THE DURHAM REPORT
It’s easy to be jaded and think nothing will come of it BUT Jeff Childers has a different opinion
………….
In the most remarkable news of the year, the Washington Examiner ran a story yesterday headlined, “Durham Report: FBI and DOJ Had No Proper Basis to Launch Trump-Russia Investigation.”
At long last, and well before the 2024 presidential campaign gets going, so nobody can accuse him of manipulating the politics, special counsel John Durham issued his final report on the Russia Collusion hoax yesterday. It clocks in at novel length, 306 pages.
Here’s the unsurprising, but official, conclusion:
“Based on the evidence gathered in the multiple exhaustive and costly investigations of these matters, neither U.S. law enforcement nor the Intelligence Community appears to have possessed any actual evidence of collusion in their holdings at the commencement of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation.”
They never had any evidence, and they never found any evidence, either.
Mr. Durham’s report described how, from the summer of 2016, the FBI was already completely aware that the Clinton campaign planned “to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security services.” They did nothing about it, except wait for their chance to leap in and help out, once Team Clinton delivered their 100% false dossier.
The report also described how the FBI handled similar Clinton-related controversies completely differently:
“The speed and manner in which the FBI opened and investigated Crossfire Hurricane during the presidential election season based on raw, unanalyzed, and uncorroborated intelligence also reflected a noticeable departure from how it approached prior matters involving possible attempted foreign election interference plans aimed at the Clinton campaign.”
“Unlike the FBI’s opening of a full investigation of unknown members of the Trump campaign based on raw, uncorroborated information, in this separate matter involving a purported Clinton campaign plan, the FBI never opened any type of inquiry, issued any taskings, employed any analytical personnel, or produced any analytical products in connection with the information. This lack of action was despite the fact that the significance of the Clinton plan intelligence was such as to have prompted the Director of the CIA to brief the President, Vice President, Attorney General, Director of the FBI, and other senior government officials about its content within days of its receipt.”
Disappointingly, Durham did not issue any new criminal charges. It’s possible Durham might have been a smidge discouraged after the first three individuals Durham charged were found ‘not guilty’ by DC juries.
The report is only beginning to take off. Republican House investigators are already on it:
And the FBI, which by all accounts looks predictably terrible in Durham’s report, promptly issued a statement yesterday saying, don’t worry, they already fixed all the problems, you can totally trust them:
Whew, I’m glad that’s been handled, and now we don’t have to worry about the FBI.
There are hot takes all over the place expressing every possible opinion, but there were signs that even the left realizes the Durham report will be a problem. Yesterday, CNN anchor Jake Tapper surprisingly called Durham’s report “devastating” to the FBI and even grudgingly admitted it exonerates Trump, albeit “to a degree.”
https://twitter.com/Breaking911/status/1658206330157408273?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
Representative Matt Gaetz hilariously called the FBI a “disinformation agency,” and vowed the report is “an insufficient consequence:”
On Fox yesterday, the Federalist’s CEO Sean Davis even called the FBI “a domestic terror organization” that “perpetrated a hoax directed at conning and gaslighting the American people.” He explained, “I have a hard time looking at this [Durham report] and coming to any other conclusion than that the FBI has to be defunded, because this wasn’t one or two rogue agents. This happened from the very top.”
https://twitter.com/FDRLST/status/1658275888721457153?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
So far, with most of us not yet having read the dense, 300+ page government document, the ultimate significance of the report’s conclusions aren’t immediately visible.
But one thing is certain: a politically-weaponized FBI helped Hilary Clinton interfere with the 2020 election, directly or indirectly.
And we all know — from January 6th — how bad interfering with an election is. It’s an insurrection. It’s seditious. And what we know of the Durham report so far is 100 times worse than January 6th, maybe 1,000 times worse.
There are lots of good federal investigations and prosecutions happening that nobody ever hears about. For instance, an opposing lawyer in one of my most difficult cases was recently arrested and charged for child porn trafficking — including very young children (under 5). The arrest was handled very skillfully, because the lawyer headed his firm’s child exploitation group and could’ve argued that the materials on his computer were just work product. They had to catch him in the act.
FBI agents did catch him in the act, with perfect timing, and it was a great job. Those honest, capable law enforcement agents should be valued and rewarded. But the politicized FBI is a gigantic problem, and it raises legitimate questions about whether the FBI should be broken up and reassigned back to the States.
Many frustrated and repeatedly-disappointed folks will predict “nothing is going to happen,” which is what the left and its corporate media would certainly prefer. But it’s way too soon to conclude anything like that. The significance of the Durham report is that it provides an official government determination of whatever everyone has known for years, but couldn’t “prove.”
The key is, the “proving” part is now over. The left can no longer rely on the old “no evidence” gag. My guess is the report is going to grow a LOT of legs, like a political centipede, and it will run in all kinds of surprising directions. For just one example, we can start untangling the web of democrat lies over the last four years, where they’ve claimed that any questions about the legitimacy of the election were “conspiracy theories” or “disinformation.”
It turns out THEY were the conspiracy theorists and the disinformers.
We will patiently wait for a strong conservative legislative response, as the proper next step in the “correct” process of addressing these problems. And I will continue to report as this critically-important story develops. But I promise you this: if the Republicans don’t take up the flag and run with it, then we will do it ourselves. You can take that to the bank.
(Just not Silicon Valley Bank.)