The Durham probe is officially a flop

Nothingburger Central.

John Durham was the one who was going to blow the lid off the massive conspiracy that was the FBI’s counterintelligence probe into Russia’s involvement in the 2016 election.

“Hats off, because, it’s coming out, and it is coming out at a level – Durham has come out with things that are absolutely amazing,” former president Donald Trump said in November 2021. “We all sort of knew that happened, and now we have facts, and I think they’re only going to get deeper and deeper – and it all leads back to the Democrats, Hillary and the dirty lawyers.”

In early 2022, Trump went even further:

“It looks like this is just the beginning, because, if you read the filing and have any understanding of what took place, and I called this a long time ago, you’re going to see a lot of other things happening, having to do with what, really, just is a continuation of the crime of the century. This is such a big event, nobody’s seen anything like this.”

Crime of the century!

We are now almost four years into the Durham probe — he was appointed to the job in May 2019 and formally made a special counsel in December 2020 — and it’s not clear when it will wrap up.

But, according to an absolute blockbuster story in the New York Times on Thursday, the probe has already failed — and failed badly.

These three paragraphs from the Times story are utterly devastating — not just for Durham but for former Attorney General Bill Barr as well:

Egged on by Mr. Trump, Attorney General William P. Barr set out in 2019 to dig into their shared theory that the Russia investigation likely stemmed from a conspiracy by intelligence or law enforcement agencies. To lead the inquiry, Mr. Barr turned to a hard-nosed prosecutor named John H. Durham, and later granted him special counsel status to carry on after Mr. Trump left office.

But after almost four years — far longer than the Russia investigation itself — Mr. Durham’s work is coming to an end without uncovering anything like the deep state plot alleged by Mr. Trump and suspected by Mr. Barr.

Moreover, a months-long review by The New York Times found that the main thrust of the Durham inquiry was marked by some of the very same flaws — including a strained justification for opening it and its role in fueling partisan conspiracy theories that would never be charged in court — that Trump allies claim characterized the Russia investigation.

Oomph.

For people following the probe closely, this shouldn’t come totally out of the blue. There have been signs that the Durham probe was struggling for some time now.

In the first trial of the Durham probe in May 2022, Michael Sussman, a lawyer for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, was found not guilty of lying to the FBI in passing along a tip about Donald Trump and Russia.

As CNN reported at the time: “The verdict is a major defeat for Durham and his Justice Department prosecutors, who have spent three years looking for wrongdoing in the Trump-Russia probe.”

Then last fall, Durham brought his 2nd case to trial — charging Igor Danchenko, a Russian expat, with four counts of lying to the FBI about the infamous Trump-Russia dossier.

Danchenko, like Sussman before him, was acquitted.

Again, CNN: “In both cases, the defense argued that Durham was a prosecutor run amok, who cherry-picked facts, bullied witnesses and tried to concoct an anti-Trump conspiracy where none existed.”

So, like I said, Durham had not exactly been covering himself in glory up to this point. Not even close.

But the Times story goes deeper — and suggests that the Durham probe is more than just ineffective.

My biggest “wow” from the Times story was how closely Barr followed the minute details of what Durham was doing.

This paragraph in particular:

While attorneys general overseeing politically sensitive inquiries tend to keep their distance from the investigators, Mr. Durham visited Mr. Barr in his office for at times weekly updates and consultations about his day-to-day work. They also sometimes dined and sipped Scotch together, people familiar with their work said.

And this one too:

Mr. Barr and Mr. Durham traveled abroad together to press British and Italian officials to reveal everything their agencies had gleaned about the Trump campaign and relayed to the United States, but both allied governments denied they had done any such thing. Top British intelligence officials expressed indignation to their U.S. counterparts about the accusation, three former U.S. officials said.

This seems to go against the whole notion of a special counsel. The whole point of the attorney general naming one — as Merrick Garland has in both the Donald Trump and Joe Biden classified documents investigations — is to provide a level of independence from the Justice Department, to avoid the appearance of impropriety or bias.

But in Barr’s case, he appeared to be directly leaning on Durham — pressuring him to find what turned out to be a nonexistent conspiracy theory about the origins of the 2016 Russian meddling.

Then there’s this: During one of their trips to Europe together, Barr and Durham were told by Italian officials of possible financial crimes committed by Trump. Rather than hand that off to another investigator, Barr had Durham look into it — even though it was nowhere close to the remit of his special counsel appointment.

As the Times wrote:

Mr. Durham never filed charges, and it remains unclear what level of an investigation it was, what steps he took, what he learned and whether anyone at the White House ever found out. The extraordinary fact that Mr. Durham opened a criminal investigation that included scrutinizing Mr. Trump has remained secret.

In fact, it was worse than that. The news that Durham’s probe now included a criminal component wound up leaking out. But, the assumption was — again because Durham was tasked with investigating the origins of the 2016 FBI probe into Russia not looking into Trump— that the criminal probe was tied to wrongdoing on that front. Neither Barr nor Durham saw fit to correct the record that the criminal investigation had to do with Trump.

Like, what?

There’s more in the story — including how Durham came to rely on Russian-produced memos of alleged hacks of Americans that made claims about, among other things, how then Attorney General Loretta Lynch was going to shut down the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails.

You really should read the whole story. It is a stunner — exposing just how off the rails the Durham probe has gone, with a major assist from Barr.

And it makes clear that the Durham report — whenever it come — is likely to be filled with sound and fury, signifying nothing.