In Defense of John Durham
Did He Make the Best of the Bad Hand He Was Dealt?
I’m that guy.
The guy that spent over 3 years telling people Special Counsel John Durham was still coming, he wasn’t finished yet, and when rumors began swirling around three months ago based on anonymous sources familiar with the matter telling the New York Times that Durham had wrapped up his 4 year investigation of the SpyGate scandal and would soon be issuing his final report?
I’m that guy that spent those last 3 months telling people Durham very likely hadn’t ended his investigation and very likely was NOT working on his final report. Because I had learned during the 22 months of the Robert Mueller Special Counsel you can’t trust anonymous sources leaking to the Fake News Media.
All I can say now is that that seemed like the wisest course of action at the time. 9 times out of 10 anonymous sources familiar with the matter leaking from behind a curtain to the Fake News who are telling Fake News reporters something they would WANT very much to hear due to their confirmation biases are launching a fake narrative for their own reasons.
Fake News Media has been eagerly waiting ever since the 2020 election was ‘successfully’ rigged for Joe Biden to hear that the Durham SCO had ended.
So yeah, it turns out the NYT’s story from three months ago is the 1 out of 10 cases where the rumors were true. Well…doom on me.
I’ll fully own up to the fact I have no inside sources whatsoever whispering anything to me about the Durham SCO, about what is or is not going on in or around it. I’ve been basing my reporting and my opinions on publicly available information on this issue since 2017 and have never been shy about saying that.
I felt a wave of incredible disappointment on realizing the rumors were true, and that John Durham had closed down without issuing any further indictments. As usual when something this major happens, something that upends all your expectations and understanding of an issue, you have to go back over what you know and reassess based on the new information you just received.
And you have to do this no matter how ego-bruising it is and how bad it makes you look.
So I’ve spent the last 5 days going back over everything I know for sure. No theory, no conjecture, no speculation. Just the cold hard facts about the new lay of the land Durham’s report reveals.
This has led to some realizations on my part.
But first, let’s get this something else that I’ve noticed out of the way.
We’re Only Just Now Getting To See How Corrupt the DOJ/Federal Courts Are…But Durham Should Have Taken The Plunge Anyway!
Its been quite surprising to me over the past few days watching many of the high profile political commentators who’ve stressed for years now just how corrupt Washington DC is, how corrupt the DOJ and the FBI are, and how corrupted the courts have become, turning right around and attacking Special Counsel John Durham for not attempting what would’ve amounted to a Don Quixote-type quest to convict more than two dozen of the most powerful and connected Swamp people in the heart of the Swamp itself.
As just one example of this, Kash Patel wrote an op-ed for The Epoch Times that was excellent in all respects except one. He thinks Durham should have manned up and taken on that stacked deck anyway and racked up a series of humiliating and pretty much futile trial losses over the next several years.
Nobody's done a better job than Kash on pointing out the utter and complete and total corruption of the
1. DOJ
2. FBI
3. Federal courts.
And yet he still wrote this editorial where he states Durham failed by not making more indictments and committing his Special Counsel’s Office to holding over a dozen trials within that very same corrupt DOJ/Fed court system now being presided over by the very same people who greatly benefitted from the scandal he has been investigating.
Even if you think Durham is a snake who deliberately sabotaged both trials thus far, how far would an honest prosecutor have gotten bringing over a dozen indictments in this current system? Hold on, because I’m going to more fully explore that thought in a moment.
Could Durham Ever Have Won?
Maybe if Donald Trump had remained in the White House following the 2020 election. But that’s a ‘what if’. Trump left the White House. Somebody else lives there now.
The one thing Durham has shocked me into realizing by folding up shop and issuing this final report when I had been confidently predicting he wouldn’t do that is this: the present DOJ and federal court system are TOO CORRUPT to pursue any of these SpyGate goons at this present time. The country may well be too politically polarized and getting a venue and jury free from people engaging in political tribalism is a tall order.
