Perkins Coie, the law firm employed by the Hillary Clinton campaign, hired Fusion GPS to conduct opposition research on Donald Trump on April Fool’s Day of 2016. If this were a novel, readers would call this foreshadowing.
Democrats, of course, never informed the public of the trick they played upon them. Instead, for more than a year, journalists and even the director of the FBI ritualistically referred to the source as a “dossier,” as if to legitimize a partisan smear campaign as the product of intelligence agencies.
Hiding pertinent information makes for a recurring theme in the Durham Report. It started early.
CIA Director John Brennan’s handwritten notes detail his briefing of President Barack Obama and other leading officials on the “alleged approval by Hillary Clinton on July 26, 2016 of a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisors to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by Russian security services.” The words did not come from Rudy Giuliani’s or Dan Bongino’s hand but from one of the main purveyors of the slanderous notion that Donald Trump colluded with the Russians. He did not whisper this to a friend over drinks but told the president of the United States, whose Justice Department spied on Donald Trump’s campaign based on information already labeled propaganda to the president by the director of the CIA.
People in the highest places knew all along that the Clinton campaign originated the falsehoods but decided to not only perpetuate the lies but also to also use it as the basis for unprecedented, in U.S. history at least, spying by the state with court approval upon a candidate of the opposition party. As Durham shows, it got worse. (READ MORE: If Durham Is So Worthless, Why Is the Ruling Class Worried About His Final Report?)
The information came from paid lackeys of the Clinton campaign who asked people within the Democratic Party apparatus in the United States about Donald Trump’s ties to Russia. Sure enough, people who made their living off of promoting liberal ideas and working for Democratic politicians conjured up a lot of nasty stories concerning the Republican nominee.
The FBI presented the primary source of the dossier as a Russia–based informant. It turns out Igor Danchenko had worked for the left-wing Brookings Institution and lived in the United States for decades. Durham’s report notes that “the FBI never corrected this assertion in the three subsequent [Carter] Page [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] renewal applications. Rather, beginning in March 2017, the FBI engaged Danchenko as a [confidential human source] and began making regular financial payments to him for information—none of which corroborated Steele’s reporting.”
Durham points out that the “FBI knew in January 2017 that Danchenko had been the subject of an FBI counterintelligence investigation from 2009 to 2011. In late 2008, while Danchenko was employed by the Brookings Institution, he engaged two fellow employees about whether one of the employees might be willing or able in the future to provide classified information in exchange for money.”
Another source, Democratic Party activist Charles Dolan, “admitted that he fabricated the allegation about [Paul] Manafort that appeared in the Steele Report.”
This hurt Donald Trump and the public. It also hurt good public servants working within the FBI.
One of the more memorable parts of the report concerns when Durham’s people “showed portions of the Clinton Plan” to an agent who worked on Crossfire Hurricane. “After reading it, Supervisory Special Agent-I became visibly upset and emotional, left the interview room with his counsel, and subsequently returned to state emphatically that he had never been apprised of the Clinton Plan intelligence and had never seen the aforementioned Referral Memo,” the report explains. It adds that the agent “expressed a sense of betrayal that no one had informed him of the intelligence.”
Notice that end-of-Unbreakable sense of perfidy and shock nowhere characterizes the response to such revelations, many of them years-old by this point, by James Comey, Michael Isikoff, and so many others “taken” by this hoax. Did they ever emotionally break down to the point of needing to step out of a room because Hillary Clinton’s minions used them to perpetrate a massive hoax essentially depicting the Republican nominee as a human Trojan Horse for the Russians?
Durham’s report charges that a “lack of analytical rigor, apparent confirmation bias, and an over-willingness 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. Although recognizing that in hindsight much is clearer, much of this also seems to have been clear at the time.”
John Durham failed to give voters justice. He did give to history the truth.
READ ANOTHER PERSPECTIVE:
Does John Durham’s ‘Strongly Worded Letter’ Make You Feel Better?
