Trump's Justice Department Goons Oversaw an Actual Witch Hunt While He Screamed About One
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Sorry, but even in this age of goldfish-brain news cycles, we cannot allow a certain development from last week to just fade into obscurity. You may remember that Donald Trump, American president, loved to say the investigation into whether his campaign coordinated with Russia's effort to influence the 2016 election was a "witch hunt" pursued by shadowy bureaucrats with an ax to grind. In his telling, that investigation was opened for political reasons, without justification, and that's why it dragged on forever and ultimately concluded with Special Counsel Robert Mueller declaring "NO COLLUSION!" and shooting off a bunch of confetti like a gender reveal. It was such an egregious violation that it required a counter-investigation overseen by Trump's attorney general, Bill Barr, and his hand-picked hard-nosed prosecutor, John Durham. They would find justice.
Well, the counter-investigation was everything he said about the Russia investigation, as a fantastic report from the New York Times laid out last week. The former took way longer than the latter and failed to uncover anything they said it would. But more than that, it was an actual witch hunt. By the summer of 2020, it was clear Durham had failed, and the Justice Department inspector general published a report that found no evidence the FBI was politically motivated in 2016. But Trump was absolutely losing it on Fox News, floating that Obama and Biden would be indicted for their offenses against him—"the single biggest political crime in the history of our country"—and the only way they wouldn't be was if his two pet prosecutors, Barr and Durham, decided to be "politically correct." (God forbid!) Enter the Times:
Against that backdrop, Mr. Barr and Mr. Durham did not shut down their inquiry when the search for intelligence abuses hit a dead end. With the inspector general’s inquiry complete, they turned to a new rationale: a hunt for a basis to accuse the Clinton campaign of conspiring to defraud the government by manufacturing the suspicions that the Trump campaign had colluded with Russia, along with scrutinizing what the F.B.I. and intelligence officials knew about the Clinton campaign’s actions.
So having failed to produce the goods in time to give Trump some political ammunition for the 2020 election, they just kept the investigation going with an entirely new focus? They came up with nothing, so they started to work the name "Clinton" in there? How is that even the same investigation? It isn't, except for one crucial respect: It continued as a vehicle for Trump's shadowy accusations against his political opponents. As long as the investigation was "ongoing," he had extra salt on his claims that anyone caught up in it was disgustingly corrupt. In this respect, it's a lot like the Ukraine extortion that got Trump impeached the first time: He just wanted Zelenskyy to announce Ukraine was opening an investigation into the Bidens. The subtext, of course, was that Trump would do the rest.
It's clear from his public behavior throughout that Barr—again, the attorney general of the United States—also considered the investigation a political endeavor. As the Times traces, Barr fought the inspector general's report, fearing its (honest) conclusions could endanger his and Durham's probe. He was on Fox News all the time misrepresenting what their counter-investigation was doing and what it had uncovered about the original investigation, just as he'd done with his "summary" of the Mueller report. He waited until after the 2020 election to admit their probe had failed to find evidence to support the conclusion they'd decided on beforehand. And most appallingly, there was The Italian Job.
...Italian officials — while denying any role in setting off the Russia investigation — unexpectedly offered a potentially explosive tip linking Mr. Trump to certain suspected financial crimes. Mr. Barr and Mr. Durham decided that the tip was too serious and credible to ignore. But rather than assign it to another prosecutor, Mr. Barr had Mr. Durham investigate the matter himself — giving him criminal prosecution powers for the first time — even though the possible wrongdoing by Mr. Trump did not fall squarely within Mr. Durham’s assignment to scrutinize the origins of the Russia inquiry...
This all remained secret until this Times report, in which there are some further observations about Barr's public behavior. After it became public that Durham's probe now included a criminal investigation, without any specifics about the crime in question, the entire news media was operating on the assumption that it was the Russia investigators who were now under full-on criminal scrutiny. This was false—Trump was under criminal investigation! But "Mr. Barr, who weighed in publicly about the Durham inquiry at regular intervals in ways that advanced a pro-Trump narrative," the Times notes, "chose in this instance not to clarify what was really happening."
So the probe of the Russia investigation actually uncovered possible financial crimes by Donald Trump, but when there was only a partial leak (and who leaked that?), Barr allowed a narrative that was close to the opposite of reality to blossom in the media, all because it was to Trump's political benefit during an election? Oh, and by the way, knowing all this, is the public supposed to have confidence that whatever allegations made by the Italians were properly investigated by Durham and Barr?
And here's where we might mention how amazing it's been to watch the discussion about Trump and Russia play out. Somehow, "famously amoral lout comes to friendship of convenience with authoritarian strongman" is now considered liberal QAnon—Blueanon—and the counterstory pushed by the biggest public liar in American history has gained broad acceptance. Yeah, the liberals who started talking about Trump being a "Russian asset" lost the plot, but his 2016 campaign manager's previous job was working for pro-Russian interests in Ukraine. Paul Manafort also worked directly for one of Putin's closest allies, Oleg Deripaska, a guy who has overseen political influence campaigns in countries all over the world. The Senate Intelligence Committee, at the time controlled by Republicans, published a report that found that "Manafort hired and worked increasingly closely with a Russian national, Konstantin Kilimnik. Kilimnik is a Russian intelligence officer," and that "Manafort sought to secretly share internal campaign information with Kilimnik." At the time, Manafort was millions of dollars in debt to Deripaska and was working for the Trump campaign for free.
Maybe Trump was entirely innocent as all this was going on, unaware of his campaign manager's connections, just as those allegations from the Italians may have been nothing. It's not like this guy had to shutter his university and his foundation after allegations of fraud. It's not like his flagship company has been convicted of fraud. He was not, in fairness, charged with conspiring in the 2016 Russian influence campaign, though that investigation was hindered by Trump's repeated obstruction of justice. But considering that Trump was yelling "witch hunt" while his cronies conducted an actual witch hunt, we should probably keep an eye on the new "Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government" his allies just rolled out.
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