Durham report on alleged Trump-Russia collusion falls short

Special Counsel John Durham has released his long-awaited report into the origins of Russiagate and the subsequent investigations. The report is an indictment of our national security and law enforcement apparatus at its highest levels of our justice system, and also to a degree of the Special Counsel itself, corroborating much of what I’ve been arguing for months here at Straight Arrow News. 

Durham’s report lays out unequivocally that Trump-Russia collusion, which was used to de-legitimize, destabilize and destroy Donald Trump’s presidency — casting a pall over that presidency and subverting its efforts — was a farce from the very beginning. As the report notes, 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. 

Further, one of the chief errors from the start of the Crossfire Hurricane was the poor analysis the FBI brought to bear on the critical pieces of information that it had gathered, as well as an over-reliance on flawed or incomplete human intelligence that only later was found to be plainly unreliable. 

The report in fact lays out a bevy of items the FBI discounted or willfully ignored, constituting material information that did not support the narrative of a collusive relationship between Trump and Russia. The investigators covered their eyes and plugged their ears in the face of any and all exculpatory evidence and didn’t take obvious steps that would have removed all doubt, including interviewing implicated people. 

There’s line after line in the report showing middle-tier employees of the FBI wondering what it was their superiors knew that they didn’t about why they were pursuing pathetic unsupported leads. The informants and sources the FBI ran got virtually nothing for their efforts. Many of them were wholly dubious and discredited individuals. Even when the shoddiness of the idea that George Papadopoulis had the goods on Trump-Russia collusion, or Carter Page was a traitor at the heart of a Trump-Russia conspiracy, or that the Steele Dossier was the Holy Grail of the entire case was obvious that it was all garbage, the authorities pursued it in their pursuit of Trump, eviscerating the rights of those they used to try and get to him. 

Durham concludes “that the Department and the FBI failed to uphold their important mission of strict fidelity to the law in connection with certain events and activities described in this report.” Talk about an understatement. The second major takeaway is that almost no one is paid for what Durham shows is arguably a criminal conspiracy at the highest levels to make a criminal conspiracy case against political foes based on opposition research passed along by the dirtiest of tricksters, the Hillary Clinton campaign and its surrogates, and using the most awesome national security apparatus in history, and a winning media — all to invalidate the votes of tens  of millions of Americans and halt a genuine transfer of power. 

We the People got three lousy false statements cases, only one of them against the government official and a low level one at that, and a handful of referrals. The absolute best you can say is that Durham didn’t bring these cases, despite demonstrating in stark detail their merits, because he knew that a Deep State-aligned jury in DC or Virginia would never convict, as the false statement cases he brought illustrated. 

This should be unacceptable to the American people and calls into question whether such cases should be pulled out of these venues. The third major takeaway is that Durham’s own report seems to have been deficient. He let people who should have been compelled to interview skate, and omitted from his own report much that should have been pursued. Amazingly, he never spoke with some of the most significant participants in overseers of, or obfuscators about, this conspiracy. 

Here’s a non-complete list of people who declined to interview with Durham, yet he never subpoenaed or who it appears he never even considered asking to interview:  Peter Strzok, Bill Prestap, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Kevin Clinesmith, Rodney Joffee, Mard Elias, Glenn Simpson, Christopher Steele, Igor Danchenko. Last but not least, there’s Barack Obama himself, the Commander-in-Chief, who was overseeing all of these individuals in the national security apparatus and their co-conspirators when all of this was put into motion. 

What’s more, the Special Counsel did not probe the DNC hack central to the broader Russian interference charge linked to Trump-Russia collusion. He didn’t probe the Mueller Special Counsel, which itself should have known and almost certainly did know what Durham found from the start — that this whole thing was a baseless conspiracy theory, and the investigators did everything they could to avoid reaching that conclusion. 

He did not probe the mysterious Professor Joseph Massoud or other Clinton-linked dossiers  that circulated, or informants Stefan Halper’s dubious deeds at Cambridge, as far as we can tell. Every aspect of Russiagate from its origins to the closing of this report is a national disgrace, in effect, rewarding the systemic rot, corruption and weaponization of the very critical institutions in which we can least afford it. And as I’ve said from the start, because no one pays, it guarantees even more egregious scandals to come.