Specifically, the regulations are written to appoint someone to conduct a criminal investigation, but Mr. Mueller was inheriting a counterintelligence investigation. The regulations also provide for the appointment of someone outside the Department of Justice as a special attorney, but Mr. Durham is the United States attorney in Connecticut.
Since Mr. Durham was not appointed according to the special attorney’s regulation, it is possible that the next attorney general could rescind Mr. Barr’s directive that the special attorney’s rules would apply to him and then terminate your investigation without any conclusion of misconduct. This was also a theoretical possibility for Mueller, but it did not matter for most research in Russia because Rosenstein himself voluntarily adopted the rules and remained in charge.
Still, said Samuel Buell, a law professor at Duke University and a former federal prosecutor, “I suppose the calculation is that there is a political cost” if a Biden government attorney tries to end Durham’s job as a special attorney.
Mr. Barr appointed Mr. Durham last year to conduct a “review” of the actions taken by the FBI and other national security officials in the early stages of the investigation in Russia. The Justice Department later said that its work had evolved into a criminal investigation, and Mr. Barr’s letter to Congress said the status was “in progress”.
But while Durham has examined a number of issues for evidence to support Trump’s often stated statement that a “deep state” conspired to sabotage him, it is unclear what he found, if anything, he found. To date, the only criminal case he has opened has been to strike a judicial settlement with Kevin Clinesmith, a former low-ranking FBI attorney. He had tampered with a CIA e-mail when the agency was preparing to request the renewal of a wiretapping order aimed at a former Trump campaign advisor with links to Russia, Carter Page.
The alteration of the CIA email by Mr. Clinesmith, who has not yet been convicted, prevented an FBI colleague from realizing that the application – and previous iterations – omitted a relevant fact: Mr. Page had discussed with CIA some of his interactions with Russians, potentially making his pattern of contacts appear less suspect. But a separate investigation by the Justice Department’s inspector general, Michael E. Horowitz, uncovered this issue, along with other ways in which the FBI screwed up the applications – not Mr. Durham.
Expectations rose that Durham would announce something important before the election, in part because Barr had encouraged them by saying that he did not believe a department policy against actions that could affect an upcoming election would be applied to Durham’s investigation.