Bill Barr stooge John Durham crashes and burns
Three years into a fraudulent criminal investigation into an imaginary criminal scandal, Special Counsel John Durham’s one and only criminal case fell apart today when a trial jury acquitted Michael Sussmann on charges of lying to the FBI.
There was never any real doubt that Sussmann would be acquitted, given that the publicly available evidence and transcripts instead showed that he did not lie to the FBI. Durham absolutely had to know this indictment would never stick at trial. Perhaps he was hoping he could scare Sussmann into a plea deal, so he could claim a lone victory. But when Sussmann didn’t cower, it’s almost stunning that Durham opted to take this case to trial, knowing he’d lose in humiliating fashion, and draw even more attention to the illegitimate nature of his probe.
The problem for Durham at this point is that he’s in a lose-lose situation. If he gives up now and shuts down his probe, it’ll be a tacit admission that he knew all along that his investigation was fraudulent. But if the laughably weak and openly fraudulent criminal case against Sussmann was Durham’s Plan A, then his Plan B is surely an even weaker and more suspect case against some other innocent person. So if Durham wants to keep his probe going from here, he’ll have to keep digging himself an even deeper hole in the process.
The pundit class is now lamenting that Durham has somehow already “won” just by dragging out his phony probe for three years. But outside of those in the Fox News bubble who were already going to vote Republican anyway, no one in the real world knows or cares that the Durham probe even exists. And if they’re hearing about it for the first time today, it’s only because they’re learning what a sham it is.
There is zero gain here for the Republicans. The Durham probe is merely yet another instance of Bill Barr having put ineffective nonsense into motion for the sole purpose of making Donald Trump think that some kind of magic wand was being waved. It’s the stuff that kept Barr employed – but it didn’t accomplish a single thing for Trump’s side.
The not guilty verdict cements the fact that Durham brought a phony criminal case against Sussmann that he knew would never stick. This should be sufficient grounds for President Biden or Attorney General Merrick Garland to finally fire the clown – and launch a DOJ Inspector General investigation into him. That said, if the Biden administration were to fire Durham, that might make this into the kind of headline grabbing scandal that Durham has spent three years wishing it were.
We’ll see if John Durham now decides to go away quietly, or if he decides to dig himself an even deeper hole. For the moment at least, it’s up to him. But if John Durham keeps bringing phony criminal charges like this against people he knows are innocent, not only will he fail to get any convictions, the only person who might end up in prison from all this is John Durham. At some point prosecutorial misconduct becomes criminal in nature. So just how dumb is Durham, and how bad does he want to make things for himself?
