“… John Ratcliffe, the C.I.A. director, said in a statement that the materials proved that suspicions of Russian collusion stemmed from “a coordinated plan to prevent and destroy Donald Trump’s presidency.”
…
In reality, the annex shows the opposite, indicating that a key piece of supposed evidence for the claim that Mrs. Clinton approved a plan to tie Mr. Trump to Russia is not credible: Mr. Durham concluded that the email from July 27, 2016, and a related one dated two days earlier were probably manufactured.
Ahead of the 2020 election, Mr. Ratcliffe, as director of national intelligence in Mr. Trump’s first term, had
declassified and released the crux of the July 27 email, even though he acknowledged doubts about its credibility. Officials did “not know the accuracy of this allegation or the extent to which the Russian intelligence analysis may reflect exaggeration or fabrication,” he said.
Among some Trump supporters, the message became known as the “Clinton Plan intelligence,” as Mr. Durham
put it in his final report.
In his report, Mr. Durham used the U.S. government’s knowledge of the supposed plan, via the Russian memos, to criticize F.B.I. officials involved in the Russia investigation for not being more skeptical when they later received a copy of the Steele dossier and used it to obtain a wiretap order. The dossier, a compendium of Trump-Russia claims compiled by a former British spy, stemmed from a Democratic opposition research effort and was later discredited.
“Whether or not the Clinton Plan intelligence was based on reliable or unreliable information, or was ultimately true or false,” Mr. Durham wrote, agents should have been more cautious when approaching material that appeared to have partisan origins.
Mr. Durham’s report also mentioned that Mrs. Clinton and others in the campaign dismissed the allegation as ridiculous, positing that it was Russian disinformation.
But Mr. Durham banished to the annex concrete details he had found that bolstered her campaign’s rebuttal, burying until now the conclusion that the email he called the “Clinton Plan intelligence” was almost certainly a product of Russian disinformation.…”