Durham Report Is Indictment of Justice System and Special Counsel Itself

Special counsel John Durham arrives at federal court in Washington on May 18, 2022. Teng Chen/The Epoch Times

Commentary

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.

With the weaponization of said Deep State under congressional scrutiny, Russiagate remains ever relevant.

Durham makes clear that “Trump-Russia collusion” was a fraud from the start, cooked up by Hillary Clinton’s team and the Democratic National Committee (DNC), foisted upon America by a similarly disposed security state that repeatedly ran interference on Clinton’s behalf while breaking or ignoring virtually every rule in the book in its zealous effort to crush her opponent and then president—and all aided by corporate media stenographers in on the information operation.

The special counsel writes (pdf) that “[N]either U.S. law enforcement nor the Intelligence Community appears to have possessed any actual evidence of collusion in their holdings at the commencement of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation.”

The FBI predicated Crossfire Hurricane, a full counterintelligence investigation into whether individuals associated with an ongoing presidential campaign were “witting of and/or coordinating activities with the Government of Russia,” as the Durham report details, on the “sole basis” of “clearly raw and unevaluated” information.

It gleaned said information from Australian diplomats who had engaged in bar talk with a then-little-known volunteer foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign. The FBI never interviewed the foreign officials, nor “gave any consideration to the actual trustworthiness of” them. It didn’t interview the Australians’ interlocutor either.

But the FBI proceeded to open the investigation at warp speed—within three days—of receiving a cable stating that former Australian High Commissioner Alexander Downer indicated that George Papadopoulos “suggested the Trump team had received some kind of suggestion from Russia that it could assist ... with the anonymous release of information during the campaign that would be damaging to Mrs[.] Clinton (and President Obama).”

That was it. That alone is the stated development that catalyzed a rolling coup against Donald Trump.

The special counsel adds that “One of the chief errors from the start of Crossfire Hurricane was the poor analysis the FBI brought to bear on the critical pieces of information that it had gathered, as well as an over-reliance on flawed or incomplete human intelligence that only later was found to be plainly unreliable.”

Look no further than the FBI’s targeting for surveillance of another Trump campaign foreign policy adviser, Carter Page, who former British spook Christopher Steele and Fusion GPS fingered as a key connection between Trump and Russia.

The FBI would go to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court with an application to spy on Page in the fall of 2016. It notably refused to interview him prior to resorting to that extraordinary measure, or for many months thereafter—this, despite Page having written a letter to then-FBI Director James Comey voluntarily offering to speak “with any member” of the FBI to clear his name in September of that year. Such an interview almost certainly would have proven exculpatory.

The Bureau apparently knew contemporaneously how dicey its request for a FISA warrant on Page was, as, according to one case agent, the FBI’s hope upon submitting the initial FISA application was that it would “self-corroborate.” That is, spying on Page, an American citizen, was a “Hail Mary” based on a presumption of guilt the government hoped would prove justified.

The Page FISA application relied heavily on the dirty Steele dossier, the substantive allegations of which Crossfire Hurricane investigators “did not and could not corroborate”—ever.

As further evidence of the illegitimacy of the Page targeting, the Durham special counsel “uncovered little evidence suggesting that, prior to the submission of the first Page FISA application, the FBI ... made any serious attempts to identify Steele’s primary sub-source other than asking Steele to disclose the identities of his sources, which he refused to do.”

Had investigators done so, and were they operating in good faith, they probably would have never spied on Page.

As we would later learn, the key sub-source for the Steele reports, the dubious Igor Danchenko, himself having been subject to a seemingly botched and never-completed counterintelligence investigation, otherwise had a shady background, and would be caught in lies to agents from early 2017 on. Yet the FBI would pay him hundreds of thousands of dollars to serve as an informant, despite providing no discernable value, according to higher-ups. This may have been hush money aimed at keeping Danchenko out of reach of congressional investigators—a prospect the special counsel didn’t explicitly entertain.

Investigators would repeatedly press for the renewal of the Page FISA warrant. They did so despite finding no “there” there in terms of questions about his allegiances—as should have been clear from Page’s past cooperation with the CIA in providing Russia-related intelligence, which the Crossfire Hurricane team knew about “months prior” to the submission of the first FISA application, and that FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith would later doctor an email to illegally omit in connection with the fourth and final such application; despite knowing the surveillance was predicated on the sham Steele dossier, no substantive part of which Danchenko could vouch for; and despite developing reams of exculpatory evidence, which they ignored from the start.

