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Special counsel John Durham found no evidence that the US justice department and the FBI conspired in a deep-state plot to investigate Donald Trump’s ties to Russia in 2016, though the report released on Monday found that the FBI’s handling of key aspects of the case were deficient.
The Durham report was sharply critical of how the FBI decided to open the counterintelligence investigation into Trump, known as “Crossfire Hurricane”, accusing top officials at the bureau of relying on raw and uncorroborated information to continue the inquiry.
Much of the criticism of the FBI in the roughly 300-page report was already known when the justice department inspector general issued its own report, which raised similar concerns but ultimately concluded that the FBI investigation into Trump was justified.
The Durham report was more scathing, finding that the FBI moved quickly on a vague tip about potential contacts between a Trump campaign aide and Russian officials in July 2016 based on “raw, unanalyzed and uncorroborated evidence” in a “departure from how it approached” the Clinton campaign.
What do we know about the Durham investigation of an investigation? In May 2019, the then US attorney general in the Trump administration, William Barr, asked federal prosecutor John Durham, the US attorney in Connecticut, to investigate an investigation: the one carried out into allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 election and links between Donald Trump and Moscow. Here’s what else we know.
Ukraine: Russia targets Kyiv with massive overnight airstrike
Ukraine was assessing the damage after Russian forces carried out a massive strike of “exceptional intensity” on Kyiv overnight, in one of the biggest attacks on the capital since last year’s invasion.
Emergency sirens woke residents at 2.30am local time and soon afterwards there were loud booms as Ukrainian air defences engaged incoming missiles. Tracer fire lit up the sky and car alarms went off. There were explosions. A further air raid warning sounded at 4am.
Ukraine’s commander-in-chief, Valerii Zaluzhnyi, said Kyiv’s defenders had shot down 18 out of 18 Russian rockets and drones. The city had came under an intense and sweeping attack from the “north, south and east”, featuring missiles fired from air, sea and land, he said.
Air defence batteries successfully intercepted six hypersonic Kinzhal missiles, the most potent long-range weapon in the Kremlin’s arsenal. They also downed nine cruise missiles, three ballistic missiles, six kamikaze drones and three unmanned aerial vehicles, Ukraine’s military high command said.
Was anyone killed? After a sleepless night in which many locals sought refuge in bomb shelters, Kyiv’s mayor, Vitali Klitschko, gave an update on damage. He said there were three victims in the Solomyan district, which was hit by falling rocket debris. Rescuers extinguished blazes after vehicles caught fire.
New Mexico shooting leaves three people dead and nine injured
At least three people have been killed and multiple people injured after a shooting in Farmington, New Mexico, where police killed the suspected 18-year-old gunman, authorities said yesterday.
The incident occurred at about 11am in Farmington, a city of about 50,000 people in the north-west of the state adjacent to the Navajo Nation. Officers responding to several calls about a shooting found “a chaotic scene” where a man was firing at people on a residential street, said Baric Crum, the Farmington police deputy chief, during a news conference.
Police confronted the suspect before fatally shooting him. They found three people dead. Crum did not identify the suspect and said he did not know the ages of any of the victims.
“Besides the suspect himself, who is deceased, there were nine other people injured,” Crum said, adding that police were trying to determine why he was in the neighborhood.
Some of the incident was captured in footage posted on TikTok, which a police department spokesperson confirmed was authentic.
What did the TikTok video show? It shows a man dressed in black pacing around a driveway outside the First Church of Christ, Scientist, carrying what appears to be a handgun, before he is later seen being shot by police in front of the building.
In other news …
The US Virgin islands subpoenaed the billionaire cars-to-rockets entrepreneur Elon Musk yesterday to obtain documents in its litigation into the role played by JPMorgan Chase bank in the activity of the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein when he was a customer, according to a court filing.
Thousands of tons of timber from Myanmar have continued to be imported into the US, despite government sanctions against the country’s state-run timber company, a report from a watchdog environmental advocacy group has revealed.
The UN’s labour rights watchdog, the International Labour Organization (ILO), is facing a backlash over the nomination of Qatar to chair its flagship annual conference despite a police investigation into alleged bribery of EU lawmakers by the Gulf state.
Police in Virginia have named the suspect in an attack in which two staffers at the district office of a Democratic congressman were assaulted with a metal baseball bat and required hospital treatment. Xuan Kha Tran Pham, 49, was arrested after the attack and faces charges of malicious wounding and aggravated malicious wounding.
Books about the Tiananmen Square massacre, Hong Kong protest movements, and other subjects deemed politically sensitive by Beijing have been removed from Hong Kong’s public libraries in the lead-up to the 34th anniversary of the killings.
Stat of the day: Mormon church has $100bn ‘clandestine hedge fund’, says whistleblower
A former investment manager for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints says that the organization stockpiled more than $100bn in funding intended for charity work but never spent it on such projects. “It was really a clandestine hedge fund,” David A Nielsen said during an interview with CBS’s 60 Minutes. “Once the money went in, it didn’t go out.” Nielsen, who submitted a complaint to the Internal Revenue Service in 2019, previously managed the church’s investment arm, Ensign Peak Advisors, for nine years. A report on the complaint to the top US tax authority was published by the Washington Post in 2019 after Nielsen’s brother provided a copy. Nielsen, a devout Mormon himself, was first recruited to work for Ensign Peak while working on Wall Street.
Don’t miss this: ‘The Velvet Hammer’: who is Twitter’s new CEO and can she fix its problems?
Still weeks away from taking up the role of Twitter’s new chief executive, Linda Yaccarino, a respected media veteran known in advertising circles as the “Velvet Hammer” for her silky but tough negotiating style, has already had a taste of the shambolic corporate environment that has swept the platform since Elon Musk bought it for $44bn last October. Hours after teasing in a post that he had appointed a new chief executive, a role he had described as a “painful” job that anyone would be “foolish” to take on, Musk confirmed speculation that Yaccarino had accepted the challenge. Prior to Musk’s announcement, she had been rehearsing to lead the company’s annual pitch to advertisers on Monday in the biggest event of the year for the business. She has been praised for understanding of advertisers – but will Musk cede enough control for her to do the job well?
Climate check: punishing heatwave grips Pacific north-west as wildfires rage in western Canada
A punishing heatwave will continue to cook the Pacific north-west this week, after millions of people endured a weekend of temperatures that pushed past 90F (32C) and broke early spring records in several cities. The hot, dry weather is fuelling dozens of wildfires across western Canada, where thousands have been evacuated and more than a million acres have already burned. Temperatures are dropping but forecasters with the National Weather Service warned yesterday that they would remain “20-30 degrees above average in the Pacific north-west throughout this week”. Climate models show the region continues to warm in the coming years, posing new dangers to residents and ecosystems alike. Fuelled by the climate crisis, dangerous heatwaves that last longer and cover more ground are becoming more likely.
Last Thing: Martha Stewart, 81, becomes oldest Sports Illustrated swimsuit cover model
Martha Stewart has become Sports Illustrated’s oldest cover model ever, posing for the magazine’s annual swimsuit edition at the age of 81. The television personality and cook is one of four cover models for this year’s issue, which aims to celebrate powerful women who “live in a world where they feel no limitations, internally or externally”. The other models were the actor Megan Fox, the model Brooks Nader and the musician Kim Petras. “When I heard that I was going to be on the cover of Sports Illustrated Swimsuit, I thought: ‘Oh, well that’s pretty good.’ I’m gonna be the oldest person, I think, ever on the cover of Sports Illustrated,’” Stewart said in an interview about the cover.
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