Does John Durham’s ‘Strongly Worded Letter’ Make You Feel Better? - The American Spectator | USA News and Politics
Does John Durham’s ‘Strongly Worded Letter’ Make You Feel Better?
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Durham just issued a report Monday afternoon firebombing the Department of Justice and the FBI for their conduct regarding the false allegations that President Donald Trump colluded with Russian bad guys to rig the 2016 election.

His probe surrounding the weaponization of the federal government in the 2016 election and in its aftermath has led to a good deal of clarity about just how dirty the Deep State is, but not much in the way of anyone paying a price for it. And he wasn’t very polite in delivering his verdict:

Special Counsel John Durham found that the Department of Justice and FBI “failed to uphold their mission of strict fidelity to the law” when it launched the Trump-Russia investigation.

Fox News Digital obtained Durham’s report Monday afternoon after his years-long investigation into the origins of the FBI’s original investigation, known as “Crossfire Hurricane.” That investigation looked into whether the Trump campaign coordinated with Russia to influence the 2016 presidential election.

Durham gave his final report to the Justice Department, which released it Monday afternoon. The report spans more than 300 pages.

“Based on the review of Crossfire Hurricane and related intelligence activities, we conclude that the Department and the FBI failed to uphold their mission of strict fidelity to the law in connection with certain events and activities described in this report,” the report said.

Durham said his investigation also revealed that “senior FBI personnel displayed a serious lack of analytical rigor towards the information that they received, especially information received from politically-affiliated persons and entities.”

“This information in part triggered and sustained Crossfire Hurricane and contributed to the subsequent need for Special Counsel Mueller’s investigation,” the report states. “In particular, there was significant reliance on investigative leads provided or funded (directly or indirectly) by Trump’s political opponents.”

“The Department did not adequately examine or question these materials and the motivations of those providing them, even when at about the same time the Director of the FBI and others learned of significant and potentially contrary intelligence,” the report said.

It’s not exactly Al Pacino in the final scene of And Justice for All, but it’ll do. (READ MORE: Will the Media Ever Acknowledge the Biden Family Bribery Scandal?)

Or will it?

Durham also stated:

[There is a] continuing need for the FBI and the Department to recognize that lack of analytical rigor, apparent confirmation bias, and an over-willigness [sic] to rely on information from individuals connected to political opponents caused investigators to fail to adequately consider alternative hypotheses and to act without appropriate objectivity or restraint in pursuing allegations of collusion or conspiracy between a U.S. political campaign and a foreign power.

And he said:

Although recognizing that in hindsight much is clearer, much of this also seems to have been clear at the time. We therefore believe it is important to examine past conduct to identify shortcomings and improve how the government carries out its most sensitive functions.

Essentially, Durham said that the DOJ and FBI are crooked as hell, and that they’re the ones who colluded to trash a duly elected president’s first two years in office by weaponizing campaign opposition research and elevating it as a pretext to instigate a fishing expedition into Trump.

All of which we already knew, of course, though it’s nice to see it confirmed by somebody in the federal government who’s delivering an independent report on the subject.

The problem is that Durham has zero power to do anything about any of this.

The statutes of limitation have largely run out on a lot of the conduct included in his scathing report, so most of the conspirators involved are scot-free. But even if there were malefactors on government payrolls who could be prosecuted for what amounted to a partial coup d’état against a duly elected president — something it’s absolutely amazing to note, as Democrats continue to warble about Trump’s “involvement” in the Jan. 6 protests that they won’t stop calling an “insurrection” — Durham would have to try these people in Washington, D.C.

Washington, D.C, is a lot like New York. Conservatives can’t get a fair trial in either place. And Democrat deep state operators in Washington, D.C., can’t be convicted of anything that’s subject to differing interpretations based on partisan affiliation.

And Kevin Clinesmith’s pleading guilty to abusing the FISA laws so that the FBI could lie its way into spying on the Trump campaign and receiving one of the lightest slaps on the wrist that the federal government has ever doled out marked the end of anyone being held to account for the Trump–Russia hoax saga.

Michael Sussmann was dead to rights, and the jury let him off. It also let Igor Danchenko go with an acquittal.

