FROM THE LEFT
By Lance Simmens
If you have never heard of the Durham Report, you are both forgiven and perfectly within your rights as an American taxpayer to demand that we get our money back. While touted by Trump supporters as an investigation that would reveal the “crime of the century” involving a massive conspiracy between the FBI and the Clinton presidential campaign, it is more appropriately a reflection of the Shakespearian characterization of “much ado about nothing.”
Furthermore, it will most likely go down in history as a classic case of how not to waste four years and $6.5 million of federal dollars on a fool’s errand to attempt to justify a political point: namely, to promote the endless fanatical conspiracies that dominate MAGA world.
John Durham, a former federal prosecutor, was authorized by Trump’s Attorney General William Barr “to investigate whether any federal official, employee, or any other person or entity violated the law in connection with the intelligence, counter-intelligence, or law-enforcement activities directed at the 2016 presidential campaigns, individuals associated with those campaigns and individuals associated with the administration of President Donald J. Trump.” Given these marching orders, it was incumbent upon Durham to root out illegal activities amongst individuals in their public service jobs and prosecute any and all such illegal acts. Durham, however, expanded his conception of the English language to seek out and prosecute political or confirmation bias. In the process, the confirmation bias that inhibits his own mindset is clearly delineated in both words and actions that substitute for intellectual scrutiny.
His failures are clearly outlined in a piece written by MSNBC Opinion Writer/Editor Hayes Brown: “The Durham Report doesn’t just fail to live up to Trump supporters’ expectations of a spectacular vindication; it manages to fail on every other level as well. Durham fails to rebut the previous findings from special counsel Robert Mueller or the Department of Justice’s Inspector General. He fails to provide suggested changes that the FBI could make moving forward. He fails to acknowledge how much of the winking innuendo the report includes wasn’t proved in court.”
Elizabeth Nolan Brown writes in Reason magazine, no leftist-leaning organization, “Durham failed to uncover any evidence of major wrongdoing … the Durham Report represents one more entry in a sad, symbiotically conspiratorial, paranoid juncture in American politics.”
Much of what was identified in the report seems to be borrowed from a 2019 Justice Department report in which Inspector General Michael Horowitz similarly identified serious performance failures among FBI agents. Those findings prompted FBI Director Christopher A. Wray to implement changes at the agency.
Leo Sands, writing in the Washington Post, points out “Durham was tasked with finding violations of the law, and he found few. Kevin Clinesmith, a former FBI lawyer, was sentenced to one-year probation after admitting in a plea deal with Durham to altering a government email used to justify security surveillance of a former Trump campaign adviser, Carter Page … Durham’s investigation led to two failed prosecutions — one against private researcher Igor Danchenko and the other against cybersecurity lawyer Michael Susan. He accused both of lying to the FBI, and both were acquitted in court. The results contrast sharply with the more than half a dozen guilty pleas or verdicts secured by Mueller’s investigation.”
The report is subject to considerably searing reviews that it mimics or practically plagiarizes an existing inspector general’s set of recommendations issued in 2019. The Durham report goes to great lengths to rally those disciples of the “deep state” who continue to bastardize civil servants and advance greater and greater control of the administrative conspiracy.
David Frum writes in a piece in the Atlantic entitled “A Sinister Flop,” contending that “John Durham served up not an investigation, but an excuse for future abuses …What the report says is in essence a classic Miranda-rights criminal defense of a kind that conservatives dislike when it benefits a mugger or a car thief: The cops messed up in this way or that, and therefore my client must go free, even though we all know he did exactly what he is accused of.”
Frum concludes “As a legal text, the Durham report is limp and meager. As a history of recent events, it is misleading. But don’t dismiss its significance because of its intellectual defects. The Durham report is already proving to be a huge success as a prop and support for the bitterest partisan rancor. And its fullest import may yet lie ahead as a rationalization for abuses of power by Trump-legacy administrations of the future.”
Durham’s unfortunate detour into the world of speculative confirmation bias, which has already been addressed by the more appropriately suited inspector general, demolishes any credit or intellectual analysis his investigation could have expected to gain from such an overtly political maneuver. In sum, it reflects a vacuous dive into a cesspool of vengeance and deceit. Shameless!