by Emerald Robinson at Emerald Robinson’s The Right Way
Do you remember when Bill Barr told you that John Durham was conducting an investigation and you actually believed it? That seems so long ago that it might as well be an ice age — you know, that bygone era when the credibility of our federal law enforcement agencies still existed. My calendar disagreed with my feelings though. It was only 13 months ago that the much-hyped investigation into Spygate finally became absurd when Attorney General Bill Barr let it be known that his special agent John Durham would not be able to finish his alleged investigation (subsequently downgraded very slyly to a book report) before the 2020 election. No indictments! No prosecutions! No kidding! This news landed like a grenade among Trump supporters who had been promised that heads would roll every night for two years on conservative cable news.
The entire thing had been a ruse: a sham investigation to cover up the most extraordinary conspiracy in American history. President Trump himself was incredulous. He called in to Rush Limbaugh’s radio the very same day the news broke and proceeded to blast Bill Barr and the DOJ to an audience of about 50 million listeners. “It’s a disgrace” and “an embarrassment” the President said, almost in disbelief. Then he offered this summary judgment on his own federal law enforcement officials: “we don’t have people who can do anything.”
The day before, in another interview, President Trump had been even more specific about Durham’s sham investigation. “It’s 24 years of putting radical liberals in there [the DOJ] and also Trump haters. They put Bush people in there. Frankly the Bush people, some of these losers who used to work for Bush, are worse than the Obama people.” The President of the United States let it be known that the FBI and the DOJ were covering for corrupt people like the Clintons. ”If we lose this election, it all goes away” he said finally. Did he mean the Durham investigation or the concept of equal justice in America? Maybe both.
Why did Bill Barr fail to clean house at the DOJ? Why did he fail to release the documents that Trump had fully declassified? Barr was protecting the institutions under his control rather than providing the accountability he had promised publicly so often. He had passed on prosecuting Comey and McCabe and plenty of other FBI bosses. He had kept Bruce Ohr gainfully employed at the DOJ right up until the end. At least fourteen criminal referrals from Devin Nunes and Chuck Grassley and IG Horowitz were ignored. Had Barr come out of retirement to investigate Spygate or whitewash it? The man who had said all the right things in public about the rule of law had done nothing to enforce it among his own employees.
Why had so many people invested their faith in the investigators investigating themselves in the first place? What had Durham’s team actually been doing for two years? It looked like Durham had picked mostly retired agents and Democrats to staff his investigation — with a budget that was tiny compared to the Mueller team. He was moving at a glacial pace too. This did not seem fatal at the time because a cavalcade of conservative media types kept assuring their audiences that they had “sources at the DOJ” and “that Durham was bringing indictments soon.” That never happened. Those folks obviously got played by their sources.
People ask me all the time how I knew the Durham investigation was a sham before anyone else. (I posted on Twitter in the summer of 2020 that Barr and Durham would do nothing on multiple occasions.) I always tell them: because I didn’t have any sources at the Department of Justice. That turned out to be a significant advantage. The most important pictures that you will ever see explaining how the FBI actually works are two leak charts contained in the Inspector General’s report. They map out “the volume of communications identified between FBI employees and members of the media in April, May, and October 2016” as The Federalist put it. The IG admitted that too many people at the FBI spend their days illegally leaking to the media to even locate the individual leakers there…
Continue Reading