Pages from the Durham report, a copy of which was obtained by The Epoch Times. Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times

Durham’s report would show more poisonous fruit sprouting from the poisoned “Trump-Russia collusion” tree rooted in the similarly perverse efforts—or non-efforts—of investigators.

The FBI eschewed glaringly obvious investigatory steps that would have shown its pursuit to be a farce.

It covered its eyes and ears to the provenance of the dirt it received.

It relatedly “discounted or willfully ignored” a bevy of items constituting “material information that did not support the narrative of a collusive relationship between Trump and Russia”—that is, it acted with complete willful blindness to the truth.

It ran informant after informant at the Trump camp, to no avail.

The report shows middle-tier FBI employees wondering again and again what it was their superiors knew that they didn’t, requiring them to keep pursuing ludicrous leads.

The cavalier and facially incompetent “investigatory” effort, combined with the double standard in treatment illustrated by the FBI’s comparatively “cautious” handling of Hillary Clinton campaign “matters,” and clear deference to Clinton, removes all doubt the fix was always in.

Durham could only conclude “that the Department and the FBI failed to uphold their important mission of strict fidelity to the law” in connection with the outrages on which he reported.

Yet for all those outrages—for the colossal, once-in-a-nation scandal that Durham detailed—all he had to show for his work were three false statements cases, only one of which was brought against a lower-level government official, Clinesmith, who got a mere slap on the wrist, and a handful of referrals.

How can that be?

In defense of his work, the special counsel writes that:

“... not every injustice or transgression amounts to a criminal offense, and criminal prosecutors are tasked exclusively with investigating and prosecuting violations of U.S. criminal laws. And even where prosecutors believe a crime occurred based on all of the facts and information they have gathered, it is their duty only to bring criminal charges when the evidence that the government reasonably believes is admissible in court proves the offense beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Maybe Durham was chastened by the losses his office suffered in even seeming slam dunk cases in front of Washington DC and Virginia judges and juries.

These should be understood at this point to be completely hostile venues for anyone running up against the Deep State and political establishment more broadly.

This is a sad commentary on our justice system. It says one can’t get justice against the ruling class on its home turf—which rewards the weaponization of every institution over which the ruling class presides.

Yet another thought also comes to mind in reading the Durham report. One can’t be convinced the special counsel ever planned to bring cases against any government officials of consequence in connection with his investigation of Russiagate—officials serving the very institutions of which the special counsel itself was a creature—even if, and perhaps especially if, the office might have secured convictions.

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.

Yes, the Clinton campaign and its surrogates continually pushed Trump-Russia collusion garbage, but the notion the FBI didn’t know who and what it was dealing with strains credulity. And it seemed more than happy to concoct and pursue the Trump-Russia collusion theory based on the thinnest of reeds of its own volition. “Manipulation” implies the FBI might have been a victim in Russiagate rather than an assailant.

That Durham includes the above comment—suggesting an implicit defense of the DOJ/FBI’s actions—and 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.

Amazingly, the special counsel never spoke with some of the most significant participants in, overseers of, or obfuscators about this conspiracy.

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.

The special counsel also never interviewed Kevin Clinesmith, Rodney Joffe, Marc Elias, Glenn Simpson, Christopher Steele, or Igor Danchenko.

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.

Durham is of course right that, ultimately, the integrity of institutions rests on the character of those who serve them over the policies and procedures by which they’re supposed to abide.

But by the same token, this seems like a cop out. How can one expect “a renewed fidelity to the [rules of] old,” as Durham advocates for, if those who flout those rules never pay a price for it, and at worst depart for cushy television gigs?

History will be left to judge whether Durham was more an investigator of the investigators or a defender of them—a true “company man.”

But the fact remains that those who savaged the republic to “save our democracy” have emerged essentially unscathed.

New revelations about Deep State corruption in support of President Joe Biden in the 2020 election, and in continued support of him and his family regarding their influence-peddling, compromise, and alleged criminality up to this very moment, reflects the obvious: Corruption in the Deep State, once unpunished with respect to Russiagate, was guaranteed to fester.

After getting away with the near-political murder of Trump, why would we expect anything but that the Deep State would continue to go bigger, and be more brazen?

All evidence suggests we the people are suffering under the systemic rot, corruption, and weaponization of those very critical institutions in which we can least afford it.

Whether the Durham special counsel could have helped put a meaningful stop to it we may never know.

But we can only expect still more egregious scandals to come.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.