As The Washington Pundit and UncoverDC were some of the first to point out, the Durham Investigation was nothing more than The Mirage of Accountability. This became even more evident when Special Counsel John Durham recently testified before the House Judiciary Committee. Representatives Thomas Massie (R-KY) and Matt Gaetz (R-FL) took Durham to task during the hearing—calling him out for his halfhearted investigation.
It was perfectly encapsulated when Durham stated, “That was not something that we were asked to look [at]” when asked about illicit acts by the Mueller Special Counsel Team. Rep. Gaetz reacted in bewilderment and shot back, “That is not true, Mr. Durham … because I am holding the document that authorizes your activity, and it specifically says ‘the Investigation of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’”.
Durham Scope Memo
The “charging document” referenced by Rep. Gaetz was the Order (commonly referred to as a “scope memo”) issued by Attorney General Bill Barr to appoint John Durham as Special Counsel and detail the matters to be investigated.
To understand the degree to which Durham failed to investigate the events of “Spygate” meaningfully, it is useful to look at the original scope laid out in the memo and compare it to the Durham Team’s interpretation of their assigned tasks as detailed at the beginning of their final report (i.e., “The Durham Report“).
First, allow us to dissect the full range of matters Durham was supposed to investigate presented in the scope memo.
“The Special Counsel is authorized to investigate whether any federal official, employee, or any other person or entity violated the law.”
Durham was not only tasked with investigating any federal official/employee. He was, in fact, authorized to investigate “any other person or entity” he found participated in the conspiracy—inside of government or not.
“[I]n connection with the intelligence, counter-intelligence, or law-enforcement activities.”
Durham was not limited to looking into strictly law-enforcement investigations but also all intelligence and counter-intelligence activities. Please note also that it does not say “of the United States government.” So the activities of individuals and entities—be they private or connected to foreign governments—would also fall within his scope.
“[D]irected at the 2016 presidential campaigns, individuals associated with those campaigns.“
Notice that it says campaigns—plural. So activities related to the 2016 presidential campaign of Secretary Hillary Clinton were every bit as much within his scope as that of President Donald Trump.
“[A]nd individuals associated with the administration of President Donald J. Trump“
Durham was specifically authorized to investigate intelligence, counter-intelligence, or law-enforcement activities of anyone who worked in the Trump administration (i.e., any Executive Branch official or employee for the entirety of President Trump’s term in office).
“[I]ncluding but not limited to Crossfire Hurricane and the investigation of Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller, III.”
While the charging document specifically tasked Durham to look into the activities of the FBI’s ‘Crossfire Hurricane’ and the Special Counsel investigation of Robert Mueller by name, it made it clear Durham was not expected to limit himself to those investigations.
“If the Special Counsel [Durham] believes it is necessary and appropriate, the Special Counsel is authorized to prosecute federal crimes arising from his investigation of these matters.”
So Durham was free—and expected—to follow the facts wherever they might lead, and given the full force of the U.S. Dept. of Justice (DOJ) to bring criminal charges for any wrongdoing uncovered.
Durham’s mandate was fairly broad—even by Special Counsel standards. After all, Special Counsels are notorious for shooting off in different directions—far beyond their original intended purpose. For example, look no further than the Ken Starr Special Counsel Investigation into President Bill Clinton—which started out looking at land deals in Arkansas and wound up examining bodily fluid stains on blue dresses.
The Durham Report
Now that we have an understanding of what Durham was supposed to investigate, let us turn and examine what he actually did investigate. While we could certainly do a point-by-point breakdown of all 316 pages of The Durham Report—to show where Durham failed to carry out his mandate—that really isn’t necessary. By looking at the first few pages, where the Durham Team spells out their interpretation of their assignment and self-imposed limitations, it becomes apparent they never intended to conduct a serious investigation.
The first indication is right in the opening paragraph of the cover letter.
“[B]ut contains no classified information based on thorough, coordinated reviews of the information contained therein by the appropriate authorities within the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Agency.”
Durham signals not to expect too much in the way of new, embarrassing information to be revealed due to “thorough, coordinated reviews” by the FBI, CIA, & NSA to ensure no classified information wound up in the public section of the report. Effectively, the Deep State got veto power over the most damaging information disclosed to the public through their notorious over-classification practices.
To understand the depth Durham went to avoid doing his job, one only needs to go to Footnote 7 at the bottom of Page 2 of the report. Again, we will dissect the footnote to demonstrate how Durham completely eviscerates his assigned duties from the onset.
“We have not interpreted the Order as directing us to investigate the Department’s handling of matters associated with the investigation of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server.”
