John Durham Declares Victory And Goes Home

At long last John Durham has dropped his long-awaited report. Let the mass arrests begin!

Or perhaps not.

In 2019, the Special Counsel was tasked by attorney general Bill Barr with investigating the origins of the FBI's 2016 Russia inquiry. After spending four years and $6.5 million of taxpayer money, he netted one false statements plea by a line attorney plus a 316-page report that will be forgotten by Friday. Durham doesn't even have any suggestions as to how the Justice Department could improve, aside from some vague handwaving about avoiding "confirmation bias" and being more careful when it comes to "politically sensitive" inquiries.

"This report does not recommend any wholesale changes in the guidelines and policies that the Department and the FBI now have in place to ensure proper conduct and accountability in how counterintelligence activities are carried out," he mumbles, adding later that "the answer is not the creation of new rules but a renewed fidelity to the old."

For years the right has predicted that this was the thing which would finally take down Hillary Clinton and the Deep State for colluding to frame poor Donald Trump.

Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my "wires tapped" in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!

-- Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 4, 2017

The theory was that Clinton and her allies in the Obama administration only made it look like Trump was playing footsie with Russia to distract from her email woes. Except the Trump investigation wasn't made public before the election because FBI Director James Comey was too busy giving press conferences about Clinton's dastardly email server and saying how sad he was that he wasn't going to be able to put her in jail for it.

To speak the thing is to refute it -- even before you take into account Don Jr meeting with a Kremlin lawyer promising dirt on Clinton. Or campaign manager Paul Manafort's meetings with a Russian spy. Or Trump's call for "Russia if you're listening" to hack Hillary Clinton's emails. Or campaign "coffee boy" George Papadopoulos's boast to a couple of Australian diplomats that Russia would be releasing information to help defeat Hillary Clinton. Or the fact that Russia did indeed hack the DNC and Clinton's campaign manager and begin releasing those emails through Wikileaks just a few weeks later. Or the Kremlin allies who ran a social media influence operation to sow discord and boost Trump. Or the many, many other connections between the Trump campaign and Russia.

And so Durham had to get a little creative, exactly as the New York Times said he would back in January when it wrote that the prosecutor had "developed an indirect method to impute political bias to law enforcement officials: comparing the Justice Department's aggressive response to suspicions of links between Mr. Trump and Russia with its more cautious and skeptical reaction to various Clinton-related suspicions."

This task was made even more difficult by DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz's 2019 report finding that the investigation of the Trump campaign, dubbed Crossfire Hurricane, was appropriately predicated on Papadopoulos's prediction, which came true in short order. But Durham suggests that this was somehow done with improper alacrity, before speaking to the Aussies and the "coffee boy" -- something investigators did within days. Durham implies darkly that this was because deputy counterintelligence head Pete Strzok "at a minimum, had pronounced hostile feelings toward Trump." In fact, the entire FBI leadership was in agreement with this decision, but still Durham suggests that it was somehow inappropriate due to the "reputational risk" to the candidate. He does not say how the candidate's reputation might be harmed by an investigation which was not disclosed until after the election.

Among other clanging howlers, Durham professes shock that "No defensive briefing was provided to Trump or anyone in the campaign concerning the information received from Australia that suggested there might be some type of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians" while "FBI Headquarters and Department officials required defensive briefings to be provided to Clinton and other officials or candidates who appeared to be the targets of foreign interference." The FBI tipped off the victim of the crime but not the suspect -- UNFAIR!

This is anyway false, according to multiple reports that Trump was briefed on the possibility of Russian influence directed at his campaign in August of 2016.

Durham also makes much of a bit of Russian intelligence describing a "Clinton Plan" supposedly announced at a staff meeting on July 26, 2020 which involved distracting from her email scandal by falsely promoting the Trump-Russia story. This rumor had Clinton allies feeding lies to the media and also the FBI in an attempt to spark an investigation of their opponent, and will sound familiar to anyone who followed Durham's speaking indictments of DNC lawyer Michael Sussmann and intelligence source Igor Danchenko, both of which led to immediate jury acquittals. Perhaps the jurors noticed that the FBI opened the Crossfire Hurricane investigation in July, and so Sussmann was too late to nefariously predicate it when he wandered into the building in September.

In its loonier incarnation, this supposed plot was the basis of Trump's RICO LOLsuit against Clinton, Sussman, Danchenko, Comey and half of DC. That case got Trump and his lawyer Alina Habba a million dollars in sanctions, but Durham will have a lifetime of shame and the permanent reek of failure, so he's not walking away empty handed.

Over at the New York Post and Wall Street Journal, Murdoch's minions are trying to spin this one as moral vindication, while the Federalist is shooting for the stars, calling it a peerless victory.

"I have a hard time looking at this [Durham report] and coming to any other conclusion than that the FBI has to be defunded, because this wasn't one or two rogue agents. This happened from the very top." @FDRLST CEO @seanmdav pic.twitter.com/yvpuAK24V3

-- The Federalist (@FDRLST) May 16, 2023

But in the War Room, Steve Bannon is calling out the naked and smelly king.

"The Epic Failure of Durham": Bannon Slams Durham's Weakness on Prosecution of Administrative State pic.twitter.com/jbjzoOmbcj

-- Steve Bannon (News) (@BannonSteveNews) May 16, 2023

Ah, well, better luck next time, Mustache Man.

Durham Report

Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics and appears on the Opening Arguments podcast.