Durham investigation (Update: Sussman acquitted) (15 Viewers)

[SaintForLife]

It looks like the first shoe has dropped with the Durham investigation with the Clinesmith plea deal. Clinesmith wasn't a low level FBI employee involved in the Crossfire Hurricane investigation.

He worked with Strzok to arrange sending an FBI agent into Trump-Flynn briefing, was on the Mueller team, he took part in the Papadopoulos interviews, and he participated in the FISA process.



From the NYT article:

Ex-F.B.I. Lawyer Expected to Plead Guilty in Review of Russia Inquiry (Published 2020)

Prosecutors did not reveal any evidence of the kind of broad anti-Trump conspiracy among law enforcement officials that the president has long alleged.

www.nytimes.com

I wonder who else knew about the lies?

 

[TaylorB]

One thing that was abundantly clear from Mueller's work, love it or hate it, was the pressure he and the line prosecutors felt to avoid charging cases that were not sure to result in convictions or guilty pleas. Of course, the right was frothing at the mouth at every single one of the select few cases he did pursue, despite the fact that they all were producing guilty pleas and convictions, and they still do not accept the outcomes of any of those cases as legitimate. But, it's frightening to think about how the right would've reacted if any of those had resulted in an acquittal by a jury. For example, if Don Jr. had been charged and ultimately acquitted for being too stupid to understand that he was breaking campaign finance law by accepting foreign dirt, it would've been the most epic meltdown imaginable.

So, whatever the merits of the Sussman case, it's objectively hilarious that the only trial Durham could muster up in three years -- a "process crime," no less -- produced an immediate not-guilty verdict. But because the right has created a separate information ecosystem in which it can lower the goalposts for itself infinitely, they'll still tell you (for some, after their wounds have healed) that this trial was a good outcome because of what it exposed, just you wait, jury was rigged, etc. And they all now seem to understand why a prosecutor might charge a process crime.

 

[Optimus Prime]

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……

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/05/31/durham-flop-trump-coverup-failures/

 

[Optimus Prime]

Putting this here
============
Among the many GOP efforts to counterprogram the Russia investigation with thinly constructed conspiracy theories, one of the most persistent ones was the so-called unmasking of Michael Flynn.


The idea was that Obama administration officials deliberately targeted Donald Trump associates — and particularly Flynn — by requesting the disclosure of their names in intelligence reports before Trump took office, doing so for political purposes.

This fed into long-running allegations of the government “spying” on Trump, who chose Flynn as his national security adviser.


We knew before that this theory had fallen apart.

We now know just how spectacularly.

BuzzFeed News late Tuesday revealed a previously top-secret Justice Department report that details the findings of a review ordered by Trump’s attorney general, William P. Barr.

The report is a resounding rejection of the conspiracy theories, which were seeded and fertilized throughout Trump’s four years in office by Trump allies and GOP members of Congress.


Essentially, the idea was that the Obama officials might have sought the identity of Flynn in intelligence detailing his December 2016 calls with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak and then leaked details for political purposes. (Flynn would later plead guilty to lying to the FBI about these calls.)

And there were valid questions early on about the Obama administration’s use of unmasking, as we wrote in 2017.


But the allegations almost always went beyond the known facts.

And now the Justice Department report affirms that the allegations went way beyond what actually happened, too…….

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/06/01/flynn-unmasking-bash-report/

 

[MT15]

Here is an aspect of the damage Durham is doing that I hadn’t even thought of:

 

[Booker]

In like a lion, out like a lamb...

Durham Inquiry Appears to Wind Down as Grand Jury Expires

WASHINGTON — When John Durham was assigned by the Justice Department in 2019 to examine the origins of the investigation into the 2016 Trump campaign’s ties to Russia, President Donald Trump and his supporters expressed a belief that the inquiry would prove that a “deep state” conspiracy...

www.yahoo.com

 

[TaylorB]

It looks like the first last shoe has dropped with the Durham investigation

FIFY

 

[bird]

FIFY

I don’t think they even bought the shoes let alone took them out of the box.

 

[coldseat]

For @SaintForLife, since he was so invested in this case, lol.

===========================
Republicans hoped Durham could become another Starr, and in some ways he did, albeit on a less extravagant scale. These two men’s stories tell us a great deal about the contemporary right’s obsession with imagined conspiracies, and why they never work out the way Republicans hope.

Durham failed to deliver, not because he’s incompetent but because there just isn’t much there there. He did not uncover a vast conspiracy within the government to stop Donald Trump from becoming president, or reveal that the entire investigation into Russian meddling should never have happened. Because those things aren’t true, no matter how much Republicans wish them to be.

The New York Times reports that “The grand jury that Mr. Durham has recently used to hear evidence has expired, and while he could convene another, there are currently no plans to do so, three people familiar with the matter said.” In other words, he’s just about wrapped up.

What does he have to show for his efforts? He indicted one Democratic lawyer for lying to the FBI; the case was almost comically weak, and the lawyer was acquitted in a unanimous jury verdict. Durham got a guilty plea from an FBI lawyer who falsified an email to justify a FISA warrant; he was sentenced to probation and community service. Finally, a researcher who was a source of information for the Steele dossier will be tried next month, also on charges of lying to the FBI.

In other words, Durham’s probe found almost nothing. If you gave me a staff of lawyers, a few million dollars and subpoena power, I could probably find more crimes committed last month at your neighborhood fast food joint. What Durham most certainly didn’t find was a vast conspiracy. Yet that’s exactly what many Republicans believed he would do.
============================

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/14/kenneth-star-john-durham-conspiracy-theories/

 

[GrandAdmiral]

So is it typically good when you go after your own witness...?

Analysis: Durham rebukes his own witness and slams FBI’s Russia probe after trial setbacks | CNN Politics

The final expected trial of special counsel John Durham’s probe took an unexpected turn Wednesday, with Durham grilling and rebuking his own witness after the witness seemed to bolster the defense of Igor Danchenko, a key Steele dossier source.

www.cnn.com

 

[DJ1BigTymer]

So is it typically good when you go after your own witness...?

Analysis: Durham rebukes his own witness and slams FBI’s Russia probe after trial setbacks | CNN Politics

The final expected trial of special counsel John Durham’s probe took an unexpected turn Wednesday, with Durham grilling and rebuking his own witness after the witness seemed to bolster the defense of Igor Danchenko, a key Steele dossier source.

www.cnn.com

Is it now safe to say that this "investigation" went as well as the "investigation" into trump's claims that HRC popular vote count was a result of fraud in the 2016 election?

 

[MT15]

Durham looks like a partisan hack. Just another person who had a fairly decent reputation and threw it all away to kneel before Trump.

 

[UriUT]

The great MAGA hope burns again today. What was revealing was that Durham exposed important informants that damaged American security.

 

[GrandAdmiral]

Man, Durham surely did (not) earn his money.

 

[MT15]

What a buffoon. I’ll bet that first guy who plead guilty is ticked off now.

 

[MT15]

So this hot take was quick, lol. How can anyone take this bozo seriously?

 

[cuddlemonkey]

So this hot take was quick, lol. How can anyone take this bozo seriously?

"I think" was the first lie out of his mouth.

 

[FullMonte]

So this hot take was quick, lol. How can anyone take this bozo seriously?

So…anyone acquitted in connection with trump was acquitted because the jury thought Trump was the more corrupt actor?

 

[bird]

"I think" was the first lie out of his mouth.

Agreed. The response to his “I think…” is, no, you don’t.