Right off the bat, Durham states he has no intention of looking into the DOJ’s handling of the Clinton private email server investigation. Durham was explicitly tasked with investigating “law-enforcement activities directed at the 2016 presidential campaigns”. That would certainly include the Clinton classified email investigation. This was the entire reason the Trump-Russia Collusion Hoax was concocted in the first place—both to distract the public’s attention from Clinton’s mishandling of classified information and assist the FBI in covering it up. It is simply inconceivable any serious effort to investigate Spygate could be done without looking into the FBI/DOJ’s handling of the Clinton email investigation.
“For a review of those matters, see Office of the Inspector General, U.S. Department of Justice, ‘A Review of Various Actions by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Department of Justice in Advance of the 2016 Election’ (June 2018).”
In order to justify this glaring omission, Durham instead points to a previous report prepared by Michael Horowitz and the DOJ’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) in June 2018. Let’s not forget Durham was asked to begin his investigation into these matters in May 2019 while still U.S. Attorney for Connecticut. This following a review by the newly appointed Attorney General (Bill Barr) into issues with those investigations—nearly a year after IG Horowitz issued his report. So the OIG report clearly was not considered sufficient at the time of Durham’s original appointment.
We must also point out that OIG is not a criminal investigative agency. OIG is a creation of Congress that acts as a fact-finding organization to assist Congress in its constitutional oversight role. OIG does not even have subpoena power to compel former or non-government employees to submit to questioning. By punting the Clinton email investigation to OIG, Durham has now ensured there will never be any meaningful review of that investigation by any law enforcement agency.
“We also have not interpreted the Order as directing us to consider the handling of the investigation into President Trump opened by the FBI on May 16, 2017. See FBI EC from Counter-intelligence, Re: [Redacted] Foreign Agents Registration Act – Russia; Sensitive Investigative Matter (May 16, 2017). (The following day, the Deputy Attorney General appointed Special Counsel Mueller “to investigate Russian interference with the 2016 presidential election and related matters.” See I Mueller Report at 11-12 (describing the authorities given to Special Counsel Mueller).”
This is the most bewildering passage in the entire Durham Report. It’s hard to fathom how they could bring themselves to put it down on paper, and this is what most stunned Rep. Gaetz in the hearing. The Durham Team actually said they interpreted the order as not directing them to investigate the actions of the Mueller Special Counsel Investigation, even though it says precisely the exact opposite.
Maybe Durham re-employed disgraced FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith, and he slipped another “Not” into the report when Durham wasn’t looking.
Perhaps Durham doesn’t “English too good.” Here, we will post it again with a nice bright yellow highlight. Maybe Durham can find someone to read it back to him.
… but we digress.
“Finally, we have not interpreted the Order as directing us to consider matters addressed by the former United States Attorney for the District of Utah.”
Durham goes on to state he did not consider matters looked into by prior U.S. Attorney investigations. Here Durham specifically excludes any matter investigated by John Huber—the now-former U.S. Attorney for Utah. Huber was originally tasked with looking into the FBI & DOJ’s handling of investigations into Trump campaign volunteer Carter Page and the Uranium One Deal involving Secretary Hillary Clinton by Attorney General Jeff Sessions in 2017. To our knowledge, Huber never brought any charges or issued his own report.
This, again, makes no sense. As stated before, the primary motive behind AG Barr’s appointment of Durham was that he had found prior DOJ investigations into Spygate to be lacking and wanted a re-review of the evidence. Around the time of Durham’s appointment as Special Counsel, it had been reported that he had “assumed parts of John Huber’s Clinton Foundation review,” but apparently, that was never the case.
“[O]r by the former United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri, other than those relating to Crossfire Hurricane or the FISA applications targeting Carter Page. For accounts of these matters in the news media, see … ‘Barr Installs Outside Prosecutor to Review Case Against Michael Flynn, Ex-Trump Adviser’”
Durham also declined to re-review some matters investigated by Jeff Jensen—the now former U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri. Specifically, Jensen’s re-examination of the political persecution of Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn (Ret.). Durham instead directs readers of the report to a February 2020 New York Times article—penned by Deep State shills Charlie Savage, Adam Goldman, & Matt Apuzzo—revealing Jensen’s assignment by AG Barr. Like the Huber investigation, Jensen never brought any charges or issued a public report.
It is hard to overstate how disappointing it is Durham refused to go into the Gen. Flynn investigation. After all, this was the proverbial “smoking gun” of the entire Spygate debacle. Evidence found during Gen. Flynn’s trial on charges of Making False Statements to Federal Investigators (18 U.S. Code § 1001) is what uncovered handwritten notes from FBI Asst. Director of Counter-intelligence Bill Priestap, during a meeting of the FBI National Security Division (NSD) on Jan 24, 2017, where he asked:
“What’s our goal? Truth/Admission or to get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired?”