There have been no consequences for deep state wreckers like Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, Bruce Ohr, Michael Hayden, John Brennan, James Clapper, or any of the others. There won’t be consequences for people like Antony Blinken or Michael Morell, who weaponized the CIA to protect Hunter Biden in October 2020.

They’re all dead to rights. It’s no secret what any of these people did. But there will be no consequences.

Not even in the media.

The Washington Post and New York Times ran stories on the Durham report on Monday. They barely covered a sort-of-related story about government corruption: the congressional revelations about the Biden crime family and the millions of dollars in unexplained swag routed to nine different Bidens through cutouts and shell companies from China, Ukraine, Romania, and other places. The Times actually pretended that the bank records proving $10 million in payments to the Bidens constituted no evidence of wrongdoing. It didn’t even bother asking what any of the Bidens did to merit that money. It’s not even pretending to do honest journalism anymore. (RELATED: Bribery Probe May Sink Biden Reelection Bid)

Which is news to nobody, of course. And it’s not like the Times influences the opinion of the majority of Americans anyway; it refuses to report the Biden pay-for-play bribery scandal straight, and yet 69 percent of the public, including half of the Democrats, agree it’s a big f*ing deal.

There is barely even a hint of concern that we have a ruling regime that ginned up a false accusation of collusion with the Russians as a fig leaf for spying on a presidential campaign, weaponized that false accusation to handcuff a duly elected president who they knew was innocent of that of which they accused him for two years — and in the process cost him a working majority in Congress — and then returned to Russian-collusion allegations in 2020 so that a corrupt former vice president who took bribes from hostile foreign regime actors — something they damn well knew was going on — would become the leader of the free world.

This is ruinous, disgusting, horrifically abusive behavior, and no free republic can survive it when it’s being perpetrated by people in law enforcement and intelligence who are sworn to defend it.

A saner America would be prosecuting these people for everything under the sun. A saner America would have them in jail without bail because they’d be safer in prison than among the tar-and-feathers-bearing population. And a saner America would be making structural changes to destroy cancerous institutions capable of this kind of rot — as in, breaking the FBI into its component parts and scattering some of them about the government while unloading most of its functions back to the sovereign states, where they belong.

Instead, you get this, which is perfectly emblematic of how the Beltway mafia and its sycophants treated the Durham report:

If there’s a silver lining to the fact that these villains all got away with it, here was Jake Tapper being forced to admit Trump was wronged:

But, of course, that’s not good enough.

Not by a long shot.

Monday afternoon, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan tweeted that the committee is working on nailing down an appearance by Durham in a hearing next week. That would certainly make for some worthy viewing.

But without perp walks, sentences, or — at least — security-clearance revocations or even firings from government service, almost none of which we have or can hope to have, the American people have zero assurances that this kind of behavior won’t happen again.

And the giant middle finger in our faces is the constant moralizing about Jan. 6. When most of the American people believe that the underlying cause of Jan. 6, the hanky-panky surrounding the 2020 election, was absolutely a real thing — in other words, that Trump was right to make trouble over that election. And a great many of us believe that what happened on Jan. 6 was largely the product of agents provocateurs at work.

How many of us see the Trump–Russia hoax, the 2020 election, and the “I saw something nasty in the woodshed” Jan. 6 caterwauling — in the face of suspicions that it was largely a put-up job — as one long-running coup d’état by an unaccountable, oppressive, and increasingly violent elite?

And how do you fix that when all the levers our founders gave us to do so have been corrupted? Not with strongly worded letters, that’s for sure.

I’m not criticizing John Durham. He doesn’t have the power to do more than what he’s doing, and the job he was given is just about impossible. The problem here runs far deeper.

And fixing it will entail changes that our current leaders lack the boldness to pursue.

Scott McKay
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Scott McKay is a contributing editor at The American Spectator  and publisher of the Hayride, which offers news and commentary on Louisiana and national politics, and RVIVR.com, a national political news aggregation and opinion site. Scott is also the author of The Revivalist Manifesto: How Patriots Can Win The Next American Era, and, more recently, Racism, Revenge and Ruin: It's All Obama, available November 21. He’s also a writer of fiction — check out his four Tales of Ardenia novels Animus, Perdition, Retribution and Quandary at Amazon.
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