John Durham fails bigtime but confirms Donald Trump lied about Russiagate

[Nevilledog]

Link to tweet

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/10/john-durham-fails-bigtime-but-confirms-donald-trump-lied-about-russiagate/

John Durham, the federal prosecutor handpicked by then-Attorney General Bill Barr in 2019 to investigate the origins of the Trump-Russia investigation, flamed out this week, when he soundly lost another case in court, establishing an embarrassing 0-2 record in cases tried before juries. This verdict further discredited Durham’s crusade—much cheered on by Donald Trump and his cult following—to confirm Trump’s outlandish claim that the entire Russia scandal was a “hoax” mounted by the Deep State to sabotage him. After years of digging, Durham has failed to prove this baseless conspiracy theory advanced by Trump and his defenders to smother the narrative of Trump’s own treachery. Even worse for Trump, during this trial, Durham— intentionally or not—produced a bombshell confirming that Trump is a liar and that the proponents of the Russia hoax theory are hoaxers themselves. Few noticed.

Durham, who Barr secretly named as a special prosecutor weeks before the 2020 election, had been prosecuting Igor Danchenko—a US-based researcher who in 2016 supplied information to Christopher Steele that ended up in the so-called Steele dossier that assembled unconfirmed allegations related to Trump’s ties to Russia—for allegedly lying to FBI agents who had been investigating the dossier. It took the jury a little over a day of deliberation to find Danchenko not guilty on four counts on Tuesday. (The judge had previously tossed out one of the original five counts.)

This was a crushing defeat for Barr’s hitman—and for Trump. Yet after the first day of the trial last week, Trump defenders were enthused. Durham that day had called to the stand a senior FBI analyst named Brian Auten, who testified that the bureau had offered Steele “up to $1 million” to prove the charges in the collection of memos he had written for a research firm that was being paid by a lawyer working for the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic Party.

Ah-ha! screamed the right-wing media (Fox News, the National Review, the Washington Examiner, and others) at this revelation. But Auten noted that no such sum was ever paid because Steele, as we already knew, did not corroborate the material in his memos. And as was already known (as Michael Isikoff and I reported in Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin’s War on American and the Election of Donald Trump), the FBI did offer Steele a $50,000 contract in October 2016—after he had shared his memos with the bureau—if he would work with the bureau. But this contract, like the “up to $1 million” payment, never happened. (Auten testified that the giant reward would only have been paid out if Steele had been able to substantiate the information and if it had led to a successful prosecution.)

*snip*

[gratuitous]

1. Say, wouldn't now be a good time to de-classify the full Mueller Report?

And not just the portions cherry-picked by the former guy's corrupt administration?

[Hugh_Lebowski]

3. One would think! (nt)

[moniss]

4. A very astute

observation. The media at large have completely abandoned the call for the full report. Even reading the available version it is clear that many people knowingly and purposely obstructed justice by destroying e-mails etc. and evading accountability by using back-channels, encrypted apps and burner phones etc. Every single one of them should have had their name prominently exposed and be prosecuted.

[Botany]

2. Durham's job was to muddy the waters so as to give the right wing talking points that the Steele ...

... Dossier wasn't true and to deflect from the proven story that Putin's Alfa Bank's server had >2,000
contacts with one of the Trump Campaign's server in Lititz, PA from April to Oct 2016.

And in both cases he was very successful.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/15/was-there-a-connection-between-a-russian-bank-and-the-trump-campaign

[GenXer47]

5. the porcupine that lives on his face

thinks it's juvenile to pee on a bed.

[UTUSN]

6. K&R