Four years later, Durham has nothing to show for his time.
It is interesting how one side says this.... yet then the other side claims there is the evidence to expel Adam Schiff over the Durham report.
Makes one wonder how most Americans could have any clue where the real truth lies.
I generally go with the side I can check and assume the other guys are lying. Four years to score two failed prosecutions checks out. Breathless hand waves from Timcast, not so much.
Did you read the Durham Report itself, or consult with any credible sources?
Like Lawfare.
Notes on the Durham Report: A Reading Diary
He then turns to the FBI’s policies surrounding assessments and investigations of counterintelligence matters. His focus? The subheadings here are revealing: “Use of least intrusive means,” “Levels of investigation,” “The Confidential Human Source Guidelines,” “Analytic integrity.” Durham even has a subsection devoted to “Recently upgraded protections,” which is to say rules that have been put in place since the Russia investigation and in response to it but which were not in place at the time it was conducted. Following this is a long discussion of the requirements of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which focuses on the protection of First Amendment protected activity.
You can tell just by looking at these sections that Durham is going to find that the FBI did not use the least intrusive means of responding to the Downer information, that it opened Crossfire Hurricane at the wrong level of investigation, that it didn’t handle its confidential human source (presumably Steele) appropriately, that it didn’t respond with analytic integrity to information as it came in, and that it didn’t comply with FISA.
Some of these points are true—and they have been known since
the inspector general’s report back in 2019. Some of them are absurd. But they cumulatively offer a window into Durham’s thinking through the investigation. He is examining what he considers the FBI’s overreaction to the problem of Trump’s and his campaign’s and business’s relationship with Russia in 2016 and 2017—and how that overreaction might have violated FBI or DOJ policy or the law.
This becomes even clearer as Durham turns to what he terms “the principal statutes that we considered to evaluate possible criminal conduct” in the investigation. Those statutes include some laws that almost any investigation would look at: the false statements statute (18 U.S.C § 1001), the perjury statute (18 U.S.C. § 1621), the law forbidding falsification of records (18 U.S.C. § 1519), and the obstruction of justice statute (18 U.S.C. § 1512(c)).
But it also includes some very suggestive laws. Durham considered cases under the law prohibiting the violation of civil rights (18 U.S.C. § 242), for example. Now whose civil rights do you imagine the FBI might have been violating in Durham’s view?
He looked at conspiracy to violate civil rights (18 U.S.C. § 241), perhaps imagining Jim Comey and Andy McCabe huddled in a room feeding dog treats to Pete Strzok while plotting about how to mess with poor Donald Trump and paint him as a tool of the Russians. He looked at more general conspiracies under 18 U.S.C. § 371, which is a useful statute if you’re pursuing conspiracy theories. He looked at illegal campaign contributions under 52 USC § 30116(a)(1)(A) and illegal foreign campaign contributions under 52 U.S.C. § 30121(a)(1)(A).
He looked at money laundering under 18 U.S.C. § 1956(a)(1)(A). He even looked at disclosure of national defense information under 18 U.S.C. § 793(d).
And, of course, he looked at fraud against the United States under 18 U.S.C. § 1031(a).
I swear I’m not making any of this up. Durham appears to be admitting here what a bunch of analysts—myself included—have suspected for while: that he saw this investigation as an effort to expose and prosecute a malicious effort by the Hillary Clinton campaign to defraud the FBI into investigating Trump and thereby violate his civil rights, and the dupes at the FBI who either colluded with or fell for this effort.
Remember, this entire investigation produced exactly one conviction—on exactly one count—and it didn’t have anything to do with any such nonsense.
Durham spent four years fruitlessly chasing a Clinton conspiracy theory and in the end found nothing IG Horowitz didn't find first.
Yet another swing and a miss from RVonse.