The stunning hypocrisy of special counsel John Durham's inquiry into Trump-Russia probe - Vox
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
A new report reveals how politicized and conspiratorial the Durham investigation was.
By Andrew Prokop Jan 27, 2023, 10:00am EST Special counsel John Durham, who then-Attorney General William Barr appointed to probe the origins of the Trump-Russia investigation after the release of the Mueller report in 2019, arrives for his trial at the United States District Court for the District of Columbia on May 17, 2022 in Washington, DC.Ron Sachs/Consolidated News Pictures/Getty Andrew Prokop is a senior politics correspondent at Vox, covering the White House, elections, and political scandals and investigations. He's worked at Vox since the site's launch in 2014, and before that, he worked as a research assistant at the New Yorker's Washington, DC, bureau.
In 2019, a few weeks after the release of special counsel Robert Mueller's report on Russian interference in the 2016 election,the Trump administration flipped the script and began investigating the investigators.
Attorney General Bill Barr appointed US Attorney John Durham to investigate those government officials who had presumed to look into Donald Trump's ties to Russia.
The FBI'sTrump-Russia probe, Barr argued publicly, was born of chasing thin conspiracy theories and relied on phony evidence, and its investigators were either blinded by political bias or acting with blatant political motives.
And then Durham and Barr proceeded to do all those same things.
A new, detailed expose by the New York Times's Charlie Savage, Adam Goldman, and Katie Benner digs into what exactly happened with the nearly four-year Durham investigation, which is purportedly about to conclude, and it isn't pretty. Anecdote after anecdote portrays Durham and Barr as believing in conspiracy theories without evidence but with clear political motives to bolster one of Trump's favorite arguments: that he was the victim of a nefarious plot.
Basically, Durham and Barr wanted to prove that the Trump-Russia investigation was manufactured in bad faith by either "deep state" officials or the Clinton campaign (or both), with the goal of hurting Trump politically. Again and again, Durham pursued various versions of this theory, and again and again, he fell short of proving his case.
If Barr and Durham started off with suspicions but found upon investigation that they were baseless, that's not necessarily so terrible. Yet both men kept on saying or implying publicly that the "'deep state'/Clinton campaign hit job" theory was true — Barr in public statements where he said this outright and Durham in court filings and trial questioning that seemed designed to advance a narrative he couldn't actually prove.
Bizarrely enough, when checking out one of these theories — that Italian officials were somehow involved in launching the Trump-Russia investigation — Durham and Barr were instead presented with evidence linking Trump himself to potential financial crimes. "Mr. Barr and Mr. Durham decided that the tip was too serious and credible to ignore," the Times reporters write. Barr kept this new investigation of Trump in Durham's hands, and it's unclear what became of it.
The Trump-Russia investigation certainly shouldn't be exempt from criticism, and a fair-minded review of whether investigators made misjudgments would be reasonable. But the Durham probe was not that. Instead, it repeatedly assumed dastardly plots against Trump, even when the evidence kept failing to establish those plots, while Barr seeded a narrative to conservative media and President Trump himself that Durham was closing in on Trump's "deep state" enemies. The politicized, blinkered investigation they were looking for was inside them all along.
The many conspiracy theories of Bill Barr and John Durham
The grand theory of the Russia investigation from Trump's supporters has always been that it was a "deep state" Democratic witch hunt. This is what Barr and Durham evidently set out to try to prove — and they explored many possibilities.
Perhaps something was off about the FBI's decision to open the investigation in July 2016. Or maybe it was the post-election period when the FBI acted oddly. Maybe the CIA cooked its analysis of Russian interference with the election. Or perhaps a Western intelligence service seeded misinformation. But Durham's probe did not lead to any charges against officials in any of these matters.
Instead, Durham's only charge against a government official, in 2020, stemmed from a referral made by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz, who found that an FBI attorney had altered an email when trying to get sign-off on a fourth round of FISA surveillance on Trump campaign aide Carter Page. The attorney, Kevin Clinesmith, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 12 months of probation, but the judge in his case concluded he didn't have political motives and was instead engaged in bureaucratic corner-cutting.
By 2021, Durham had seemed to give up on the "deep state." His team's new theory seemed to be that Trump/Russia investigators were bamboozled by malicious outside actors — with ties to Hillary Clinton — knowingly making false or misleading claims to drum up a phony investigation into Trump.
So he focused on one episode where Michael Sussmann, a lawyer for the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee, told the FBI about research by a group of computer scientists into secret online communications between a Trump server and a Russian bank. The charge against Sussmann was narrow, with Durham alleging he lied to his FBI contact about whether he arranged their meeting on behalf of his client.
