A Guide to the False Claims John Durham Will Tell Congress
I finally finished my last post on the Durham Report last week before heading off for a visit with family for a week. This post gathers them all together in one place.
John Durham’s investigation was a four year effort to flip the script: to make Hillary Clinton — the victim of a nation-state attack in 2016 — its villain.
Durham and his sponsor, Bill Barr, did so as part of a larger effort — one that also included Barr’s sabotage of both the release of the Mueller Report and the ongoing investigations into Trump’s people — to discredit the investigation started because Trump’s Coffee Boy bragged about learning of the Russian attack in advance, and he wasn’t the only one. The Rat-Fucker, too, got advance notice, the Rat-Fucker, too, bragged about Russia’s assistance to the campaign, though because the FBI didn’t investigate Guccifer 2.0 aggressively enough in real time, it took several years to unpack Roger Stone’s advance knowledge.
And so, in an attempt to negate the results of a very real and very productive investigation, Durham sought out targets via whom he could avenge that investigation into Trump. The investigation itself failed to Lock Her Up, to say nothing of jailing any of the men and women of “the Deep State” who believed that enthusiastic foreknowledge of a Russian attack on a presidential candidate was an important thing to investigate, right along with Emirati efforts to cultivate politicians of both parties, the improper handling of classified information, and suspected (but ultimately uncorroborated) corruption.
Durham tried, but failed, to criminalize efforts to keep the country safe from Russian influence operations. Likewise, he tried, but failed, to criminalize political speech, a political candidate’s effort to raise concerns about her opponent’s very real ties to the country that had targeted her. The two prosecutions Durham brought in an attempt to obtain evidence to support the conspiracy theory that animated his entire investigation — or, short of that, to lead the public to believe in his conspiracy theory, regardless of the evidence — ended in embarrassing acquittals, but not before devastating the livelihoods of his targets and others, many of whom had previously played valuable roles in keeping the US safe.
In a sane world, with a diligent press, that should have ended it. In a sane world, with a diligent press, this four year effort would be recognized as the weaponization of DOJ that Trump-whisperers imagine might only happen in the future, or that Republican supporters of fascism set up a committee to falsely claim happened, only to Republicans, in the past.
But that didn’t happen.
So here we are, six months after Durham’s second humiliating trial loss, that of Igor Danchenko, the one where Durham personally led the prosecution, and he finally released the required report on his investigation. By regulation the report is supposed to be just a record of his prosecutions and declinations. Rather than admit that there had been no there there to his conspiracy theory, Durham engaged in omissions and false claims to bolster his conspiracy theory.
Tomorrow, Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee will invite Durham to repeat his false claims.
Here’s a guide to some of the false claims he may make before Congress.
John Durham Lied about Who Told the False Stories
Eight Things Not Mentioned in the Durham Report
John Durham Committed the “Crime” of “Inferring” of Which He Accused Rodney Joffe
“Ridiculous:” Durham’s Failed Clinton Conspiracy Theory
John Durham Fabricated His Basis to Criminalize Oppo Research
John Durham’s Disinformation Problem
John Durham covered up what really happened with the Alfa Bank investigation
The Dishonest and Incompetent FBI Work John Durham Learned to Love
FBI Cyber Division’s Enduring Blue Pill Mystery
John Durham’s Blind Man’s Bluff on DNS Visibility
John Durham committed the prosecutorial errors he attacked when the FBI made them, but worse
Doo-Doo Process: John Durham Claims to Know Better than Anthony Trenga and Two Juries
John Durham, High Priest of the Cult of the Coffee Boy
The press hasn’t called out Durham even while they’ve identified his false claims
How Jonathan Swan Covered [Up] John Durham’s Corruption
How CNN Inculpated John Durham While Purportedly Exonerating Trump
Republicans Demanded Independence for John Durham and Got Robert Hur and Jack Smith in the Bargain