At 3:40 p.m. on Monday, Special Counsel John Durham released his report on the FBI’s investigation into former President Donald Trump’s alleged collusion with Russia. Twenty minutes later, MSNBC had declared the 320-page report bunk.
"The probe that Trump promised would uncover … the crime of the century," MSNBC host Nicole Wallace declared, "may have instead found evidence of Donald Trump committing more crimes."
The speed readers at MSNBC may want to take a few more minutes to pore over Durham’s report, which found that the bureau did not have sufficient basis to open a July 2016 investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia. The report slams the FBI’s failure to vet the infamous Steele dossier, which falsely alleged a "well-developed conspiracy of coordination" between the Trump campaign and Russia.
Durham, who called the report’s findings "sobering," also noted the FBI did not open a similar investigation into the Hillary Clinton campaign’s attempts to paint Trump as a Russian agent. His report contradicts the earlier findings of former Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who in 2019 claimed the bureau’s probe stood on solid ground.
This is not the first time Wallace used her platform to promote conspiracy theories about collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. In 2018, she defended the Steele dossier, claiming that "whole big parts of it are holding up."
But Durham and other investigators have debunked much of the dossier, which was funded by the Clinton campaign. Investigators found that the primary source for the dossier fabricated some of the information in the dossier. The FBI failed to verify any of its salacious claims, such that the Kremlin had a sex video of Donald Trump.