While he was collecting information about Trump and Russia, Steele worked with Fusion GPS, a Washington-based private investigation firm, which in turn had been hired by a law firm working with Clinton’s presidential campaign. The Steele dossier was not behind the FBI’s decision to open the Trump-Russia investigation, nor was it the basis for any allegations included in Mueller’s final report. Trump and Durham have tried to shift public attention to the Steele dossier because it was a mess.īut that is a red herring. Like Trump and many pro-Trump pundits, Durham has focused mainly on the Steele dossier, an inflammatory collection of unsubstantiated tips and leads about possible ties between Trump and Russia that was written in the heat of the 2016 presidential campaign. In 2020, Barr gave Durham special counsel status, meaning the Biden administration couldn’t fire him.ĭurham’s investigation has now lasted about twice as long as the original Trump-Russia inquiry conducted by special counsel Robert Mueller. Barr appointed Durham to satisfy the former president, who has constantly complained that he was the victim of a witch hunt by the so-called deep state. Durham called them to testify and then turned on them, to the detriment of his own case.ĭurham is a Trump administration holdover, a federal prosecutor appointed in 2019 by former Attorney General William Barr to investigate how the Trump-Russia inquiry originated and was conducted. In the process, Durham tried to treat a federal courtroom like a cable news studio, where he could verbally attack the Justice Department and the FBI without actually prosecuting any government officials.ĭuring his most recent case, he harshly criticized two FBI officials on the stand - both his own witnesses and ostensibly friendly to the prosecution. Durham prosecuted a lawyer associated with Clinton’s 2016 campaign and a Russian-born informant for Christopher Steele, the retired British intelligence officer who authored the dossier. He chose targets affiliated with what Trump and his supporters have claimed were the evil forces behind the Mueller investigation: the Hillary Clinton campaign and the so-called Steele dossier. He targeted people outside the government to stage trials that seemed designed to help prove his pro-Trump bona fides. It is rare for a federal prosecutor to go 0-2, but Durham never really seemed to care about making his cases stick. ![]() Remarkably, neither targeted officials from the Justice Department or the FBI. What he has not done is search for the truth.ĭurham has developed and launched just two prosecutions in connection with his probe of the Justice Department and FBI’s handling of the Trump-Russia case. ![]() John Durham has used the criminal justice system to try to score political points. His long-running inquiry into the government’s performance during the Trump-Russia investigation has often seemed designed to get shoutouts from Donald Trump and Tucker Carlson and to go viral on right-wing social media. Photo: Ron Sachs/Consolidated News Pictures/Getty Imagesįor three years, John Durham has essentially been the Justice Department’s Special Counsel in Charge of Owning the Libs. Special counsel John Durham departs after prosecutors rested their case against Hillary Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussman at the United States District Court for the District of Columbia on May 25, 2022, in Washington, D.C.
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