Unsealing indictments right now against the FBI goons involved, Comey, McCabe, Strzok, and others involved in knowingly taking the Trump-Russia collusion hoaxes created as part of The Clinton Plan would have started the process under a DOJ presided over by Merrick Garland and Joe Biden. How, do you think, would that have turned out over the next year and a half?
Did Durham take an assessment after the stolen election of 2020 of everything he’d learned regarding the extent of the rot within the DOJ and the FBI since he began interviewing people like Peter Strzok and Lisa Page back in early 2017, and come to an awful realization? A realization that even if he decided to go ahead and take the plunge and make the 20+ indictments he could make if he wanted to, he would be swimming steeply uphill the entire way in a justice system literally stacked against him?
How much value would there have been for the country in the spectacle of watching John Durham and his team unseal over 20 indictments over the the last three years, watching them engage in months or even years of careful preparation for the trials…and then rack up L after L after L within this present corrupt DOJ/federal court system?
I could make the case - and did at the time - that taking those two cases to trial helped many people ‘see’ the utter destruction of the Trump/Russia collusion hoax. So would Durham continuing to hold new trials over the next 2-3 years and racking up L after L have had any continued value in educating the public on just how corrupt the present justice system has become?
I doubt it. How often should you beat the same dead horse?
At this point, people who still insist that the Trump/Russia collusion hoaxes are real are not acting in good faith. Like Adam Schiff, for instance. No new trials are going to move the needle on this.
The exposure of The Clinton Plan, the joint venture, the DOJ/FBI’s role in knowingly accepting fake Trump/Russia collusion hoaxes and launching investigations with them, its done. Its been accomplished at this point.
So if Durham
isn’t going to be very likely to secure any convictions of key SpyGate players in the present justice system and
there is no longer any real value in using the trials as a venue for exposure of the criminal ‘joint venture’ between Hillary Clinton’s campaign, the Obama White House, DOJ, FBI, CIA, and Durham can just as well establish that with a final report?
Just release the final report then. Why hold new trials where you’ve already established you are not even going to be able to secure convictions on minor, easily proven charges against low-level participants in the ‘joint venture’, because the DC/VA juries are just going to let the guilty off because they see them as members of their tribe?
Assuming you did take the plunge and indict all the top players in the joint venture, how much value would their be in investing another 2-3 years in banging your head against the same corrupt wall and watching them escape conviction one after another?
And even if you think Durham is a corrupt dirty rat just there to cover all this up, stop and ask yourself this: would an HONEST prosecutor have fared any better trying to make that uphill swim in the present justice system? If an honest prosecutor trying as hard a he or she could filed 20+ indictments under Merrick Garland, how many convictions would have been obtained over the past 3 years? Durham went 0-2 and took a hint. How many would your honest prosecutor have gotten out of, oh let’s say 24 indictments in this present justice system? Is Durham **really** the problem?
Was one of the key reasons for Durham bringing two low level players in The Clinton Plan to trial last year to demonstrate that even with airtight documentary evidence on the easiest-to-prove charges he could bring - making false statements to federal investigators - he was not going to be able to secure any convictions in the DC/Virginia court systems, which is where most if not all of any future cases would have been tried, had he attempted to make them now?
I did have someone tell me as an independent Special Counsel, Durham didn’t HAVE to bring cases in the DC/VA area. He could unseal indictments in places like Georgia or Utah if he’d wanted to. And try to force all the defendants to travel there to litigate their cases. But realistically, how much success would Durham have gotten trying to force Swamp Rats like Clinton, Comey, Clapper, Brennan, Strzok, etc. out of the Swamp? They’d have all immediately filed for a change of venue to where their accused criminal conduct occurred. And they’d have had strong cases for that venue change. Even assuming Durham could have tried this venue change gambit, I doubt he or any other honest prosecutor would have had much if any success trying this.
Durham going 0-2 in trials last year in the current DOJ/Federal Court system was bad enough. How bad would it have been if he’d taken the plunge in 2020, unsealed a bunch of indictments against key players in this scandal, and gone 0-12 or more in the last three years? How much of a legitimate chance at victory did he ever really have?