It is also what led to FBI Special Agent Peter Strzok’s bombshell handwritten notes of the infamous Jan 4, 2017, Oval Office meeting detailing President Barack Obama plotting with his senior national security team to set up and frame President-Elect Trump and his incoming National Security Advisor. And the same meeting where Vice President Joe Biden first suggested using the “Logan Act.”
This, however, is only half the story of the Gen. Flynn persecution. There is also the bogus case of alleged FARA “violations” related to the Flynn Intel Group brought by the Mueller Investigation that is inexplicably still ongoing to this day—and has two innocent men (Bijan Kian and Ekim Alptekin) still facing decades in federal prison. Durham felt no need to seek justice on their behalf.
The final piece of The Durham Report we will examine is a paragraph on Page 3 where the Durham Team details all the investigative powers exercised throughout the four-year investigation. They looked at one million documents, six million pages, conducted 480 interviews, even made a request from one foreign government, blah blah blah.
Ironically, this was done to lead the reader to believe the team really did a lot of good work. Well, is that true? The metric that jumped out at us was the number of executed search warrants: seven. Throughout the four-year-long Durham Investigation, they executed a grand total of seven search warrants.
Our own reporting shows that the Mueller Special Counsel Investigation executed more than seven search warrants related to Gen. Flynn … alone. Here Durham had a much more expansive mandate, on a broader scale, into crimes that actually occurred—unlike Mueller—and he executed seven search warrants total over four years. It’s a joke.
Durham Postmortem
That begs the question: “Exactly what has Durham been doing this entire time?”
For comparison, let’s look at the most analogous example—the Watergate Investigation. The entirety of Watergate—break-in to trials—took roughly two and a half years. In that time, there were 69 indictments with 48 convictions, including a former and the current Attorney General of the United States, the White House Chief of Staff, the White House Counsel, and a slew of other White House officials.
And keep in mind; this was back before the time of electronic records—when you had to get your hands on paper documents or get witnesses to roll on each other. Nowadays, you can issue a subpoena or search warrant to instantly obtain nearly all a suspect’s communications and financial transactions. So theoretically, it should be a lot easier to put together a criminal case.
By contrast—with a year and a half more to work with—Durham only managed to bring three indictments with one guilty plea and two acquittals. The guilty plea (Clinesmith) resulted in one year of probation and a $100 fine. Nobody will ever serve a day in jail.
This is despite Durham having the full power of the Attorney General and DOJ at his disposal, given his appointment as Special Counsel. And Durham cannot use the excuse that he could only bring cases in Washington D.C. (DDC) or the Eastern District of Virginia (EDVA). As the recent Trump Indictment by Jack Smith has demonstrated, Special Counsels are free to bring indictments in any jurisdiction they find possible criminal acts.
Given the breadth of the Spygate Scandal, surely Durham could have found crimes to be charged outside of Trump-hating districts. One example that comes to mind is that much of the Alfa Bank Hoax was run out of entities connected to Georgia Tech. Could Durham not have found charges to bring in the Middle District of Georgia (MDGA), where he was much more likely to obtain convictions?
The truth is Durham didn’t even try.
There were reports by John Solomon and others that Durham was dramatically increasing the scope of his investigation in the lead-up to the 2020 presidential election. Now that we finally have his report, it seems that was never the case. He was drastically limiting the scope of his investigation from the onset.
It was a coverup.
Durham’s True History
Given his reputation, there was a great deal of excitement following the release of the scope memo following Durham’s appointment as Special Counsel. There was also a tremendous shock when it became apparent he was going to do little to nothing to hold the perpetrators of Spygate accountable. But this outcome wouldn’t have been surprising if people understood his true history.
Durham had developed a reputation as a dogged, non-partisan government corruption fighter because of his three prior stints as a DOJ “special investigator.” He was appointed by AG Janet Reno to look into the Whitey Bulgar Scandal in Boston and matters related to the CIA by both AG’s Michael Mukasey and Eric Holder. However, when you dig into the details of those investigations, you find that reputation is not warranted.
In the Whitey Bulgar case, that scandal was already public and spiraling out of control before Durham got involved. In the end, Durham only whacked a few low-level FBI officials with charges but protected the high-ranking DOJ officials implicated—including the Acting U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts at the time, Robert S. Mueller.
In the CIA cases, Durham didn’t charge anybody in either investigation. And during his time investigating those cases, he had John Brennan directly in his crosshairs. As Obama’s CIA Director, Brennan got caught red-handed spying on the U.S. Senate. Durham could have brought charges but allowed Brennan to walk without consequence.
The truth is Durham is the DOJ’s “Mr. Fix-It.” He’s the guy sent in when a scandal is spiraling out of control to minimize the damage to the institutions and the high-level institutional players. This outcome isn’t a big surprise once you understand Durham’s real history. This is who he always was.
The art of being a coverup artist is making people believe you really did something—when in reality, you did nothing at all.
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