Special counsel John Durham’s four-year effort to investigate the Trump-Russia investigators has ended with a whimper.
Despite the hype from Trump allies that Durham would prove criminal conduct by top government officials or Democrats and reveal a perfidious plot to frame the former president, the probe has ended with two failed prosecutions, one guilty plea, and a 306-page report released publicly Monday with harsh words about certain officials but little new information.
Buried in the middle of the report is a section explaining why Durham went down the rabbit hole for so long — laying out what he tried and failed to prove.
Basically, Durham became enamored of an intelligence analysis by the Russian government from 2016 which had made it into American hands. The Russians assessed, per then-CIA Director John Brennan’s summarized notes, that Hillary Clinton had approved a plan to “vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by Russian security services.” However, the US intelligence community did not know whether this Russian assessment was accurate.
Durham appears to have believed this could be the Rosetta Stone decoding the Trump/Russia scandal. Through his team’s suspicious eyes, this Russian analysis could blow the whole thing wide open — revealing the whole scandal as, per the phrase repeatedly used by the report, a “Clinton Plan.” Maybe top DOJ and Obama White House officials were in on the plan and helping it along to hurt Trump. Further, if Clinton allies had given knowingly false information to the government in the hope of getting Trump investigated, that would be criminal.
But the reality fell far short of Durham’s hopes — as the report he produced attests. And in its discussions of the supposed “Clinton plan,” Durham’s investigation has been revealed to be sloppy and misleading, and betrays the kind of partisan bias it had projected on its adversaries.
Why Durham fixated on a “possible…
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