Bill Barr just suffered an ugly blow
If you’ve had the misfortune to hear from the the average pro-Trump conspiracy theorist at any point over the past several months, you’ve surely heard them express confidence that a guy named John Durham was going to end up indicting and arresting every anti-Trump political figure out there. Why? Because Attorney General Bill Barr picked Durham to lead the sham investigation into the origins of the Trump-Russia investigation.
Back in the real world, nothing in U.S. Attorney John Durham’s history suggested that he was going to be remotely willing to announce false findings or bring false criminal charges in the name of propping up Donald Trump and Bill Barr. It was one thing for Durham to carry out the investigation, after Barr ordered him to. But Durham was always going to end up announcing that he didn’t find anything to support the lunatic theory that the FBI, CIA, Obama, and Hillary were all criminally conspiring to rig the 2016 election against Donald Trump.
Sure enough, the Washington Post is reporting tonight that John Durham has informed DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz that his investigation has found nothing. We all saw this coming. Barr probably even saw it coming. After all, he ordered this sham investigation into Trump’s favorite phony conspiracy theories, because it’s what Trump wanted – and Barr is just trying to keep Trump happy enough to keep the door open for Barr to be pardoned on the dozens of felony obstruction of justice charges he’s facing once he’s no longer Attorney General.
Even though this was almost 100% predictable, it’s still an ugly blow for Bill Barr. He’ll now have to publicly argue that Donald Trump’s favorite lunatic conspiracy theories are true, even as his own handpicked federal prosecutor and his own Inspector General are publicly spelling out why these conspiracy theories are false. This helps to further erode whatever political muscle Barr had left. But that’s what tends to happen when an increasingly mentally unstable Trump forces his people to focus on self-defeating nonsense, instead of doing things that might actually have helped him and them.
