by Ben Whedon
British intelligence expressed skepticism about the FBI’s investigation into the Donald Trump campaign’s alleged ties to Russia in 2016, and eventually became so concerned it stopped cooperating, according to evidence made public in Special Counsel John Durham’s recent report.
Durham released his 300+ page report on the origins of the Trump-Russia collusion probe on Monday, representing the culmination of years of investigations. That report excoriated the FBI for pursuing the investigation without possessing any significant evidence of wrongdoing.
Intelligence officials in the United Kingdom evidently shared Durham’s assessment contemporaneously.
Durham highlighted an exchange between an intelligence official and the FBI’s legal attaché office in London (ALAT) in which the latter relayed concerns about the flimsiness of the evidence, especially as it related to former Trump campaign aides George Papadopoulos and Carter Page.
“Dude, are we telling them [British Intelligence Service-1] everything we know, or is there more to this?” he asked “Supervisory Special Agent-1.” “That’s all we have… not holding anything back,” was the reply, prompting ALAT to retort “Damn that’s thin.”
The FBI legal attaché in London “went on to tell the Inspection Division that in discussing the matter with a senior British Intelligence Service-I official, the official was openly skeptical, said the FBI’s plan for an operation made no sense, and asked UK ALAT-1 why the FBI did not just go to Papadopoulos and ask him what they wanted to know, a sentiment UK ALA T-I told investigators that he shared,” he wrote.
The Brits’ concern escalated throughout 2016 and 2017, eventually resulted in a UK intelligence officer refusing to aid the FBI any further, Durham’s report revealed.
“Later in the Fall of 2016, UK ALAT-1 was at FBI Headquarters with some of his British Intelligence Service-I counterparts. While there, members of the Crossfire Hurricane team played the audio/visual recordings of CHS-1 ‘s August 20, 2016 meeting with Carter Page,” Durham wrote. “UK ALAT-1 said the effect on the British Intelligence Service-I personnel was not positive because of the lack of any evidence corning out of the conversation.”
“UK ALAT-1 told the OIG that after watching the video one of his British colleagues said, ‘For [expletive] sake, man. You went through a lot of trouble to get him to say nothing,'” the report said.
By the time Robert Mueller was named special counsel to take over the FBI investigation, British intelligence had had enough.
“At a later point in time, after the Mueller Special Counsel team was in place, UK ALAT-1 said that ‘the Brits finally had enough,’ and in response to a request for some assistance ‘[a British Intelligence Service-I person] basically said there was no [expletive] way in hell they were going to do it.'”
Retired FBI intelligence chief Kevin Brock told Just the News last week that Durham exposed just how much the discredited Russia collusion probe “disrupted the country and besmirched the good reputation of the FBI.
“The FBI essentially was hijacked by a handful of senior executives who had an agenda, who did not like Donald Trump, and who used the awesome powers of the FBI to launch an investigation against all policy, against all legal guidelines and restrictions that would prevent the misuse of the FBI,” Brock said.
Former Pentagon chief of staff Kash Patel, who helped unravel the Russia collusion narrative as a senior House Intelligence Committee lawyer, said the bungled probe clearly has hurt America’s reputation on the world stage,
“People can’t look to America and be like, how do you install a uniform singular system of justice anymore,” Patel noted. “And John Durham’s report affirms that by how our allies, our greatest ally, Great Britain, looked at us and said, ‘Wait a second, you can’t even run an investigation properly. Please leave us out of it. We want nothing to do with it.”
Read the full Durham report:
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Ben Whedon is an editor and reporter for Just the News. Follow him on Twitter.
Photo “Federal Bureau of Investigation Building” by Adam Fagen. CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.
