By the time of Comey’s press conference, that embarrassing finding had been massaged into this portion of his script:

With respect to potential computer intrusion by hostile actors, we did not find direct evidence that Secretary Clinton’s personal email domain, in its various configurations since 2009, was successfully hacked. But, given the nature of the system and of the actors potentially involved, we assess that we would be unlikely to see such direct evidence. We do assess that hostile actors gained access to the private commercial e-mail accounts of people with whom Secretary Clinton was in regular contact from her personal account. We also assess that Secretary Clinton’s use of a personal e-mail domain was both known by a large number of people and readily apparent. She also used her personal e-mail extensively while outside the United States, including sending and receiving work-related e-mails in the territory of sophisticated adversaries. Given that combination of factors, we assess it is possible that hostile actors gained access to Secretary Clinton’s personal e-mail account.

As scathing as that was, Comey’s earlier drafts (described in Horowitz’s report) were even more damning. The director had been planning to say that Clinton

also used her personal email extensively while outside the United States, including from the territory of sophisticated adversaries. That use included an email exchange with the President while Secretary Clinton was on the territory of such an adversary.” [Emphasis added.]

This express mention of Obama was veiled in a subsequent draft, which referred instead to “another senior government official.” Realizing this would only draw unwanted attention to Clinton’s communications with Obama, which had very possibly been hacked by Russian or other hostile intelligence services, Comey and his advisers completely omitted any allusion to Obama from the remarks he finally delivered on July 5. (Prior to leaving office, Obama quietly directed that his email communications with Clinton be sealed.)

Remember, the FBI opened Crossfire Hurricane in late July 2016 as a full-throttle investigation — without interviewing Papadopoulos, the Aussie diplomats, or a single relevant witness — because of the supposition that Papadopoulos might have been saying that the Trump campaign believed the Russians had compromising information that they might use against Clinton. Yet, less than four weeks earlier, the FBI’s top official had openly speculated that hostile actors (obviously the Russians, among others) had compromising material that they might use against Clinton.

To put it another way, in reading what Comey told the world at his presser, one could easily detect a “suggestion of a kind of suggestion” that the Russians had hacked Clinton’s communications and were in a position to disseminate them at a time that could have been maximally harmful to her presidential campaign, revealing both (a) private conversations that Clinton would understandably have wanted kept confidential, and (b) her gross negligence in conducting sensitive government business this way — which Trump or any other political rival would inevitably argue demonstrated her unfitness to be president.

If that’s what the FBI’s own director was saying publicly, what else would you expect from George Papadopoulos?

Not much. And thanks to Durham, we now know that’s what the FBI agents working the case thought of the vaunted predication for the case: not much. Less than that, really.

As noted above, the bureau opened a full-scale investigation against a presidential campaign based on information from the Aussie diplomats before even interviewing them (just as the bureau failed to interview Christopher Steele’s main source, Igor Danchenko, until after twice swearing under oath to his allegations in FISA-court warrant applications). The bureau got around to this apparently lower priority of actually talking to witnesses on August 2, 2016. Because the interview was to be done in London, the FBI had to consult with its British intelligence counterparts.

As Durham details, to pave the way, the bureau’s legal attaché (leg-at) in London (whose name is not given in the report) was dispatched to discuss the opening of the investigation with the Brits. Their reaction was one of “real skepticism.” They told the leg-at that the sketchy statements attributed to Papadopoulos by the Aussie diplomats were “not assess[ed]” to be “particularly valuable intelligence.” In fact, the leg-at added, “the British could not believe the Papadopoulos bar conversation was all there was,” so they assumed the FBI must have more information that it was holding back.

It didn’t. By that first week in August, the FBI had assigned a first case agent (also not named in the report) to work under the direction of Agent Peter Strzok and help interview the Aussies. In an August 11 conversation, the leg-at and the case agent had this exchange:

Leg-at: Dude, are we telling [British intelligence] everything we know, or is there more to this?

Case agent: That’s all we have. Not holding anything back.

Leg-at: Damn, that’s thin.

Case agent: I know.

The one who knew the most at the time about bureau headquarters’ thinking was Strzok. The leg-at recalled that as the agents taxied to the Australian High Commission in London, Strzok muttered, “There’s nothing to this, but we have to run it to ground.”