Remember when it was reported that John Durham’s investigation into the Russia probe by the FBI that led to the Mueller investigation would end by the summer of 2020? Of course all those who supported this fraud, Fox News and various far-right politicians like Rep. Jim Jordan, were “eager” that Durham release a report damaging to Joe Biden in the run-up to the election.
But that didn’t happen; Durham’s “investigation” has just droned and groaned on forever and ever, to the point where most people had simply forgotten about it. Let’s recap: after the Mueller report was released on March 22, 2019, Attorney General William Barr—who had previously denounced that investigation as “spying” against the Trump campaign, an absurd assertion since it was the FBI’s duty to secretly investigation enemy subversion in the electoral process—cherry-picked its findings to make it appear that Trump and his associates were somehow complete innocents and were the victims of a “deep state” conspiracy.
This was far from the truth of course; without the Mueller probe, we certainly wouldn’t have discovered that Trump’s former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, was receiving millions of dollars in untaxed secret payoffs from a foreign government, and that he was “involved” with Russian operatives in the Ukraine with the intent to subvert the election. We are also supposed to forget the fact that it was Trump’s own Justice Department that had itself initiated the Mueller investigation because Trump’s firing of FBI director James Comey had a bad “look” to it, “suggesting” that it was clearly aimed at ending the FBI’s investigation into possible links between Russia and Trump campaign officials for the purpose of “assistance” in undermining the Clinton campaign. That Russia was aiding the Trump campaign because Vladimir Putin viewed Trump as a politically naïve “pawn” that he could easily manipulate has been proven to be true.
Just three days after the release of the Mueller report, and without doubt on the demand of Trump, Barr “officially” initiated discussions with Durham and others on how to proceed with Durham’s own “investigation” into the origins of the FBI’s Russia probe, which of course the Mueller investigation was derived from. Obviously this had been in the works for some time, and misrepresenting the findings of the Mueller report—and let’s be frank: Mueller is a Republican and he wasn’t “eager” to bring down a Republican president—was the first step in that process.
On May 14, 2019, The New York Times reported that Durham would be conducting a “review” of FBI actions that led to the Russia probe, not an actual investigation into potential criminal acts. Nine days later, Trump gave Barr unlimited authority to declassify any document he thought would be “helpful” to his case, which obviously could be seen as an abuse of power. The CIA was ordered to cooperate with the “review,” and in July Barr traveled to the UK and Italy in a mostly failed effort to coerce information helpful to his and Trump’s paranoid delusions; Australia was also dragged into this muck. In September, the Justice Department claimed that “certain Ukrainians” not in, or no longer in, the government were supplying possibly “helpful” information; however, as we were to discover when Rudy Giuliani went on his “fact-finding” mission, Trump’s gullible associates were just being used by Russian intelligence operatives in the Ukraine for their own purposes.
In October, 2019 it was reported that the Durham “review” was diving “deep” into previously unrevealed territory, and in removing the wool from the public’s eye it was announced that the “review” was now a “criminal” probe. Barr claimed that this was because of—or at least he wanted to believe—“improper motives,” meaning of course people didn’t like Trump and thought he would be a danger to the country, which of course he turned out to be.
With time running out an actually finding any actual crimes, Barr decided to make it harder for the Biden administration to simply end Durham’s “probe” as a pointless waste of money by appointing him as a “special prosecutor” which limits what the Justice Department can do to limit the blind alleys that Durham can go into, although it has every right to limit how much longer this political farce can go on. There are real crimes going on, after all, such as former Sen. Rand Paul staffer Jesse Benton being indicted for laundering $100,000 dollars from a Russian national into Trump’s 2016 campaign fund; Benton shouldn’t be expecting another pardon, which he received from Trump for an earlier campaign finance fraud conviction.
A year into the “investigation,” Durham could only announce he was looking into “media leaks” and the possible “entrapment” of Michael Flynn, who has since proved himself to be another election conspiracy nutjob who has made treasonous suggestions of how to overthrow an election. Last December it was reported that Durham was looking into the involvement of former CIA director John Brennan. Durham seemed to believe that there was a “preconceived notion” that Trump and his campaign were involved with the Russians to undermine a democratic election.
In fact the Russians were trying to do exactly that, regardless of the active or “inadvertent” cooperation of Trump—who we recall publically called on the Russians to release Hillary Clinton’s emails, which was clearly enough evidence to justify the Russia investigation on its own. Of course we also remember that infamous “meeting” with a Russian lawyer who claimed to have “dirt” on Clinton, but that Jared Kushner was “disappointed” to discover turned out to be a lot of nothing. And then there was Trump “asking” the president of the Ukraine to help dig up dirt on Biden; are we supposed to pretend that didn’t happen too? There were also reported “clashes” between intelligence agencies about what could or could not be shared with Durham or other parties. Durham, perhaps in a brief encounter with reality, “revealed” that Barack Obama and Biden were not targets of his “probe.”
But surely there was some “point” to all of this, right? Two years and five months later we have…U.S. Inspector General Michael Horowitz reported that though the FBI’s FISA request to monitor the activities of Carter Page, which initiated the Russia investigation, was “sloppy,” there was no evidence that there was a political motive in doing so. In August, 2020 FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith pleaded guilty to adding a phrase to the FISA request that suggested that Page was “not a source” for the CIA, and he was sentenced to probation and community service. And what else? Oh yeah, a cybersecurity lawyer named Michael Sussman has been indicted for not mentioning that he had connections with Clinton campaign when spoke to the FBI about possible connections between the Russians and the Trump Organization.
That’s it…???? Well, we are told that Durham has presented a garbage dump of “evidence” to a grand jury for it to hash out to see if there is anything there that is sufficient to charge some low-level FBI employees and a few others outside of government. Why Attorney General Merrick Garland hasn’t demanded accountability from Durham and informed him to “wrap-up” his wasteful farce of an investigation is beyond comprehension; that Durham himself doesn’t have the personal integrity to do so himself speaks volumes for his own credibility and of his “investigation” that is itself far more political and biased than anything that initiated it.
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