The Attempt to Discredit Trump’s Russiagate Enemies Is Falling Apart

One of former Attorney General William Barr's many acts that made it clear he viewed himself as Donald Trump's personal attorney  rather than the top law enforcement official for the nation was his appointment of John Dunham to investigate Trump's lie that the entire Russiagate investigation was a "deep state" conspiracy against him.  Fast forward and Dunham's investigation has todate basically found no evidence to support Trump's lie and the one indictment that he has issued appears posed to fall apart if it every were to go to trial.  Indeed, Dunham - who like others (including Barr) on the right appears to be willing to destroy his own reputations to serve Trump - has selectively taken information out of context and totally ignored other information in an attempt to fabricate evidence to support Der Trumpenfuhrer's lies. A piece in New York Magazine looks at Dunham's collapsing investigation.  Here are article highlights:

When Donald Trump’s attorney general appointed John Durham to investigate what Trump insisted was a deep-state conspiracy against him, a question hovered: What exactly was Durham thinking? Durham had a respectable résumé as a prosecutor in a career that did not seem to lead straight into a role as Trump’s Roy Cohn.

Was he simply accepting the role out of diligence and the understanding that, if he found no crimes, he could put Trump’s absurd charges to rest? Or — unlikely but possible — would he uncover real proof of a criminal conspiracy at the FBI to undermine Trump? Or had Durham undergone the same Fox News–induced brain melt that has turned figures like Barr, Giuliani, and many others into authoritarian conspiracy theorists?

In the wake of Durham’s first and perhaps only indictment, we can safely rule out the first two explanations.

Durham’s indictment does not even allege that the FBI committed any wrongdoing. Instead, it charges that the FBI was lied to — by Michael Sussmann, a lawyer who passed on leads about Trump’s ties to Russia that the bureau was unable to verify. Durham’s indictment claims Sussmann committed perjury by denying he was working for the Clinton campaign at the time he brought his information about Trump to the FBI in 2016.

The first weakness in the indictment is that even if every word Durham writes is true, the charge he has amounts to a very, very small molehill. Interested parties uncover crimes all the time. There’s just no reason to believe that Sussmann’s relationship with a law firm working for Clinton would have made any difference to the FBI — which was already investigating Trump’s ties to Russia and which wound up discarding Sussmann’s lead anyway as a dry hole.

Second, the evidence that Sussmann lied to the FBI is extremely shaky. . . . The perjury charge is merely the window dressing in the indictment. The meat of it — the part that has Trump defenders excited — is a narrative laid out by Durham attempting to paint Sussmann and the experts he worked with as liars who smeared Trump. That narrative part does not describe actual crimes, of course. Prosecutors can write whatever they want in their indictment. This one is like a Sean Hannity monologue wrapped around a parking ticket.

And even the “speaking indictment” portion of Durham’s charge is falling apart now. Today, both CNN and the New York Times reported that Durham selectively quoted from emails in order to furnish a completely misleading impression that Sussmann’s researchers lied.

The story here is that a group of computer scientists discovered evidence of communication between a Russian bank server and a Trump property. The computer scientists suspected, but weren’t certain, the server might be used for some form of communication between Trump’s campaign and Russia. (The reason they suspected this, of course, was the broad swath of shady behavior Trump exhibited toward Russia.)

Durham’s indictment asserts that the computer scientists knew the data was innocent but sent it to the FBI anyway. What the Times and CNN reported today is that Durham supported this charge by clipping misleading segments of emails by the scientists when other emails undermined his accusation.

Whatever the truth is of the Alfa Bank matter — the Times reports that the computer scientists still don’t feel satisfied they know the answer — Durham’s case that the scientists knew they were lying is simply a preposterous smear.

Durham’s indictment of Sussmann seems extremely unlikely to result in a prosecution. The rest of it is a story about dishonesty. But the dishonesty lies on the part of Durham himself. His indictment proves only the willingness of many members of the right-wing legal Establishment to corruptly put their powers at the disposal of a liar.

I remain baffled as to why so many are so willing to prostitute themselves to Trump and destroy their reputations and place in history in the process.