It was only a matter of time. I am not really connected to the intelligence community and had heard about there being a dossier over beers with finance guys. It was the worst kept secret out there. Agreed. FBI was already looking into the allegations and had already substantiated some by the time of the leak. John McCain and others had spoken to the FBI and CIA and had seen it. Steele had already gone to the FBI. The FBI had already interviewed some people that were sources in it. The leak was a problem because they framed raw intelligence gathering in over a dozen reports as a dossier, when it wasn't. It hadn't even been completely vetted yet. So the narrative wrongly because that this was some full and final report - when it never was. It was a mess - and that benefits Trump - because what gets lost is that Trump was informed by the Russians that they had compromising information on Clinton.... and Trump met with them, and received information - and he never turned that information over to the state department. THAT is the difference - when Steele learned of there being damaging information he turned it over to the state department.
Again…. we uncovered that the Trump campaign met with Kremlin backed associates and shared information…. …. seems like that was worth looking into.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/john-d...collusion-11f44f16?mod=hp_opin_pos_3#cxrecs_s John Durham: the Last Honest Man in Washington The special counsel’s report speaks for itself, whatever partisans say. By The Editorial Board June 22, 2023 at 6:45 pm ET John Durham had a reputation as a straight shooter when he was asked in 2019 to examine the origins of the FBI’s Russia collusion investigation of Donald Trump. Mr. Durham had previously done highly sensitive inquiries for Democratic and Republican administrations alike. Last month he fulfilled his latest task by delivering a sober 306-page report full of useful information. Alas, Congress isn’t into sobriety these days. On Wednesday Mr. Durham testified publicly for roughly six hours before the House Judiciary Committee about the FBI’s Trump investigation, which he found lacked “any actual evidence of collusion” when it was launched. But rather than dig into the evidence Mr. Durham uncovered, partisans on both sides were more interested in bashing him for what he didn’t do. Florida Republican Matt Gaetzactually accused the former special counsel of being “part of the coverup.” He then likened Mr. Durham to the Washington Generals, whose role is to “show up every night, and to play the Harlem Globetrotters, and their job is to lose.” So he thinks the investigation was staged? That would be news to former FBI Director James Comey and associates such as Andrew McCabe and Peter Strzok. But when it came to attacking the witness to distract from the substance, no one outdid the Democrats. New York’s Jerrold Nadler delivered a mini-speech. “It may be hard to remember,” he said, “but at the outset of the Durham investigation, Mr. Durham was a well respected career prosecutor with a solid reputation.” Tennessee’s Steve Cohen was even more over the top. “I’ve tried to follow your report,” he vented. “Mr. Donald Trump Jr. would have called it a ‘nothingburger.’ You got no convictions. You got nothing. It was all set up to hurt the Mueller report, which was correct and was redacted, to hurt the Bidens and to help Trump.” Mr. Cohen added that “everybody’s reputation who gets involved with Donald Trump is damaged,” and “there’s no good dealing with him, because you will end up on the bottom of a pyre.” Mr. Durham was perfectly cool. “My concern about my reputation is with the people who I respect and my family and my Lord,” he said, “and I’m perfectly comfortable with my reputation with them, sir.” The idea that indictments are the measure of a special counsel is pernicious. Mr. Durham’s report is clear: The FBI rushed an investigation that lacked evidence and was tainted by a partisan bias that led to double standards regarding Mr. Trump and his 2016 rival. Mr. Durham did his duty. Wednesday’s hearing only exposed how much of Congress refuses to deal with it.
Geez.. I still see discussion brought up about the Steele dossier as though it were all that the FBI investigation was. Even Durham said that the investigation wasn’t started from or based on the Steele Dossier.
I don’t think Durham is a liar and I think the criticisms of him including calls that he is senile are unwarranted. From what I saw of his testimony it wasn’t great but it wasn’t god awful. He was extremely careful in what he said much like how extremely careful Mueller was in his testimony. That doesn’t mean that his report and investigation wasn’t largely a dud. I turned up very little new information and failed to deliver anything significant. That there wasn’t enough to prove a crime of Collusion mueller had already determined that and that many in the FBI were sloppy and overeager the IG had already determined that. Also this claim that just because there are few indictments doesn’t mean it wasn’t successful is a rationalization. When it’s supposed to be an investigation into criminal behavior yes indictments would be a measure of success. It’s particularly ironic considering that the WSJ opinion section has had people previously pointing out to the failure to indict Trump, up until this year that is, as meaning that Mueller and the other investigations into Trump were failures.
He also said the investigation was warranted. Basso cannot accept that and must stick to his original and forever lasting story.
