The First Witness of the FBI’s 2016 Russia Probe: When A Special Counsel Auten Turned His Fingers Into a Penalty

It was the first witness and it was surprising. And at times, while Durham personally questioned the witness, he strayed from the narrow case against Danchenko and focused more on the FBI’s mistakes in 2016 as it investigated then-candidate Donald Trump.

The codename of the FBI’s Trump-Russia probe before Robert Muller took over was Crossfire Hurricane. The Russia probe is a major focus of Durham’s work, and he previously criticized how it was opened. But he hasn’t brought any charges alleging bias or misconduct in the opening of Crossfire Hurricane.

The special counsel grilled Auten about his role in the FBI applications to surveil Carter Page, a former Trump campaign adviser.

But the situation shifted when the defense got to cross-examine Auten. In the past, Auten testified before the Justice Department inspector general and the Senate Judiciary Committee, which contradicted some of Durham’s claims.

Auten answered “I stand by my testimony” when Danny Onorato asked him if that still was his belief.

The defense also elicited testimony indicating that Durham cherry-picked material from an FBI memo that Auten wrote, when there was exculpatory information on the very next page.

After Onorato finished, Durham returned for a final round of questioning, but the tone completely changed. Durham and Auten spent over an hour fighting. Durham sounded angry at times, and many of Auten’s responses were adversarial, clearly not giving Durham the answers that fit his narrative.

“You’re going to be suspended,” Durham said in one of his questions, “because you won’t admit your involvement” in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, process.

A New High-Level Adviser to Trump: The Case for F.B.I. Attorney General Mark Durham and the Investigation of Papadopoulos

The special counsel then rebuked Auten for saying earlier that George Papadopoulos was a “high-level adviser” to Trump’s 2016 campaign. Durham correctly states that Papadopoulos was a low level aide, just 28 years old at the time, and that he included his college experience on his resume.

“Did you guys even bother to go look at the phone records?” Durham asked if the records of a potential source for the document were available. Did you bother to look at the travel records?

Durham said that Steele’s claims were to be accepted by the FBI and included in the warrant applications. The trial found that the FBI recycled Steele’s material in the FISA renewals even as their attempts to corroborate his work failed.

According to CNN, the written report of Durham’s investigation is currently being worked on by his team and will be forwarded to Attorney General Garland. The attorney general and other top Justice Department officials will decide how much of the report to make public. Garland has previously said he wants to release “as much as possible.”

This is the first trial for Mr. Durham since he was appointed to lead the investigation in the spring of 2019. The first trial, in which Mr. Durham accused a lawyer of providing false information to the F.B.I., ended this year with an acquittal.

In the new trial, which began on Tuesday at a federal courthouse in Northern Virginia and in which testimony is expected to conclude Friday, with closing statements likely on Monday, Mr. Durham and his team have had to grapple with significant questions about the quality of their evidence.

The testimony of Mr. Helson, a counterintelligence analyst and another F.B.I. witness concluded on Thursday after three days of questioning. Mr. Durham at times appeared visibly frustrated with the testimony of the F.B.I. officials.

Between October 2020 and September 2022, Durham spent $6.5 million. However, Durham started his inquiry in early 2019, and the cost of his first year and half of work has not been disclosed. That’s because he was working at that time as a US attorney and was only appointed as a special counsel in October 2020.

This year, more than a million dollars was spent on employee salaries and benefits. Durham spent more than $220,000 on travel, more than $600,000 on contractual services such as IT support, and more than $100,000 on rent.

An investigation of misconduct of the Italian courts against the F.B.I., Mr. Durham, and a Democratic philanthropist

When the Justice Department’s own inspector general prepared to issue a report saying that, while the F.B.I. made some ethical mistakes, the investigation was legitimate and not politically motivated, Mr. Durham lobbied him to drop the finding. When that effort was unsuccessful, Mr. Barr reverted to his usual pattern of trying to spin the report before it was issued, disagreeing with its finding before it was even out. Mr. Durham then followed up with a similar statement, shattering the clear department principle of staying silent about a current investigation.

The report is “but one of many instances where former President Trump and his allies weaponized the Justice Department,” Mr. Durbin said in a statement, adding that his committee would “do its part and take a hard look at these repeated episodes, and the regulations and policies that enabled them, to ensure such abuses of power cannot happen again.”

Based on interviews with more than a dozen current and former officials, The Times described an array of previously unreported episodes that showed how Mr. Durham inquiry’s became roiled by internal dissent, leading two prosecutors on his staff to resign in protest.

The article also described how Mr. Durham used Russian intelligence memos — suspected by other U.S. officials of containing disinformation — to gain access to emails of an aide to George Soros, the liberal philanthropist who is a target of the American right and Russian state media. Mr. Durham shifted to using grand jury powers to obtain the information after a judge twice rejected his request for an order as legally insufficient.

The article revealed that in the fall of 2019, Italian officials unexpectedly gave Mr. Barr and Mr. Durham a tip about suspected financial crimes linked to Mr. Trump. Mr. Durham was asked by Mr. Barr to investigate the matter himself rather thanReferral it to another prosecutor. There were no charges brought by Mr. Durham.