What if John Durham’s real task was to lay bare the full extent of the corruption of not just the Obama White House, the Obama DOJ/FBI, the Obama federal courts, and how that unbelievably high level of corruption continued into the outsider administration of President Donald J. Trump? Something that also directly points to the level of the corruption in the present Biden White House, the Biden DOJ/FBI, the Biden federal courts?
If so, then Durham did release a report that met THAT goal.
What is John Durham trying to tell us by releasing this report?
I’m now going to paraphrase what I think John Durham is trying to tell the country with this explosive report he just released:
“You know I can prove all this, exactly who did what in this massive ‘joint venture’ spanning the Clinton campaign, Perkins Coie, Fusion GPS, the FBI, the DOJ, the Obama White House, the State Department. Hell, I can even prove the involvement of foreign intelligence services and officials.
I can prove who manufactured the Alfa Bank Hoax.
I can prove who put together the Steele Dossier Hoax.
I can prove who brought these hoaxes to the federal agencies.
I can fully demonstrate how the law enforcement and intelligence officials at these federal agencies had already been tipped off the hoaxes would be coming to them from the Clinton campaign, and how they knowingly took these hoaxes from Clinton’s operatives and used them to launch federal criminal and counterintelligence investigations of Donald Trump’s campaign.
But proving all of this is not the problem.
I can expose all of it just fine. And I did.
I **did** expose it all just fine.
What I can’t do is get convictions for any of this in the present justice system.
I couldn’t even get convictions of two low level flunkies involved in this massive joint venture on the easiest-to-prove charges they faced.
Extensively documented lies they told to federal investigators. Hell, Sussmann’s text message to James Baker should’ve been all I needed to get a conviction. But the jury let him walk anyway.
Do you REALLY THINK if I’d invested another 3-4 years or more in indicting James Comey or Peter Strzok or Andrew McCabe and about a dozen others on serious felony charges and made the case at trial about all the criminal acts they’d committed, I’d have had a better than 3/10 chance at getting a conviction on any of the counts with a DC jury?
I know people say ‘Just file for a change of venue!’ Well, would Garland’s DOJ and Biden’s Federal court system have let me change the venue from the DC/Virginia courts? Let’s just say I was not sanguine about my chances of pulling that off.
I did the best I could with the shitty hand I was dealt. I had to settle for utterly exposing how they did it because convicting any of them for this went out the window when the 2020 election was over and Trump left and Joe Biden entered the White House. Whatever you think of William Barr, I’d have had a much better chance under him than Merrick Garland.
What I hope is that after I put this utterly damning report on the record, and clearly demonstrated the level of corruption that existed in the DOJ and the FBI back in 2016 and then into the Trump presidency itself, corruption that remains firmly in place to this day, at some point in the future someone in the White House can take this report and use it as the basis for the serious and dramatic and much needed reforms at both of these federal agencies.”
What Will Durham Testify To In Front Of Congress?
On the release of his report, the chair of the House Weaponization Committee, Rep. Jim Jordan [R-OH] immediately tweeted that he was reaching out to Durham’s office about possible Congressional testimony. Jordan then produced a Tweet showing an official letter he’d just sent to Durham, inviting him to appear before the Committee to testify on May 25th.
Its pretty much a given that at some point Durham is going to publicly appear and answer questions about his years-long Special Counsel investigation. Whether its on May 25th or some other date, I don’t see how he just rides off into the sunset without ever having answered a single reporter’s question or those of members of the US Congress.
Just as ol’ Bob Mueller had to face the music 3 years ago in the strange Congressional hearings where he didn’t seem to recall or know much of anything about the investigation he supposedly led, John Durham will also have to sit for an afternoon and answer questions put to him by the members of Congress.
However, I don’t see Durham’s testimony going the way Mueller’s did, where Mueller often looked confused and out of sorts as he failed recognize key names that appeared in his own report and seemed to have very real cognitive issues.