Durham, an independent counsel, displayed bias in discrediting the origins of the Russia investigation into Trump's election team. In 2019, before being appointed to investigate the origin, he expressed disagreement with certain aspects of the 2019 IG report, which had concluded that the Russia investigation was justified. Despite this bias and Attorney General Barr's assertion that he believed the Trump campaign was spied on, the investigation ultimately concluded that the investigation was indeed justified and that there was no spy involved. The investigation largely aligned with the original IG report from 2019, acknowledging issues with how the FBI conducted the investigation without stating that it was unjustified. Regarding the prosecution results, three men were charged as a result of Durham's investigation. One of them pleaded guilty to charges unrelated to the origins of the FBI investigation and received probation. The other two were charged with deceiving the FBI but were later acquitted. In essence, the outcome of the prosecutions yielded minimal results. After a 3.5-year investigation that incurred a cost of $6.5 million, there was no new valuable findings. Regardless of one's (@basso) desire to disregard this reality, it remains unchanged.
related "His job was to find out what happened and why." In Defense of John Durham https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/06/in-defense-of-john-durham/ excerpt: The collaborative effort of Democrats and the FBI to nullify Trump’s victory was thwarted by the lack of Trump–Russia collusion evidence and the failure to apprehend that, once those collusion claims proved empty, the country would not care about the ensuing attempt to portray Trump’s smoldering rage over the continuing probe as “obstruction of justice” — which even Mueller couldn’t quite bring himself to allege. By contrast, the fundamental flaw in the Durham investigation was that it was not, in any traditional sense, a prosecutor’s investigation aimed at making a criminal case. It was an exercise in historical accountability: Why did the FBI launch an investigation of a presidential campaign, despite scant basis for suspicion of a Trump–Putin conspiracy, when common sense — to say nothing of our norm against government interference in electoral politics — dictates that top officials should have demanded a compelling basis for suspicion before plowing ahead? *** Barr approached the problem from the perspective of one who sees the intermingling of law enforcement and politics as poisonous for both. Recall that, for all the Democratic smears and Trump tantrums directed his way, Barr declined to prosecute both the FBI’s former director, James Comey, for mishandling classified information (which Comey technically did do, though the non-prosecution decision was sound) and deputy director Andrew McCabe, on a false-statements case (a much closer call, but one as to which Trump had undermined the prosecution). The AG’s essential point was that, while politically fraught prosecutions cannot always be avoided, there should be a presumption against them, superable only if there is convincing evidence of “meat and potatoes” crimes. That was the antithesis of a prescription for bringing an aggressive conspiracy case against Trump’s Russiagate antagonists on some creative theory of treason, or at least public corruption. For a prosecutor, such a case would be unwinnable. The defendant officials would be poised to contend that they were acting within the wide berth of discretion that the law gives them, particularly when they believe, as many of them did and do, that Trump is a menace and that his connections to Russia — which are not imaginary, even if they are not uniquely extensive or nefarious — were cause for concern. The failing of our system is that it has lost the capacity to strip such people of power they are unfit to exercise because their firmly held convictions (what Comey portentously describes as his “higher loyalty”) render them incapable of dispassionately exercising the duties entrusted to them. The criminal law, our go-to substitute, doesn’t work: (a) professional law-enforcement agents should be proactive without crossing the line into overzealousness, but even negligent overzealousness is not criminal intent, and (b) if we were to tweak the law in order to criminalize overzealousness, we would end up paralyzing good police and prosecutors and thus eroding the rule of law that our society must have to thrive. *** After Durham’s yearslong, meticulous investigation, Holder announced in 2012 that “the fully developed factual record” dictated that the Justice Department “decline prosecution because the admissible evidence would not be sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction beyond a reasonable doubt.” Not that what the CIA did was justified; just that not all government abuses of power are grist for criminal prosecution, at least if one applies reason rather than passion. It is not that the Obama administration did not want to make a case, it’s that Durham established that the case wasn’t there. To have alleged otherwise would have degraded the CIA, an institution vital to American national security. That is why Durham was honored. It is why, seven years later, he was drafted to scrutinize the origins of Russiagate. His job was to find out what happened and why. Not necessarily to prosecute misconduct, though his mandate allowed for that. The point was that U.S. government interference in our democratic process is, in many ways, more dangerous than foreign interference — it being much harder to determine whether American officials are well-intentioned or malicious. It was thus worth a full-blown investigation by a seasoned, nonpartisan prosecutor from outside Washington, especially given that abuses had been committed by the Justice Department itself — with the main trail leading to FBI headquarters. As in his CIA investigation, Durham’s deep dive into Russiagate uncovered a great deal that is wrong and needs addressing, but little or nothing that could be successfully prosecuted in court. And just as the political Left was outraged by Durham’s CIA conclusions (though its rebukes were muted with a Democratic administration in power), Trump supporters are outraged that Durham could find so much corruption and so little to prosecute — and could choose to prosecute comparatively trivial cases, resulting in acquittals that he had to know were likely and that would be used to discredit his solid fact-finding. Having run more than my fair share of imperfect investigations, I can assure you that there are no perfect ones. more at the link
