Trump's Justice Department Goons Oversaw an Actual Witch Hunt While He Screamed About One

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

Sorry, but even in this age of goldfish-brain news cycles, we cannot allow a certain development from last week to just fade into obscurity. You may remember that Donald Trump, American president, loved to say the investigation into whether his campaign coordinated with Russia's effort to influence the 2016 election was a "witch hunt" pursued by shadowy bureaucrats with an ax to grind. In his telling, that investigation was opened for political reasons, without justification, and that's why it dragged on forever and ultimately concluded with Special Counsel Robert Mueller declaring "NO COLLUSION!" and shooting off a bunch of confetti like a gender reveal. It was such an egregious violation that it required a counter-investigation overseen by Trump's attorney general, Bill Barr, and his hand-picked hard-nosed prosecutor, John Durham. They would find justice.

Well, the counter-investigation was everything he said about the Russia investigation, as a fantastic report from the New York Times laid out last week. The former took way longer than the latter and failed to uncover anything they said it would. But more than that, it was an actual witch hunt. By the summer of 2020, it was clear Durham had failed, and the Justice Department inspector general published a report that found no evidence the FBI was politically motivated in 2016. But Trump was absolutely losing it on Fox News, floating that Obama and Biden would be indicted for their offenses against him—"the single biggest political crime in the history of our country"—and the only way they wouldn't be was if his two pet prosecutors, Barr and Durham, decided to be "politically correct." (God forbid!) Enter the Times:

Against that backdrop, Mr. Barr and Mr. Durham did not shut down their inquiry when the search for intelligence abuses hit a dead end. With the inspector general’s inquiry complete, they turned to a new rationale: a hunt for a basis to accuse the Clinton campaign of conspiring to defraud the government by manufacturing the suspicions that the Trump campaign had colluded with Russia, along with scrutinizing what the F.B.I. and intelligence officials knew about the Clinton campaign’s actions.

So having failed to produce the goods in time to give Trump some political ammunition for the 2020 election, they just kept the investigation going with an entirely new focus? They came up with nothing, so they started to work the name "Clinton" in there? How is that even the same investigation? It isn't, except for one crucial respect: It continued as a vehicle for Trump's shadowy accusations against his political opponents. As long as the investigation was "ongoing," he had extra salt on his claims that anyone caught up in it was disgustingly corrupt. In this respect, it's a lot like the Ukraine extortion that got Trump impeached the first time: He just wanted Zelenskyy to announce Ukraine was opening an investigation into the Bidens. The subtext, of course, was that Trump would do the rest.

https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/trumps-justice-department-goons-oversaw-150000414.html

[democrank]

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