Durham's Trifecta of Indictments: Deep State, Justice System, and Himself
Despite detailing a colossal, once-in-a-nation scandal, special counsel allowed those who savaged the republic to 'save our democracy' to emerge unscathed--guaranteeing still worse to come
Durham Report Is Indictment of Justice System and Special Counsel Itself
Special Counsel John Durham’s report represents a trifecta of indictments. First and foremost, it’s a direct indictment of our national security and law enforcement apparatus, suggesting it’s plagued by unfathomable levels of rot and corruption at the highest ranks. Second, it’s an indirect indictment of our justice system. Third, through the special counsel’s own sins of omission and commission, the report serves as an indictment of the special counsel itself.
The virtue of Durham’s report is that it has revived and added rich detail to one of the greatest scandals in American history, whereby a political campaign, the Deep State, and media conspired to undermine a presidential candidate, and then delegitimize, destabilize, and destroy a duly elected president—preventing the peaceful transfer of power to him and disenfranchising his tens of millions of voters—all based on a lie.
Yet for all the outrages Durham details—for the colossal, once-in-a-nation scandal that Durham illuminates—all he had to show for his work were three false statements cases, only one of which was brought against a relatively lower-level government official, who got a mere slap on the wrist, and a handful of referrals.
What’s more, as I detail in a new piece in the Epoch Times, there are troubling indicators that beyond its non-prosecutions, the special counsel may have been more a defender of the implicated institutions, than an investigator of them.
As I write in part:
Durham vacillated in filings associated with the cases he brought, and in the report itself, about whether the DOJ/FBI were weaponized or at minimum hyper-politicized agencies at the highest levels, or simply duped ones.
There may have been tactical reasons for doing so in litigation. But that after the parade of horribles Durham lays out in his report, he still concludes that the FBI should have “reflect[ed] on whether” it “was being manipulated for political or other purposes” is beyond unbelievable
…“Manipulation” implies the FBI might have been a victim in Russiagate rather than an assailant.
That Durham includes the above comment…after a report in which he chalks up Deep State depredations aimed at destroying a presidency to “lack of analytical rigor, apparent confirmation bias, and an over-willingness to rely on information” from politically connected sources, takes on new meaning when one considers, too, the punches he pulled in connection with his investigation.
Durham let some of the most critical actors in Russiagate, who should have been compelled to interview, simply decline, and left uninvestigated much that should have been pursued.
…Among those who declined the office’s requests to interview—and who Durham’s office never subpoenaed—were James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Bill Priestap, and Peter Strzok.
…Last but not least, while Durham’s office did speak with Hillary Clinton, it never interviewed her former boss, and the man who sat atop the national security apparatus when Russiagate was put into motion, President Barack Obama.
If you wanted to get a comprehensive accounting of the origins of Russiagate, and investigate its evolution, how could you not speak with these individuals?
What’s more, the special counsel apparently neither probed the DNC hack, central to the broader Russian interference charge linked to Trump-Russia collusion, nor the Mueller special counsel, which almost certainly knew that, as Durham found, from the start, that Russiagate was a baseless conspiracy theory—and which effectively served to cover-up what amounted to a conspiracy to exploit a conspiracy theory; nor did Durham probe the role of mysterious professor Josef Mifsud in Russiagate, or other Clinton-linked dossiers that circulated, or, as far as we can tell, much about informant Stefan Halper’s dubious deeds and relatedly the targeting of Gen. Michael T. Flynn, who was poised to take on the very Deep State that took him out.
Nor did the special counsel call for heads to roll, or for radical changes within the DOJ/FBI of the kind that might have a deterrent effect going forward.
Read the entire analysis — covering all the virtues and vices of the Durham report, here.