William Barr’s outrage that
Justice Department IG Michael Horowitz’s investigation of the origins of the
FBI’s surveillance of Trump campaign staffer Carter Page did not completely
condemn the FBI on every count only demonstrates Barr is a complete partisan
hack with no credibility. He could not accept a finding that there was no
partisan or political intent in investigating possible Trump campaign contacts
with either the Russians or those who claimed to have access to their email
hacks. Let us remember that this is the same William Barr who as George H.W. Bush’s attorney general
provided the “rationalization” for Bush to hand out pardons that ended the
Iran-Contra scandal investigation; if the Caspar Weinberger trial had been
allowed to go forward, it would likely have implicated then Vice President
Bush, who knew “everything.” Barr was a partisan hack then, and he hasn't changed.
Barr has not only not grown the more wiser
since then, but he has become even more crankily and hypocritically partisan, and he doesn’t care
what anyone thinks of that. He managed to fake his way through his confirmation
hearings, and once more the country has to face its “morning after” regrets.
Meanwhile, Trump continues to appoint to important judicial posts far-right
hacks—many of them “approved” by the far-right Federalist Society, which claims
to take an “originalist” approach to the
Constitution, save when Trump shreds it to tatters—that the American Bar
Association has deemed unqualified.
Another person who disagreed with
Horowitz’s “failure” to fully condemn the FBI was John Durham, currently the
U.S. Attorney in Connecticut. Durham is conducting a “criminal” investigation
of the origins of the FBI investigation into Russian interference in the 2016
election. Durham, however, is not interested in the Russians proven attempts to
undermine Hillary Clinton, but the FBI’s “tactics” in investigating Trump
associates. While Rudy Giuliani has been pursuing his personal “investigation,”
interviewing corrupt, discredited former Ukrainian officials with discredited
stories, Durham and Barr have gone far and wide, from Australia and Italy, to
pursue their own conspiracy theories.
One of these involves Joseph
Mifsud, a Maltese professor who was working in Italy. According to The Intercept, “In May, Attorney General
William Barr announced that he was assigning a top federal prosecutor, U.S.
Attorney John Durham, to determine if the FBI or the CIA had been ‘spying’ on
the Trump campaign without a proper legal predicate to open a case. Barr has
twice traveled to Italy to ask the Italian government to aid the Justice
Department in its inquiry. But the Italians did not view Mifsud in such
elevated terms, according to one of the intelligence sources, who advises
the Italian government. The professor ‘was considered to be of no value or use’
by Italian intelligence, this person said. ‘They viewed him as a fool and saw
no point of contacting him. They didn’t even debrief him after he was in the
news.’”
Mifsud supposedly attempted to
contact Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos about “dirt” on Hillary
Clinton, mainly concerning the Russian email hacks. Again, there is no question
that there were these hacked email dumps, and the Russians were responsible, and they sought to undermine Clinton.
The Roger Stone trial proved that agents of the Trump campaign had a keen
interest in these email dumps, and probably had foreknowledge of them and
discussed how best to use them against Clinton. That the Mueller investigation claimed
to have found no evidence to “prove” it at the time was largely because those
with knowledge about it (like Stone) either did not talk or perjured
themselves. Yet here we are with Barr and Durham not at all interested with
proven and very likely future Russian interference in our elections, but going
after the people working to stop it.
So we know that Barr is as
crooked as an octagram, but what about John Durham? He has been described by
many as being “above” politics, and has had a "stellar" career prosecuting
organized crime figures. But he is a Republican, he was nominated to his
current post by Trump, and he was selected by Barr to conduct a criminal
investigation into the FBI’s handling of the Russian email hacking probe and a possible
Trump campaign angle. If Durham is so “clean” why would he have been chosen for
this role? As we discovered with Mueller—who was unwilling to make the hard
calls given his own political affiliations—there may be some very questionable underlying reason
why he was picked. And knowing Barr’s absolute refusal to accept any
conclusion save the most conspiratorial sort that benefits Trump politically,
it leads one to suspect that he did “discuss” in private what he expects Durham
to “uncover.”
Durham’s own denunciation of the
Horowitz report, his willingness to accept testimony from shady characters with
questionable stories, and his insistence that “crimes” were committed all
testify to the fact that he, Trump and Barr are working in tandem for a
partisan political end. Michael Tomasky of the Daily Beast sums-up what is really happening here: “Barr wants
Durham to find and describe a vast “deep state” conspiracy—a criminal
conspiracy—that intended to deny Donald Trump the White House, the details of
which will dribble out, if it can be managed, over the course of next spring
and summer and even into the fall. In other words, the purpose of this investigation
appears to be 100 percent political and electoral. It’s to show that the system
cheated, or tried to cheat, Trump in 2016, and thereby give him a huge hand to
play in 2020. Shorter purpose: to reelect Trump.”
That Durham is intimately
involved in this effort condemns and discredits him. Everyone knows that the
only person hurt by Russian interference in 2016 was Clinton. What is going on
here is like the proverbial fox guarding the henhouse—in this case Barr is the fox
and the FBI the hens. Durham is just preparing the “excuse” for Barr to attack
and devour for Trump’s political benefit.
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