Bill Barr’s Durham stunt unravels as key prosecutor resigns

| 4:06 pm EDT September 11, 2020
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For months, Donald Trump’s fans have been hanging their fading election hopes on the notion that U.S Attorney John Durham is going to take action against the people who investigated Trump’s crimes, and that this turn of events is somehow magically going to hand the election to Trump. This was never likely to go anywhere, and it’s now unraveling.

It turns out Donald Trump and Bill Barr have been putting so much inappropriate pressure on Durham’s team, Durham’s top aide Nora Dannehy has resigned in protest, according to the Hartford Courant newspaper. Some folks will insist that this means Trump and Barr are now winning, because someone resigned. But the entire point of Barr’s scheme was to try to get Durham’s team to put their names on false accusations against Trump’s adversaries, not to push Durham’s team out the door.

This has to be taken as a sign that Bill Barr’s Durham stunt is unraveling. We still don’t know for certain what John Durham will do in the end. But since there’s no “there” there, we don’t expect Durham to announce anything beneficial to Donald Trump before the election. We do expect that Barr will flat-out lie and claim that Durham did find something when he didn’t. But we don’t expect that to have any impact, because no one outside Trump’s existing base will believe it or care.