The Russian researcher who was the primary source for a 2016 dossier that alleged former President Donald Trump had ties to Russia was found not guilty of lying to the FBI about the sources of his information. Igor Danchenko’s acquittal was a blow to Special Counsel John Durham who was appointed by former Attorney General William Barr to review the FBI’s investigation into whether Trump’s campaign had colluded with Russia. Trump had predicted Durham would uncover “the crime of the century” inside the FBI. But as Straight Arrow News contributor Ben Weingarten argues, the question is whether the government investigators were dupes or colluders in trying to bring down Trump.

The John Durham special counsel just lost its case against Igor Danchenko, the man behind the dirty Steele dossier behind the Deep State’s endless pursuit of a Trump-Russia collusion conspiracy theory that sabotaged much of his presidency and ruined countless lives.

All indications are that Durham is done prosecuting people, and that all that’s left is for him to issue a report and go home.

So what’s the special counsel’s legacy? Was it a failure, as Russian collusion-mongers, and those who hung on the special counsel’s every word hoping against hope he would bring the Deep State’s Russian collusionistas to justice, alike, might argue?

Let’s review what’s transpired.

Durham brought three cases against bit players in the scandal: 

The first was Kevin Clinesmith, an FBI attorney accused of doctoring an email wrongly used to spy on the Trump campaign, foisting a fraud on the FISA court. He pled guilty to one count of making a false statement, and never went to jail.

The second was Michael Sussmann, a Clinton campaign lawyer and former DOJ official accused of lying on several occasions about who he was representing when he brought Trump-Russia dirt to various national security agencies, including the FBI – lies Durham argued deceived the FBI and poisoned their investigations. A true jury of his peers let him off the hook, acquitted on all charges despite ample evidence of his guilt.

The third was Danchenko, recently acquitted on all charges he had provided false statements to the FBI about various aspects of the Steele dossier – a document the FBI’s top analyst couldn’t corroborate any aspects of yet relied on to pursue Trump.

So the cases touched, barely on the government, more-so on the Clinton campaign, and relatedly, an asset of the Clinton campaign who became an asset of the FBI.

We’ve covered at length at Straight Arrow News that Durham used these cases to reveal the information operation the Clinton campaign ran to present Trump as a Russian traitor, how they flooded the federal government from a million directions with their fake evidence, and then how the federal government at every turn engaged in willful blindness – recklessly pursuing the Russian collusion theory despite a trillion red flags indicating its origins were poisonous, and that it was consuming not only the fruit of a poisonous tree, but a poisonous forest.

The takeaways for close observers being it was hellbent on getting Trump at any and all costs – truth be damned.

The Danchenko case was no different.

Among other things, as the peerless TechnoFog has rounded up, the Danchenko case revealed:

• The FBI made Danchenko an informant after it knew he was lying to it, paying him over $200k during the Trump presidency – paying him to shut up, while shielding him, a shoddy source, from scrutiny, and therefore the FBI/DOJ pursuers of Russiagate from scrutiny.
• The FBI offered his boss Christopher Steele up to a million dollars to prove allegations of the dossier in an October 2016 meeting, and he refused.
• The FBI covered its eyes and ears to various aspects of Danchenko’s past that would’ve likely made him unfit for selection as an informant – including that he was the target of an espionage case years earlier.
• “The Mueller Special Counsel had FBI Agents and Analysts investigating the Steele Dossier – but purposefully limited the scope of that inquiry, making sure…information damning to their investigation would not be uncovered.”

The question at the end of the day was whether the government, led by the FBI and DOJ, were dupes, or willing colluders in the Clinton campaign’s effort to destroy Trump.

Because of the cases that Durham brought against outside actors, he presented the government as the dupes, rather than co-conspirators.

Recall that in the Sussmann case, one Durham prosecutor said in court that:

We are here because the FBI is our institution. It should not be used as a political tool for anyone – not Republicans. Not Democrats. Not anyone.

Durham, speaking at the end of the Danchenko trial, seemed to show some growth in his public posture – perhaps because the trial, in which FBI officials testified, exposed the depths of Deep State malpractice.

Durham said “the FBI failed here,” that it “mishandled the investigation,” and that agents “didn’t do what they should have done.”

He opined that the FBI could have been “simply incompetent” or that it had been “working in coordination” – presumably with the Clinton campaign.

He and his team should know the truth, and we deserve to know the truth too.

We’ll reserve judgment until we see a final report – which should detail the scope of his investigation, who it pursued, what leads it followed, what they revealed and why, if it failed to bring charges against all the Deep State officials that we already know have been implicated in wrongdoing from just the three cases he brought – it didn’t bring them to justice.