Special Counsel John Durham and the Press's Battle With Truth
By: Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. (WSJ)
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Members of the press are rooting for the failure of the latest John Durham prosecution, because they think it absolves them of their roles in the collusion hoax.
Nor are the feelings of special counsel Durham hard to guess. They are likely identical to those of a previous exposer of FBI misfeasance, Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz, who could not have failed to be surprised and a little appalled at the media's indifference to the truths he and his team labored to reveal at taxpayer expense.
It was Mr. Durham himself, in his initial and expansive indictment of Democratic lawyer Michael Sussmann, who dwelled and dwelled on every reason for believing the FBI had not been fooled by the lie Mr. Durham charged the lawyer with telling in the collusion hoax.
The message is even clearer in this week’s prosecution of Steele dossier principal “researcher” Igor Danchenko, who has also pleaded not guilty to lying to the FBI. The world now knows, thanks to Mr. Durham, that the FBI put Mr. Danchenko on its payroll for 3½ years and kept him there as late as October 2020, long after it knew the dossier was a package of lies. One effect of this arrangement was to discourage the analyst-about-town Mr. Danchenko from telling the press or other investigators the truth about the dossier’s fraudulence while the FBI was still suggesting to the public and courts it was “credible.”
As a news story, alas, all this runs into the blinkeredness, not to mention giant helpings of personal cowardice, of many reporters covering it.
Telling is a Washington Post scene-setter on the Danchenko trial that began by misrepresenting the three-year-old words of the Justice Department’s Mr. Horowitz, who said he found no “documentary or testimonial evidence” of improper motivation in the Clinton email and Trump collusion investigations.
If a reporter thinks Mr. Horowitz here is saying he got to the bottom of matters and, yep, the agency is clean as a hound’s tooth, Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos needs to investigate what’s happening inside his newspaper. The inspector general plainly states that, in the absence of an unlikely memo or testimony blurting out an admission of wrongdoing, he was required to accept the good faith of FBI actions for which no “satisfactory explanations” were offered.
These include FBI actions in the Hillary Clinton case, which almost all agree were improper and probably cost Mrs. Clinton the election. These include actions in the Trump case that involved unambiguous malfeasance, such as doctoring evidence for a surveillance court and presenting evidence the FBI knew had been discredited.
Mr. Horowitz thereupon went straight to Congress to urge declassification of his complete findings so the public could know the full truth about the FBI’s 2016 actions. Not only did his words go almost universally unreported in the press, most outlets still haven’t told their readers that a so-called classified appendix even exists.
This is the same press that turns away from clear evidence that former top CIA officials spread an obvious lie about the Hunter Biden laptop to protect Joe Biden in the 2020 race.
The big problem here is the story you’re not being told because it would expose the press’s own gullibility and worse in the collusion farrago. In 2016, the FBI no sooner disposed of the Clinton investigation than it launched the Trump collusion investigation. Only after Election Day, though, did this investigation start spawning illegal, apparently politically motivated leaks and become the vehicle for pushing the Steele dossier into public view.
Why? It’s humanly impossible that the motives and feelings that engulfed the FBI’s top coterie at this time were not dominated by the realization they had likely put Mr. Trump in the Oval Office as the result of actions set in motion by what they knew to be fake Russian “intelligence” (the burden of that secret inspector general’s report).
In fact, the contemporaneous texts of FBI counterintelligence deputy Peter Strzok as well as Kevin Clinesmith, the FBI lawyer who pleaded guilty to falsifying collusion evidence, plainly blame their agency for electing Mr. Trump.
It can scarcely be exaggerated how mortifying and damaging it would be to the intelligence community if the truth were widely known by the American people. The Russia hoax saved the day by changing the subject, just as the Hunter Biden hoax may well have accounted for Joe Biden’s victory—a thing that even people who welcome Mr. Biden’s victory ought to be able to be honest about .
But there’s a reason almost every good book about journalism by a journalist, from Evelyn Waugh’s “Scoop” to Christopher Koch’s “The Year of Living Dangerously,” is unflattering about some of the people our profession attracts. My appeal to Mr. Bezos particularly would be: The Washington Post has become a significantly stupider newspaper on your watch. Do something about it.
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We have this trial and a final report coming.
Thus far we have learned that:
1) An FBI attorney forged a document and provided it to FISA judges to support spying on the Trump campaign.
2) The FBI still used a dossier they knew was purchased by Hillary Clinton, prepared by someone/hearsay, mostly Igor Danchenko
3) The FBI knew the dossier was untrue and again submitted it as the basis of FISA applications to continue spying on the Trump campaign.
4) The FBI, per sworn testimony last week, even offered the provider of this document $1M to prove his accusations about Trump were factual. He could not.
5) The msm feels that their job is to assist one party vs the other in gaining and maintaining power. In the Russia hoax, the msm was complicit.
6) They all got away with it
The value in the Durham investigation is in the facts that have been brought to light, and hopefully Durham issues a final report tying it all together. There's been a wealth of information generated under oath and it will create compelling expose of what happened. Just this week we learned Mueller perjured himself in his Congressional testimony. But, that of course, isn't of interest to the MSM. But Durham has provided the facts showing an out of control FBI leadership that was hell bent to get Trump and ignored the field agents providing evidence that hindered their obsession and the field agents repeated requests to examine the people providing the false information (Steel and his sources).
