The Durham debacle: alternate reality at its worse.
A study in the weaponizing of government -- for real.
Ed. Note: Over the last two weeks, The Resistant Grandmother (TRG) has been researching a major story that will likely appear in the next seven-10 days. It’s one designed to help President Biden and Democrats stave off charges of “woke” that have polluted public discourse in the last several years. Attacks against “woke culture” have, of course, formed the centerpiece for Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s state policies and now of his expected presidential campaign. So stay tuned.
Anyone needing validation that Republicans live daily in an alternate universe that harms America need look no further than William Barr and his just-concluded John Durham probe.
Barr appointed Durham as special counsel in early 2019 to investigate the FBI for being, in Barr/Durham’s view, overly eager to look into Trump’s 2016 campaign for Russian connections. The implication: the “deep state” was unfairly targeting Trump, and Durham/Barr would expose the “truth.”
Getting to the bottom by going there
Ostensibly, Barr said Durham’s probe was to “get to the bottom” of the FBI’s 2016-17 inquiry that had been opened without a solid basis, in his view. His contention was that the FBI probe “stemmed from a conspiracy by intelligence or law enforcement agencies” simply to get Trump, according to a January 26 article by Charlie Savage in the New York Times.
Perhaps Durham’s most bizarre claim was that the FBI investigation was wrongly billed as a full inquiry. It should have been called a preliminary inquiry – a “distinction without a difference,” according to attorney and Democratic Congressman Dan Goldman from New York. The implication was the inquiry was based on thin evidence, not worthy of a full court press by the FBI.
What Durham criticized: the FBI doing its job
But a review of the information that led to the probe suggests the FBI, charged with protecting America from adverse foreign influence, had no other choice but to aggressively investigate what was going on between the Trump campaign
and Russia.
A quick recap of clues facing the FBI at that time includes:
Australian intelligence tips about Russia’s email hacking plans as provided to an Australian diplomat by Trump campaign official George Papadopoulos.
Trump’s asking Russia during a summer 2016 news conference to hack Hillary Clinton’s email server to find her “33,000 missing emails.”
Russia’s actual hacking of the Democratic National Committee’s (DNC) network and releasing hacked emails in June and throughout July of 2016.
Strong connections between Russia and Trump officials, such as campaign manager Paul Manafort who had decades-long ties with higher-ups in Russian intelligence.
Ongoing Trump statements about how much he respected Vladimir Putin and how much Putin, in turn, liked him.
MSNBC legal analyst Barbara McQuade said Wednesday it would have been a “dereliction of duty” for the FBI not to commence a serious investigation given what they knew, and still didn’t know, about the Trump campaign.
GOP and opposite reality
But the “up is down and down is up” universe in which the GOP now appears to be taking up full-time residence is attempting to make something that benefits America, in the form of the FBI’s probe into Trump’s Russian connections, into something harmful.
Even though Durham ended his inquiry on May 15, reporting no successful prosecutions (going 0 for only two in cases brought to court), GOP’ers touted its findings as if it had uncovered things that still needed ongoing investigations.
Alabama ex-football coach and now Senator Tommy Tuberville called for prosecutions to begin immediately of FBI agents cited by Durham.
An anti-democracy Alabama Senator
“If people don’t go to jail…let’s not have elections anymore!” Tuberville exclaimed on May 16, leaving onlookers to wonder if Tuberville had even read Durham’s findings, which admitted there was no one else to charge.
Weaponization? It’s in the house.
To no surprise to the most jaded among us, the Durham probe proved to be a governmental weapon in and of itself. Although Durham, a U.S. attorney from Connecticut, was charged to prove the FBI was weaponizing government against Trump, his report shows how the Department of Justice under Barr and Trump were being weaponized against the FBI.
According to a month-long review by the New York Times published in January, “The main thrust of the Durham inquiry was marked by … its role in fueling partisan conspiracy theories that would never be charged in court that Trump allies claim characterized the Russia investigation.”
An embarrassing approach to allies
Proof of Durham’s selective overlooking of evidence that would debunk their bias that the government had wronged Trump was the report’s omission of an intriguing piece of information gleaned when Barr and Durham made an embarrassing tour of law enforcement officials of three allied countries – the United Kingdom, Australia, and Italy throughout 2019-20.
Contrary to Barr’s upbeat description of how the meetings went, CNN reported that Barr/Durham “received little return” from the international visits as allied law enforcement contacts gave them only a cooly polite time-of-day.
According to an Oct. 28, 2019 CNN report, “Barr explains why he met with foreign officials on Durham,” (cnn.com), “British officials expressed reluctance to become part of U.S. political infighting” and reminded Durham they had given information to the Obama administration in 2016.
CNN reported Australians said they would cooperate only if they had any relevant information, which the absence of any mention of Australian information in the Durham study suggests they did not.
CNN added the Italians told Barr they did not have any information that would help Durham – other than to suggest a specific concern about Trump’s possible
financial criminality made known to them by intelligence officials there.
Barr has neither mentioned the Italian tip off nor pursued it, as inferred also by the absence of any mention of the Italians’s warning or American follow-up in Durham’s report (newsweek 1.28.23).
Durham deserves investigation, not the FBI
Judged in real-world terms, not Republican spin, the two government inquiries Durham targeted – the FBI probe 2016-2017 and the Mueller investigation of 2018-2019 which was convened to carry the FBI investigation forward scored tangible results in terms of multiple indictments and successful prosecutions. Mueller found the Russians interfered in “sweeping and systematic fashion,” indicted and earned guilty verdicts for everyone charged, but stopped short of accusing Trump in deference to a president’s “need to govern” during his term.
The 2016-17 FBI probe that morphed into the Mueller investigation ended with fewer tangible results, perhaps because the agency was immediately targeted by Trump and denuded of its most visible senior leadership, either through firings or resignations, the most famous of which was the firing of FBI Director James Comey in May 2018 for refusing to pledge loyalty to Trump.
The turning of government officials and agencies into weapons against the good continues to this day with the ironically named “Weaponization of Government” select committee headed by Ohio Republican Congressman Jim Jordan. Still the target is the FBI while Jordan conducts hearings featuring so-called whistleblowers who never became them, officially, as there is an official process to win that designation, and protection.
Instead, Jordan has invited in a sad group of former FBI agents with axes to grind against their former employer. Most are aggrieved because the Agency expected them to carry out their duties vis a vis rounding up Jan. 6 insurrectionists — a task they’ve declined in support of the Jan. 6 cause. Several admitted yesterday they’re receiving money from Kash Patel who works for Donald Trump.
The Jordan committee has also threatened to release sensitive security information contained in the Durham report, making the “weaponization committee the one that’s doing the weaponization of government,” according to ranking Democratic member Stacey Plaskett of the American Virgin Islands.
Authoritarians attack truth-tellers
If any of what Barr, Durham, Jim Jordan, and the GOP as a whole is doing is concerning, it should be, according to Ruth Ben-Ghiat, New York University professor of authoritarian culture.
Ben-Ghiat warnings
Ben-Ghiat said Thursday on MSNBC that authoritarians are all about harboring “corrupt secrets.” For the GOP, these hidden truths are rooted in their complicity in the Jan. 6 insurrection, and, by extension, the party’s looking the other way in the cooperation between Trump and Russia.
Ben-Ghiat added that keeping secrets requires “going after everyone who is dedicated to research and investigation — journalists, academics, scientists, prosecutors, and intelligence services. That is the frame for what’s going on.”
–trg