Ex-CIA official tied to anti-Trump intel claimed that Durham charged her. He never did.

A former top CIA counterintelligence official who has linked herself to the flawed January 2017 intelligence community assessment on Russian election meddling told two of her former colleagues — both Hunter Biden laptop letter signers — that former special counsel John Durham had criminally charged her and put her on trial.

Durham never charged her, nor was she ever on trial.

Susan Miller, who was the Assistant CIA Director for Counterintelligence under then-Director John Brennan in 2016, made her claims about being charged and put on trial by Durham and then-Attorney General William Barr in an August episode of the Mission Implausible podcast hosted by John Sipher and Jerry O’Shea. Both podcast hosts signed the infamous “51 intelligence experts” letter that portrayed as Russian disinformation Hunter Biden’s laptop, which was eventually recognized widely as authentic.

Miller’s LinkedIn page describes herself as “Retired Senior (SIS) CIA Officer, currently target of Trump and Tulsi’s witchunt” [sic] and says that she earned a “Bachelor of Arts – BA, Jornalism [sic]” from California Polytechnic State University-San Luis Obispo in 1985.

No public record of any such case

Miller said on the podcast last month that “Barr-Durham put me and a couple members of my team on trial” and had filed a “criminal complaint” against her. Miller was, in fact, never charged, nor put on trial, by Barr nor Durham. A Just the News search of the entire federal criminal docket system shows no public record of any such case.

Just the News previously reported that Miller, the retired CIA official who says she was involved with the CIA’s assessment on Russian election meddling in 2016, has called Donald Trump a “dictator” and MAGA supporters “Nazis” — and has insisted that British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s now-discredited dossier “might be true.” Miller has also repeatedly suggested that Trump might be a “Russian asset” or a “Kremlin asset”

The August Mission Implausible podcast episode’s description claimed that “Miller has recently been targeted by Tulsi Gabbard for her work on a CLASSIFIED report on Russia’s attempts to influence the 2016 election” and said the episode involved delving into how Miller was “dealing with this newfound persecution.”

Miller said during the August podcast episode that her defense lawyer during the first Trump administration had been Kenneth Wainstein, who was also the lawyer for Brennan during the Durham investigation. Brennan was another laptop letter signer.

Miller is also currently represented by attorney Mark Zaid, who specializes in national security matters and represented national security official and purported whistleblower Eric Ciaramella during the Ukraine-related impeachment effort against Trump in 2019. 

Zaid did not respond to requests for comment or confirmation of Miller’s claims from Just the News.

Miller has never produced a copy of the “criminal complaint”

Miller has repeatedly claimed that Barr and Durham charged her with crimes and put her on trial in retaliation for her alleged involvement in assessing Russian election meddling during the 2016 election.

“And for that he decided to do the — I don’t know how long later it was — but, Barr-Durham put me and a couple members of my team on trial for writing a paper that ended with ‘and Trump is basically the rightful president’ or you know is president,” Miller told the Mission Implausible podcast last month. “I remember when my lawyer came to me and told me this, and I laughed my head out loud, and he goes ‘no I’m actually serious’ and I’m like ‘crap.’ And it’s a criminal complaint. I said yes. He said what’s the crime? Something to do with insurrection, I’m not positive. And it just went on from there.”

Although asked, Miller has never produced a copy of the “criminal complaint.”

Miller said last month that the election meddling assessment effort that she was allegedly involved with “was briefed to Trump by our director, and he was quite happy, and he basically said ‘good briefing’ when it was briefed to him.” 

Miller then claimed “And then it was not too long later that I got called into the OGC’s [Office of General Counsel’s] office and told that Trump was — with a couple other team members, by the way — that we were all being charged by the attorney general for writing the paper. And we all laughed our heads off at it and said, ‘Tell us really why.’ And then they said, ‘No it is absolutely true, you are being charged.’ It is a criminal process.” 

Miller never identified exactly who in the OGC’s office allegedly told her she was being charged.

Caroline Krass served as the CIA general counsel from March 2014 to May 2017, Courtney Simmons Elwood worked as the agency’s top lawyer from June 2017 to January 2021, and Kate Heinzelman held the role from July 2022 to January 2025.