The law is so deferential to the FBI that it makes prosecution for the spying on Americans almost impossible. As this case has made clear, the FBI can investigate any American citizen on the flimsiest of pretexts, literally "a drunk guy at the bar said something" is enough. While prosecution is impossible, the exposure of what happened has ruined the career of almost every high level decision maker involved in this. Even if they've escaped prosecution, they've been disgraced and many fired. Hopefully, that provides enough of a warning for the next generation of FBI agents who want to interfere in an election.
I'm not so sure they all got away with it. There may not be indictments and prosecutions but there seems to have been a clear shift in public opinion. The public does seem to have a more cynical attitude toward the DOJ, FBI, and the press.
This story is like someone eating their own vomit.
It's the same old drivel we have been hearing in connection to John Durham's investigation for 3 YEARS. This has gone on longer than the 8 Benghazi investigations took. What has Durham to show for all this "buzz" ? Virtually nothing. Not only nothing in terms of indictments and convictions , but also nothing in terms of convincing evidence that Donald Trump and his campaign were "persecuted".
Why did so many people believe the dossier? Because based on what people knew of Donald Trump, and his character, IT WAS BELIEVABLE. Long prior to the appearance of the dossier in the "news" Americans had heard of for over a year about Trump's bizarre affection for Vladimir Putin. It was an issue in people's minds from the start of his presidential campaign in June 2015. Whats up with Trump? Why is he a suck up to Putin and Russia? people wondered. Then when Trump became downright ambivalent about the conclusion that Russia had hacked the Democratic National Committee and spread damaging information about Clinton, and then Trump , truly bizarrely , asked "Russia" to find Hillarys missing emails, this became another brick in the wall of the belief that Trump was up to something in Russia.
NO ONE was surprised when word got out that the FBI had been investigating the Trump campaign.
Now this pro Durham faction , aka right wing media, wants us to believe that the Trump campaign were innocent babes in the woods who were abused by the evil guvmint.
Vomit.
So now you know how we felt over the hundreds of "I hate Trump only because she beat Hillary" screeds that you seeded over the years.
" Because based on what people knew of Donald Trump, and his character, IT WAS BELIEVABLE."
Only to TDS infected leftists that either believed, or wanted to believe everything anti Trump was the truth. They have been disappointed many, many times.
The rest of your rant is nothing more than vomit.
Get lost.
My dislike of Trump has nothing to do with him beating Hillary. I disliked him long before that, as soon as I started reading articles about him 2015 and then when he made a travesty of the Republican primaries in 2016.
It would help if you would ever get tired of being wrong. can you do that for us?
Nope
"My dislike of Trump has nothing to do with him beating Hillary."
Your screed seeds in the immediate months after Trump was elected says otherwise.
"It would help if you would ever get tired of being wrong"
I have admitted being wrong here before, but I've never had to do so with you.
I dont give a damn what you think. You couldnt debate your way out of wet toilet paper.
Sorry, John...
No one needs to "debate" you.
First, you don't want debate, you want compliance to your view.
Second, your arguments are thinner than wet toilet paper.
Unfortunately, JR is not the only one.
Don't forget about the one that demands you recognize Trump is guilty in all things Jan 6, and even if you do, that is not good enough. He will change the question just to hound you more.
Desperately sad, really.
Durham was doomed to failed because beginning by 2014 and continuing right up to election day in 2016 Trump was in secret negotiations with clandestine agents of Russian State Intelligence Services to build Trump Tower Moscow. Trump even offered Putin a luxury penthouse as a bribe to get the deal.
Trump got himself investigated by seeking out and establishing relationships with many known agents of Vlad Putin's Russian State Intelligence Services. The Trump Russia investigation was legally predicated.
And what come of that "investigation"? Nothing. The same resulted in the other "investigations". And yet you don't see the trend of failure by the Democrats in all this and still run with debunked and fictitious claims.
Robert Mueller is not a Democrat and neither is the man who appointed him to conduct his investigation.
Do you understand these basic facts? Evidently not because you keep babbling falsehoods.
Keep spinning John. I didn't mention Meuller or anybody specific for that matter. But here you are adding in your irrelevant nonsense. You should really try to keep up with what was actually said. You can avoid looking like a fool that way.
Do you understand that to to this day NOHTING come from any of those investigations? Of course you don't. Your TDS won't allow you to acknowledge those facts. But you do you. The rest of us will continue to laugh at you and your conspiracy theories.
Dont you ever go back and clean up your spelling mistakes? We dont want readers to think right wingers are dumb or anything.
What failure by the Democrats? Mueller showed the many connections between Trump and Russia and also Trumps obstruction of justice (aka coverup). The Senate Intelligence committee, led by Republicans, concluded that Russia interfered in our election with the approval of the Trump campaign. The first impeachment showed conclusively that Trump tried to extort a foreign government into helping him smear his election opponent, the second impeachment showed conclusively that Trump incited a riot on Jan 6, and the Jan 6 committee has shown beyond a shadow of a doubt that Trump tried to steal the presidential election.
Its really not my problem if your understanding of these matters is dim. Go ahead, discuss any part of this in detail. I dont think you are able to.
Tell me you have nothing without telling me you have nothing....
And here you want us to believe you don't deal in conspiracy theories.