The court filings and final report issued by Durham shows a man in complete control of the facts regarding this criminal ‘joint venture’ he just finished fully exposing, a joint venture to stop the election of Donald Trump, and then to sabotage his presidency from within when he surprised them by winning that 2016 election anyway.
When Durham does make his appearance before Congress, I would like to propose seven questions for him:
"Can you give us a ballpark figure of how many people on the Trump campaign ended up being spied on based on the illegally predicated Carter Page FISA warrant? How about on the Trump transition team?"
"Do you have any insight you can share with our Committee as to why former CIA Director John Brennan seemed so alarmed by this Russian intelligence penetration of the highest levels of the Clinton campaign that he rushed to the White House to brief President Obama, AG Loretta Lynch, FBI Director James Comey and the NSC about it?
“Do you have any insight on why the FBI did not share Brennan’s concerns, despite the CIA sending a investigative referral to Comey & Strzok strongly suggesting they open up a counterintelligence investigation to discover who the Russian mole was inside the Clinton campaign and plug that leak to Moscow?”
"Is it your opinion based on your report that Comey and McCabe and Strzok and others inside the FBI at that time engaged in no criminal conduct in taking what they had been tipped off about, these coming hoaxes from the Clinton camp, and starting federal investigations of Trump and his associates?"
“Is the original affiant of the illegally predicated Carter Page FISA warrant currently the subject of a still-ongoing federal investigation, and if not, can you share with us the identity of this affiant?”
“Just to be absolutely clear and unequivocal on this point: in your Final Report, you are claiming the top FBI people running the Crossfire Hurricane investigation of Donald Trump and his associates were **tipped off** by the CIA in August of 2016 and then again in September of 2016 that the Clinton camp would soon be approaching them with fake Trump/Russia collusion hoaxes? Hoaxes that had already been shopped to various news media outlets by these same Clinton operatives?”
“And you’re claiming that when these top FBI people were in fact approached by Clinton’s operatives with the Alfa Bank and the Steele Dossier hoaxes, these FBI people **knowingly** accepted these hoaxes and deliberately used them to launch federal criminal & counterintelligence investigations into Donald Trump, General Michael Flynn, Carter W. Page, Michael Cohen, Paul Manafort, and other Trump associates?”
As yet, there is no date for Durham’s testimony, just a letter from Jordan proposing a date of May 25th, but hopefully this changes in the coming week.
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Nothing to defend on your part. This could very well be the beginning, since not a single statute of limitations is bounded when the collaborative network this big continues to commit crime after crime. At worst, this is for the 'norms' and slow learners to grasp the enormity and depth of the situation and seems to be a perfect door-opener for some sort of outside intervention. It is all too perfectly done with the trial court waters tested and likely FISA's still active in the background on the very people that perpetrated this by design.
I like how you think! This war we find ourselves in is (at this point) about disclosure/exposure of information and to that end, Durham definitely succeeded in striking a definitive blow that involves all you mentioned and likely many more. I’d consider comparing the Durham investigation and subsequent report with Fauci up front and center that over about 3 years now has exposed DARPA, CDC, NIH, WHO, FDA, the majority of the medical field (especially hospitals), the big Pharmaceutical corporations, and the CIA, and more. There has essentially been no justice there either; yet, when the legislature’s investigations on this and possible tribunals in the future... the evidence for all of the crimes of insurrection, treason, those against humanity, etc., identifying it’s all the same people; then Durham, the house committees, and all other investigations likely going on behind the scenes will have done the hard work of amassing the mountains of evidence to prosecute, convict and punish in accordance with the law. It will be a matter of timing. I wonder how many of the low hanging fruit will have turned on the next level up in this huge organized criminal organization? Of course, it is difficult to be patient as it ‘appears’ these criminals will face no justice for their crimes until they face God.
Brian, you’re an excellent journalist and this country is blessed to have you. Thank you. God bless you.🙏
PS: Hey, there isn’t anyone here who hasn’t made a mistake! No big deal.👍