Just the News reached out to all three through their personal LinkedIn pages with questions about whether they or their colleagues at the CIA OGC had ever informed Miller that she was being criminally charged by Barr, Durham, or anyone else. None of them immediately responded to the request for comment. 

Miller said that she hired attorney Kenneth Wainstein in response to being investigated by Durham, and that he cost her $1,500 an hour. Wainstein is also known to have represented Brennan in relation to Durham’s scrutiny of the ICA and other matters.

Wainstein did not respond to requests for comment or confirmation of Miller’s claims from Just the News by presstime.

She persisted: The imaginary prosecution and trial

Miller said that “then we sat in front of the tribunal for hours and hours.”

“Ken did try to find out what is the crime. We don’t understand how a report that ends with ‘and Trump is our president’ is a crime,” Miller said. “He never got a super good answer and it’s something that during the actual Barr-Durham where I sat in front of them to provide my testimony, I asked that question too, and nobody gave me an answer. I think one person mumbled ‘trying to bring down a government’ or something like that.”

O’Shea endorsed Miller’s unfounded claim about being prosecuted by Durham, saying it was now like what he had seen in Russia or Cuba or China “where they look over their shoulder before they talk to you.” O’Shea said “Trump 2.0” included that “people are afraid” and “people like yourself, you say something that you believe, that the facts base [sic], and then you’re like up on criminal charges.”

Miller had also claimed to the U.K.’s Times Radio in July that Trump got Barr and Durham “to open a trial on us.” She said she was interviewed by Durham “for eight hours.” 

Although the Special Counsel can subpoena persons for investigation, a deposition or interview is not the same thing as being charged or on trial. Nonetheless, Miller has several times repeated the  trial story. “I spent 8 hours on trial; other team members also had trials. Not unexpectedly, nothing criminal was found, of course but how on earth could a US ATTORNEY not stand up to him and say….no….there is no crime, so I’m not going to charge them,” Miller said on LinkedIn in March. 

“Instead Barr went ahead with it So I’m worried….not about me/ my team as that’s long over; but about the fact that he thinks he is above the law…but willing to manipulate the law.”

Miller’s timeline of alleged trial doesn’t add up

Miller also botched her timeline about when Barr and Durham began an inquiry into the origins and conduct of the Trump-Russian investigation. Barr was not named Attorney General until February 2019 and did not assign Durham to look into this saga until May 2019, but Miller insists that Barr and Durham began investigating her at Trump’s direction in 2017.

She called Trump “a documented liar and bully” in a March post on LinkedIn and said that “I experienced this firsthand when in 2017 he tried to put me and my team at CIA in jail […] This was the Barr-Durham tribunal. Look it up!”

In fact, Durham’s special counsel investigation filed criminal charges against only three individuals — none of them Miller.

Ex-FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith would plead guilty to falsifying a document during the bureau’s efforts to renew FISA authority to wiretap Carter Page. Clinesmith admitted to Durham in August 2020 that he had falsely edited a CIA email in 2017 to state that Carter Page was “not a source” for the CIA when the agency had actually told the bureau on multiple occasions that Page was. Instead of the recommended six months prison sentence, Judge James Boasberg instead sentenced Clinesmith a year of probation, 400 hours of community service, and no fine.

Indictments against Steele Dossier source Igor Danchenko, and Clinton campaign general counsel Marc Elias’s former Perkins Coie law partner, Michael Sussmann, were handed up, and both were found not guilty at trial.

Miller admitted that some at CIA wanted to decide if Trump was president or not

Miller has also contended that there were officials in the CIA who wanted Miller and her alleged team to decide whether Trump was a legitimate president or not after he won in November 2016.

“The idea that we would conspire to write something like this? If I was going to conspire to write something it would be really righteous. This particular ended with, basically, um, yes 100% the Russians tried to influence the erection — election — in Trump’s favor, and 100% we can’t tell you if it worked unless we polled every voter, and therefore, in our opinion, Trump is our president. And that was it,” Miller told the “Mission Implausible” podcast.

