The Shocking Hypocrisy of Special Counsel John Durham’s Investigation into the Trump-Russia Investigation

In 2019, weeks after the release of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 election, The Trump administration reversed the playbook and began calling on investigators.

Attorney General Bill Barr has appointed U.S. Attorney John Durham to investigate administration officials who swooped in to investigate Donald Trump’s ties to Russia.

FBI’s Barr has publicly stated that the Trump-Russia investigation arose from chasing flimsy conspiracy theories and relying on false evidence, and that its investigators were either blinded by political bias or acting with blatantly political motives.

Then Durham and Barr started doing the same.

Charlie Savage, Adam Goldman and Katie Benner of The New York Times have been working on the Durham investigation for nearly four years, and it is said to be coming to an end, but things are not looking good. Anecdote after anecdote paints Durham and Barr as believing conspiracy theories without evidence but with clear political motivations to support one of Trump’s favorite thesis: that he is the victim of a nefarious conspiracy.

Basically, Durham and Barr wanted to prove that the Trump-Russia investigation was maliciously engineered by “deep state” officials or the Clinton campaign (or both) to hurt Trump politically. Time and time again, Durham pursued various versions of this theory, and time and time again, he failed to prove his point.

It wouldn’t necessarily be so dire if Barr and Durham had suspicions at first, but an investigation found them to be baseless.However, the two have been publicly saying or implying that the “‘deep state’/Clinton success” theory is correct – something Barr said bluntly in his public statement and Durham said in a statement. court documents And probing questions that seem designed to advance a narrative he can’t actually prove.

Oddly, when examining one of the theories — that Italian officials were somehow involved in the Trump-Russia investigation — Durham and Barr instead got evidence linking Trump himself to potential financial crimes . “Mr. Barr and Mr. Durham believe this message is too serious and credible to be ignored,” the New York Times reporter wrote. Barr handed over the new investigation into Trump to Durham, and it is unclear what the outcome of that investigation will be.

The Russia investigation is certainly not immune to criticism, and an impartial scrutiny of whether investigators miscalculated is justified. But that was not the case with the Durham Inquiry. Instead, it repeatedly posited dastardly conspiracies against Trump, even if the evidence consistently failed to substantiate them, and Barr sowed the narrative, both in the conservative media and in President Trump himself, that Durham was closing in on Trump’s ” Deep State” enemy. The politicized, mindless investigation they’ve been looking for has always been inside of them.

Bill Barr and John Durham’s Many Conspiracy Theories

The grand theory of the Russia investigation by Trump supporters has always been that it is a witch hunt by “deep state” Democrats. This is clearly what Barr and Durham were trying to demonstrate—they explored many possibilities.

Perhaps there was something wrong with the FBI’s decision to investigate in July 2016. post-election period When the FBI behaves oddly. Maybe the CIA has an analysis of Russian meddling in the election. Or maybe Western intelligence agencies sowed misinformation. But Durham’s investigation has not resulted in any charges against officials on any of these issues.

Instead, Durham’s only charges against government officials in 2020 stemmed from a referral from Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz, who found that an FBI attorney had altered a document while trying to sign off on a fourth round of FISA surveillance. email to Trump campaign aide Carter Page. Attorney Kevin Klein Smith pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 12 months probation, but the judge hearing his case concluded he had no political motives but engaged in bureaucratic corner cutting.

In 2021, Durham appears to have given up on the “deep state”. His team’s new theory appears to be that Trump/Russia investigators were swayed by malicious outside actors (connected to Hillary Clinton) to deliberately make false or misleading claims to instigate an investigation into Trump. fake survey.

So he focused on an episode in which Michael Sussmann, a lawyer for the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee, told the FBI about a group of computer scientists’ knowledge of secret online communications between a Trump server and a Russian bank. Research. The charges against Sussmann are narrow, with Durham alleging he lied to FBI contacts about whether he arranged their meeting on behalf of his client.

However, the indictment seems to hint at something bigger – that the Clinton campaign deliberately fabricated a false Trump-Russia connection and made it available to the FBI and the media. The problem with this theory is that other evidence suggests that the researchers involved do believe their theory. (Sussman was acquitted at trial.)

Durham also delves into Igor Danchenko, Christopher Steele’s notorious (and notorious flaw) “dossier” claiming Trump’s Russia ties.Durham appears to have try to imply Democrats intentionally planted false claims in the dossier — such as the one about “diaper belts.”

But what he could prove was far less impressive — a Democratic communications executive who had previously worked on some of the Clinton campaign but never held a top job claimed to know the Trump campaign staff some gossip about him, which he actually read in the papers. (Danchenko was accused of lying to the FBI but was acquitted at trial.)

Now, a new Times report uncovers another episode in which Durham used dubious tactics to try to prove Democratic malfeasance. The background was that the CIA had obtained intelligence memos purported to be Russian, claiming that Clinton was deliberately orchestrating a phony investigation into Trump, but internal analysts deemed the memos suspicious.

However, Durham tried to prove their authenticity, in part by trying to secretly obtain the emails of a George Soros Open Society Foundations executive (because the memo made some allegations against the executive). However, the judge denied Durham’s request to obtain the private citizen’s emails without notifying him.

The Times reporter pointed out that this is very similar to what the FBI did with the allegations in the dubious Steele dossier—except now, obviously, it doesn’t matter because Barr’s people are doing it.

It’s still possible Durham finds something unflattering, which he will reveal in his final report. But so far, his investigation appears to be a politicized mess, moving from one conspiracy theory and weak case to the next.

Everything Barr believed to be true about the Trump-Russia investigation turned out to be true in the one he ordered.