restripe, Opinion John Durham’s flop is only the latest of many Trump coverup failures
"Russia Russia Russia Lies. Lies. Lies Hopefully the Republicans get their balls back and start making investigations and criminal charges Against all the unproven lies"
Would be much better if you called for their balls for not doing their jobs responsibly. H/t to sortagreen for his first reply to yours.
By Paul Waldman and Greg Sargent May 31, 2022 at 5:36 p.m. EDT
Special counsel John Durham departs the U.S. federal courthouse in Washington after opening arguments in the trial of attorney Michael Sussmann on May 17. (Julia Nikhinson/Reuters)
For three years, conservatives hyped John Durham’s investigation into the origins of the FBI’s original investigation of Russia’s effort to help Donald Trump get elected president in 2016. Durham, a prosecutor appointed in 2019 by then-Attorney General William P. Barr, would blow the lid off the real scandal, they said, which was a conspiracy between Democrats and the FBI to get Trump. This would show there was never anything to the Russiagate scandal.
To appreciate the significance of this moment, you have to remember that Trump and Republicans have spent years working to show that there was never any serious cause for concern about the idea that Russia went to extraordinary lengths to try to swing the 2016 election to Trump.
[Insert: And restripe now you call for them to spend more years. And more millions.]
Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III did not find evidence that Trump criminally colluded with Russia. But he found .. https://www.justice.gov/archives/sco/file/1373816/download .. that Russia interfered “in sweeping and systematic fashion”and that Trump’s campaign expected to “benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts.” Mueller also refrained from explicitly exonerating Trump of criminal obstruction of justice.
Durham had tried to prove that Sussmann had lied to the FBI when he came to them with supposed evidence of some kind of suspicious electronic communication between the Trump Organization and a Russian bank.
Durham’s probe was supposed to suggest that the FBI investigation that ultimately led to Russiagate was tainted to its core by politics, thus unmasking this whole scandal as a big nothingburger. In this sense, Durham’s flop is only the latest in a long string of failures.
“The Durham probe has turned into what conservatives always accused the Mueller probe of being: a politically premised fishing expedition that has failed to discredit its original target, namely the Russia investigation,” prominent national security lawyer Bradley Moss told us.
None of these efforts have been able to disappear a fundamental truth: The stubborn facts show that Russiagate actually was an extraordinarily grave and disturbing scandal.
Crucially, this was the culmination of years of efforts by Trump, his allies and members of the Republican Party to cast doubt on the seriousness of the Russia scandal. Here’s a partial list:
* In 2019, when a Justice Department inspector general investigation revealed significant errors and omissions in the FBI’s original applications for surveillance authority, Republicans widely distorted the truth about the findings, claiming .. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/12/11/guide-misleading-spin-ig-report/?itid=lk_inline_manual_28 .. this showed much more serious problems with the origins of the Russia probe.
* During the 2020 election, Trump’s homeland security chief .. [Former acting Department of Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf intervened to delay release of an intelligence report flagging Russian involvement in the 2020 election, while other DHS officials sought to “blunt” the focus on the country in the report, according to a government watchdog. P - A Tuesday report from DHS’s Office of Inspector General concluded that DHS’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis (I&A) wrongly let politics interfere with the dissemination of the report, which documented a Russian disinformation campaign surrounding President Biden’s mental acuity. ] https://thehill.com/policy/national-security/3476107-watchdog-finds-trump-dhs-altered-delayed-report-on-russian-election-interference/ ..
intervened to slow the release of an intelligence report raising alarms about another possible round of Russian electoral interference on Trump’s behalf.
In some ways, that campaign was successful. Trump pardoned a long list of cronies with ties to the Russia scandal (Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, Michael Flynn, George Papadopoulos). And every Republican is pretty much required to say it’s no big deal if a hostile foreign power helps a presidential candidate get elected, provided that candidate is a Republican.
But the long-held dream of Trump and his allies to erase the enormous significance and depravity of the Russiagate scandal stands as decidedly unfulfilled. And thus it will likely remain.
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