“What we understood from the sources — the source — was that it was ordered by the Russian leadership and they had chosen Trump because they felt he was more favorable than the Democratic, the Democrats, any Democrat that would run against him and other Republicans and things like that. So that’s what we found,” Miller said. 

“And everybody wanted us to come to a firm conclusion, and we did too, honestly, starting this out. We wanted a firm conclusion. Yes, he should not be president, or no, he should be president. One way or the other, we didn’t really care which way it ended, but we couldn’t find that. And so that’s what we ended up with,” she said.

She has also repeatedly admitted that although the ICA did not come to that conclusion, she has suggested that her team may have been able to reach that finding if it had been able to poll “every single voter” to see if they had been swayed by Russian meddling. The Federal Election Commission reported that 136,669,276 people voted in the 2016 presidential election.

Miller defends CIA: “We tell the truth”

Miller told the “Mission Implausible” podcast last month that the CIA was “a family of sorts” and “a dysfunctional club.” She said that “there were very few idiots I had to work with” and that “it’s really good smart people who weirdly want to tell the truth.” Miller said that “we are not what we were back in the 50s & 60s, that’s for sure.”

“We tell the truth, and we fire the people who don’t,” Miller said of the CIA, adding, “We don’t lie inside the building.”

Miller previously sent mixed messages, saying that her alleged CIA team had found “no collusion” when they were writing their election meddling assessment in late 2016, and even claimed that this “no collusion” finding was made clear. The ICA’s major reference to collusion, however, was a direct citation to a two-page annex to the Steele Dossier.

Former FBI Director James Comey and former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe had pushed in December 2016 to include Steele’s debunked dossier in the 2016 ICA on alleged Russian meddling. The dossier was included in an appendix — “Annex A” — to the assessment and was directly referred to in the most highly-classified version of the ICA.

A recently-declassified House Intelligence Committee report and a recent CIA review referred to as the “lessons learned” report by current CIA Director John Ratcliffe sharply criticized Brennan for joining with avowed anti-Trump forces in the FBI by pushing to include Steele’s dossier in the 2016 ICA. That inclusion was made over the objections of Russia experts in the Obama administration’s intelligence community. 

Miller has decried Ratcliffe’s lessons-learned review as a political hit job and claims that none of it was true, before admitting on the “Spy Talk” podcast that key allegations in Ratcliffe’s report, notably about Brennan insisting that the dossier be included in the ICA, were probably accurate.

Miller walks back her involvement in faulty 2016 ICA

Miller told Just the News in writing last month that “I did not write the ICA….to which you are referring, what you describe is a DNI-led and written report which came up after our very focused report, which was simply looking at the data we had that Russia was trying to influence the election. I have no idea if the Steele document is true. We never analyzed it.”

“I was head of the team that wrote an internal report based on the information we acquired on Russias [sic] plans to influence the elections in trumps [sic] favor. This is what my posts refer to,” Miller previously told Just the News. “This report was shared by the DCIA [Brennan] with DNI [Clapper] and with then-president elect Trump, as well as the committees in Congress. Trump thanked our DCIA for the report, which found no collusion by him or his team. The ICA is a DNI product that came later…..and it cites my report….but it is not not my product. ICA = Intelligence Community Assessment….a DNI product.”

Miller’s security clearance reportedly is revoked

An intelligence official familiar with Miller’s current security access status but who declined to be named told Just the News that Miller does not have an active security clearance. A senior defense official told Just the News that Miller’s security clearance had been revoked, as has been reported by other outlets.

“Further evidence of politicization by Administration was last week’s revocation of our client former CIA officer #SusanMiller’s #securityclearance,” Zaid tweeted last month. Zaid himself has his security clearance revoked, and has filed a lawsuit seeking reinstatement, according to ABC News and other outlets.

Miller told the Mission Implausible podcast last month that “there would be no chance of it — of getting a security clearance” in reference to Trump if he was not the president. Miller added: “He is so arrogant and so all about me. The easiest people to recruit are the arrogant ones. … I’m not claiming he’s an agent of the Russians, but Putin certainly has enamored him.”