Senate Democrats announced that they will begin an inquiry into the investigation by Special Council John Durham of the origins of the Russiagate investigation by the Department of Justice.
The probe is a direct result of an article in the New York Times that accused Durham of “misconduct.” Senate Judiciary Chairman Dick Durbin says that Durham allegedly committed “outrageous” abuses.
“These reports about abuses in Special Counsel Durham’s investigation — so outrageous that even his longtime colleagues quit in protest — are but one of many instances where former President Trump and his allies weaponized the Justice Department,” Durbin said in a statement Monday.
It should be pointed out that lawyers also left Robert Mueller’s investigation, and FBI investigator Peter Strzok was fired for gross anti-Trump bias after partisan texts were uncovered disparaging the former president.
“The Justice Department should work on behalf of the American people, not for the personal benefit of any president,” Durbin added. “As we wait for the results of ongoing internal reviews, the Senate Judiciary Committee will do its part and take a hard look at these repeated episodes, and the regulations and policies that enabled them, to ensure such abuses of power cannot happen again.”
Clever framing by Durbin as he claims that “abuses of power” happened even before the investigation takes place.
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But the New York Times outdid itself in publishing a partisan hit piece on Durham.
The story prompted some skepticism. The Federalist’s Margot Cleveland outlined six reasons why she believes the New York Times “launched a preemptive assault” in anticipation of Durham’s special counsel report. Chuck Ross, an investigative reporter for The Washington Free Beacon, surmised the “flimsy” New York Times story will empower Democrats to give Attorney General Merrick Garland an “excuse to block Durham’s report, or frame it negatively for the media if it’s released.”
So far, Durham has secured one guilty plea: that of former FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith, who was accused of falsifying a document in efforts to renew the authority to conduct FISA surveillance on onetime Trump campaign foreign policy adviser Carter Page. Clinesmith was spared prison time and faced a one-year bar suspension. This year, Durham endured setbacks when prosecutions against former Hillary Clinton campaign attorney Michael Sussmann and Igor Danchenko, a key source for British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s anti-Trump dossier, ended in acquittal in Washington, D.C., and Northern Virginia, respectively.
The deck was stacked against Durham from the outset. Anything that might have indicated wrongdoing by the intelligence agencies or the Department of Justice would have been shredded or deleted long before Durham began his probe. We’ll never get to the bottom of why a dossier on Trump — manufactured by a Democratic consulting company — containing the most ridiculous, the most outrageous accusations against him were used as evidence to get a FISA intelligence warrant on Trump employee Carter Page.
Durham did the best he could, but without any political pressure on the witnesses, it proved an uphill climb to find anything prosecutable that would hold up in court.
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