John Durham's Investigation Has Disclosed Corruption: His Own

[Nevilledog]

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Marcy Wheeler AKA emptywheel

https://newrepublic.com/article/168311/john-durhams-investigation-disclosed-corruption

No paywall
https://archive.ph/rSkpA

In the wake of special counsel John Durham’s embarrassing second acquittal earlier this month, Durham’s fans—from the Wall Street Journal editorial page to former Attorney General Bill Barr to Donald Trump himself—have tried to justify Durham’s work by claiming he disclosed corruption.

Perhaps he did. But whose? Indeed, the Durham fiasco has disclosed, first and foremost, how much damage Republicans are willing to do in an attempt to deny the results of Robert Mueller’s own special counsel investigation.

Barr appointed Durham immediately after the Mueller investigation finished, over 40 months ago. At the time, there was no evidence a crime had been committed. The sole explanation Barr offered in his memoir was that “I still had to launch US Attorney John Durham’s investigation into the genesis of this bogus scandal.” Thus far, the only scalp Durham can claim is that of an FBI lawyer who pleaded guilty to doctoring an email, but even there, that crime was discovered by a Justice Department inspector general investigation, one that found no evidence that politics affected Mueller’s investigation.

Durham’s own investigations have flopped. In June, a District of Columbia jury found lawyer Michael Sussmann not guilty of lying to hide a tie between the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign and a tip about some cybersecurity anomalies Sussmann shared with the FBI in September 2016. Then, after the government finished its case, a Republican-appointed judge ruled that Durham had charged the primary source for Christopher Steele’s dossier, Igor Danchenko, with lying even though the alleged false statement was “literally true.” Then a jury did the rest. It acquitted the Russian analyst of four additional charges. Forty months in, two juries and a judge concluded Durham had proven no crime.

*snip*

[NoMoreRepugs]

1. No crime proven - imagine that.

[MyOwnPeace]

2. Just another for the past corrupt AG to continue......

the legacy of "Benghazi! Benghazi!" hearings.

Can you imagine the shit-shows they'll be staging if they win control of either house come January?

[Solly Mack]

3. Shocker

[Hermit-The-Prog]

4. The killer paragraph ...

[ See original for lotsa links ]

Trump’s “coffee boy,” Papadopoulos, admitted he lied about when he got advance notice of Russia’s plans to help Trump. Trump’s national security adviser, Mike Flynn, confessed that he lied about how he undermined several of President Obama’s foreign policy efforts on a series of calls with the Russian ambassador. Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, admitted that he lied to Congress to hide the direct contact he had with the Kremlin in pursuit of an impossibly lucrative real estate deal. A judge found that Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort, lied about a meeting with a man—since sanctioned as a “known Russian Intelligence Services agent”—where he shared campaign strategy and discussed plans to carve up Ukraine. And a jury found that Trump’s dirty trickster, Roger Stone, lied about the true nature of his back channel to the Russian hack-and-leak effort. All the Barr misrepresentations and all the failed prosecutions and all the Trump pardons cannot erase Mueller’s results.