With help from NYT newsroom lawyers Al-Amyn Sumar and David McCraw, I have today filed a new Freedom of Information Act lawsuit seeking a less-redacted version of the (once) classifed appendix to the 2023 report by former Special Counsel John Durham, as well as disclosure of related material.
Declassified and released last summer, the appendix revealed that the origin story for a theory that Hillary Clinton and her 2016 campaign conspired to frame Trump for collusion with Russia had been faked by Russia’s S.V.R. spy agency. That origin story was Russian intelligence information about Clinton supposedly approving a plan on July 26, 2016, to stir up a scandal tying Trump to Russia, based on two supposedly Russian-hacked emails of a George Soros aide. Then-DNI John Ratcliffe made public the basics of this in late September 2020, and Durham’s public report in 2023 extensively discussed what he called the “Clinton Plan intelligence.” He stashed in the classified appendix, concealed until July 2025, that his efforts to prove the two seeming emails were authentic had instead uncovered evidence showing they had been creations of the S.V.R., the successor to the Soviet-era K.G.B.
The evidence includes related S.V.R. files whose discussion in the appendix is marred by redaction lines to key dates and other tidbits, and the lawsuit seeks to get those redaction lines removed — arguing that since Russia has the unredacted originals, there is no legitimate national security justification for keeping that information secret from the American public.
The lawsuit is also seeking the information cited in the footnotes of the declassified appendix, like interview reports of witnesses.
And it seeks as well a copy of an interim report that Durham’s team produced for Attorney General Bill Barr in the summer of 2020, and a September 2020 memo written by Nora Dannehy, Durham’s former No. 2, denouncing both the idea of putting out an interim report before the investigation was over and ahead of an election, and objecting to the interim report’s conclusions. It appears that the interim report focused on this same Russian intelligence information that has now been declassified. After Dannehy quit in protest, Durham and Barr did not release the report. My colleagues Katie Benner, Adam Goldman and I first reported a lot of this in an early 2023 investigative project we did about the Durham inquiry, and Dannehy later confirmed some of it in her confirmation hearing to become a Connecticut Supreme Court justice.