I will start with an admission. I have not read all 300 pages of the Durham report released yesterday, and probably never will. But I am glad it was released, because it shows that John Durham, having spent four years investigating the issue of the FBI and Donald Trump, came up with nothing. Truly, he should be known as Bull Durham.

He was given this task by Trump (via Bill Barr) to counter the findings of the Mueller report. I think I have written about the Mueller report, stating my disappointment that Mueller felt bound by DOJ limitations on investigating a sitting president and therefore determined that, while he saw nothing to lead him to think that there were prosecutorial crimes committed by members of the Trump administration, he couldn’t say that such crimes hadn’t been committed because of the DOJ restrictions. (This is a paraphrase/my read)

But Durham’s job was to find that the crimes were committed on the Democratic side, not the GOP. According to Wikipedia, he “secured one guilty plea and a probation sentence for a charge unrelated to the origins of the Russia investigation, and two unsuccessful trial prosecutions”

His report showed nothing new. At all. He repeated a lot of the findings of the Mueller report and report of the Department of Justice’s Inspector General, and he made no recommendations for further investigations, prosecutions or even FBI procedural reforms. But he did go out of his way to defend himself, by (again, my read) twisting things around to make it look like the FBI was anti-Trump and pro-Clinton and that senior FBI officials acted accordingly.

I don’t understand. I did read the first part of the Durham report, where he repeated, and in fact emphasized, the disinformation efforts that the Russians employed during the 2016 presidential campaign, how the Russians clearly supported Trump over Clinton, how there were several documented contacts between Trump campaign officials and Russians, but how there was no evidence (or at least insufficient evidence) presented there was actual collusion or conspiracy between the Trumpists and the Russians.

He then went on to talk about how senior FBI officials relied on the Steele Dossier (I am still not clear why there hasn’t been a more definitive report on the contents of the Dossier), when there was insufficient corroboration for the conclusions presented in it. This, I think, is what DOJ IG Michael Horowitz wrote about years ago.

So to me, all Bull Durham did was try to justify his wasted four years. And I predict that, like the Mueller report, the Durham report will, not very many years from now, gather dust.

As to the FBI itself, a look at its history would show, that it has always done a very credible job in pursuing criminal activity, but has always destroyed that credibility when it reached, or reaches, into ideology or politics. For its first 48 years (!!!!), the FBI was run by J. Edgar Hoover, no friend of American liberals, who kept secret files on prominent Americans (other than conservatives and ultra-conservatives), for the purpose of having leverage over them and hog-tying even American presidents out of fear. Then, remember James Comey, the man I believe responsible for Donald Trump’s victory, having come out just before the 2016 election with a statement that he was reopening a theretofore closed investigation involving Hillary Clinton because of major new information. Was this only bad judgement on Comey’s part, or something even more insidious?

The FBI and its investigators have always had the reputation of being biased towards conservatives, as I recall, until perhaps the Trump years. I like to think that the senior FBI officials who led the investigation against Trump were patriots who saw the irregularities of the Trump administration and were seriously concerned about them. Again, as to the use of the Steele dossier, I am still uncertain and would welcome more information as to sources and process. But it appears we are not going to get that.

So, what we should be aware of, is that the Trump presidency, which all that it has led to, was helped by a major Russian disinformation campaign that perhaps did not even need again active collusion with Trump’s team, and then through the action of then FBI Director James Comey (whom also I would welcome more information as to his motivation). Were it not for these two matters, Hillary Clinton would have been elected president.

Russian disinformation also took place in 2020, but was not sufficient to give Mr. Trump (also known as “SIR!”) another term. And we can be sure that the Russians are active now and will be more so during the 2024 campaign, although I do not believe that today’s FBI will repeat the egregious errors of James Comey.

And that’s the way it is.