Durham: FBI Needs to Prioritize ‘Fidelity, Bravery, And Integrity’ for New Rules to Matter.

Special Counsel John Durham: FBI Corruption Can Only Be Fixed by Rediscovering Core Values

In a bombshell report on the origins of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation into former President Donald Trump, Special Counsel John Durham suggested that no amount of regulatory reform will fix FBI corruption until the bureau rediscovers its sworn commitments to “fidelity, bravery, and integrity” and the U.S. Constitution.

Durham found that the FBI launched a politicized investigation into the Trump campaign despite having zero “actual evidence of collusion” with Russia. The FBI “failed to uphold their important mission of strict fidelity to the law” and “did not and could not corroborate” the serious allegations made by the Clinton campaign-commissioned Steele dossier. This dossier inspired a baseless Obama Justice Department spying operation on the Trump campaign and a massive disinformation effort to smear Trump as a Russian asset.

The FBI Must Renew Its Fidelity to Core Values

The special counsel slammed the FBI for a “lack of analytical rigor, apparent confirmation bias, and an over-willingness to rely on information from individuals connected to political opponents.” These character failures, Durham continued, caused the bureau to “act without appropriate objectivity or restraint.”

“The promulgation of additional rules and regulations to be learned in yet more training sessions would likely prove to be a fruitless exercise if the FBI’s guiding principles of ‘Fidelity, Bravery, and Integrity’ are not engrained in the hearts and minds of those sworn to meet the FBI’s mission of ‘Protect[ing] the American People and uphold[ing] the Constitution of the United States,’” Durham concluded. “The answer is not the creation of new rules but a renewed fidelity to the old.”

Confirmation Bias Led to FBI’s Self-Inflicted Damage

A shortage of those core values within the bureau led investigators to fall prey to confirmation bias, buying into a convenient but unsubstantiated narrative that maligned a candidate they hated. As a result, the FBI “discounted or willfully ignored material information that did not support the narrative of a collusive relationship between Trump and Russia.”

Near the end of his 306-page report, Durham emphasized that the bureau’s self-inflicted damage to its own credibility was avoidable. “Had the Crossfire Hurricane actors faithfully followed their own principles regarding objectivity and integrity, there were clear opportunities to have avoided the mistakes and to have prevented the damage resulting from their embrace of seriously flawed information that they failed to analyze and assess properly,” says the report.

It’s clear that the FBI must renew its fidelity to core values to regain the trust of the American people and uphold its mission of protecting the country and the Constitution.

About the Author: Elle Purnell is an assistant editor at The Federalist, and received her B.A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. Follow her work on Twitter @_etreynolds.