The indictment, however, seemed written to imply something bigger — that the Clinton campaign knowingly concocted a bogus Trump-Russia link, and fed it to the FBI and the media. The problem with that theory is that other evidence suggests the researchers involved really believed their theory. (Sussmann was acquitted of the charge at trial.)
Durham also dug into Igor Danchenko, the lead researcher for Christopher Steele's infamous (and infamously flawed) "dossier" claiming Trump-Russia connections. Durham seemed to have been trying to imply that Democrats deliberately seeded false claims in the dossier — like the claim about the "pee tape."
But what he could prove was much less impressive — a Democratic PR executive, who had been previously involved in some Clinton campaigns but never at high levels, had claimed to know about some Trump campaign personnel gossip that he had actually read in the newspaper. (Danchenko was charged with lying to the FBI but acquitted at trial.)
Now, the new Times report reveals another episode where Durham used questionable means to try to prove Democratic malfeasance. The background is that the CIA had obtained some purported Russian intelligence memos asserting there was a deliberate plot by Clinton to drum up a phony investigation against Trump, but the memos were believed by internal analysts to be dubious.
Durham, however, tried to prove their veracity, in part by trying to secretly obtain emails from an executive at George Soros's Open Society Foundation (since the memos had made some accusations about this executive).A judge, however, rejected Durham's request to get this private citizen's emails without informing him.
The Times reporters pointed out that this is quite similar to what the FBI did with the allegations in the dubious Steele dossier — except now, apparently, it's okay because Barr's people are the ones doing it.
It remains possible that Durham has found some unflattering things that he'll disclose in an eventual report. But so far, his investigation has seemed to be a politicized mess, bumbling from one conspiracy theory and weak case to the next.
Everything Barr thought was true about the Trump-Russia investigation has turned out to be true about the investigation that he ordered.
Tags
Who is online
413 visitors
Yes Virginia, Trump, Barr and Durham knew damn well in advance that the CIA and FBI probes of Trump's Russian connections were legally predicated and predated the 2016 Presidential election by years. That Trump had been being investigated for year prior for seeking out and meeting with and establishing long term relationships with clandestine agents of Putin's Russian State Intelligence Services. That beginning by at least 2014 and continuing right up to Election day in 2016 Trump had been negotiating with Vlad Putin to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. How could they not? Not to would have been negligence!
Like anyone secretly making deals with Vlad Putin, Trump blundered into ongoing surveillance programs. There is no denying it anymore!
I understand how disillusioned a MAGA must be...
The Trump-Barr-Durham Hoax has been exposed.
It turns out that the CIA and FBI investigations into Trump's secretive relationships with Putin were legally predicated and long predate 2016!
Like a broken record....
Lol. He gets caught lying and then has to reseed an article to avoid to try and avoid the embarrassment.
Rinse and Repeat.
Not at all. Can I help it that dozens of news organizations are now reporting about the stunning hypocrisy of the Durham Probe?
That the facts are out and the CIA and FBI investigations into Trump's many secretive relationships with Russian spies were legally predicated and predated the 2016 election by year. What part don't you understand?
There are dozens of sources reporting it.
Yet you are recycling stories that were already seeded to distract from your previous debacles.
Let's play the game. I'll say for the 1,000th time. Prove it.
You panic.
Knowing you've been caught lying again, you runaway and seed yet another article that doesn't say what you claim it does.
Rinse and Repeat.
Why don't you explain the article for us?
Since you say the author doesn't say what he plainly says. That the CIA and FBI probes of Trump's Russian dealings were legally predicated and predated the 2016 presidential election by years which is why the Durham probe was a hoax...
Since dozens of reputable news sources are reporting the same perhaps instead of trolling me you should write a sternly worded letter to their editors. I cannot help it that this is being widely reported.
Perhaps you should seed varying opines.
Then cite the author actually saying it. It's really easy to cite actual [words deleted CoC]
All you have to do is quote the author specifically claiming "that the CIA and FBI probes of Trump's Russian dealings were legally predicated and predated the 2016 presidential election by years which is why the Durham probe was a hoax..."
That's it.
Its incredibly easy to do if the author actually said it. [deleted]
If there were, why don't you provide a few links.
man.... so here we have a VOX article that is based on a New York Times article. And people still don't think the news media is lazy and full of bullshit. I miss the good old days when journalists would do their own work rather than just regurgitate an article from another news source.
[deleted]
Considering how much some people hang on every word trump utters it makes sense that some traits would rub off on them.
So many people asking for additional sources!
Being there are so many I was happy to oblige.
How many sources until you believe the truth?
[deleted]