The long-delayed, much-awaited Durham report has finally dropped. And what it shows is nothing short of shocking: A conspiracy at the highest levels of our government to fix an election in favor of one candidate over another. This is not something that deserves merely a handslap or the usual Inside-The-Beltway tut-tutting. It’s a criminal act for which people should go to prison.
Just for the record, this is far worse than Watergate. And that ended Richard Nixon’s presidency, even though he neither planned nor approved of the break-ins against the Democratic Party offices in the famed Watergate Hotel. What will the perpetrators of this crime get?
The FBI launched its now-infamous “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation of alleged Russian “influence” on the Trump campaign in July 2016. The premise for the investigation was a “dossier” of information from former British spy Christopher Steele that implicated Donald Trump and several of his supporters as being improperly influenced by Russia’s government.
The only problem: The dossier was found to be false, “misinformation” of the worst kind, but nonetheless reported as the “truth” by nearly all mainstream media outlets.
Worse still, in July 2016, as the FBI got underway with its investigation, it received a Russian intelligence analysis alleging that Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was plotting to distract attention from her own very real law-breaking, “her use of a private email server,” a serious. even dangerous, breach of security and a clear violation of the law.
The so-called “Clinton Plan” was hatched by the Hillary campaign “to stir up a scandal” against Trump “by tying him to Putin and the Russians’ hacking of the Democratic National Committee,” the Durham report said.
In August 2016, CIA chief John Brennan even briefed President Barack Obama, then-Vice President Joe Biden, Attorney General Loretta Lynch and FBI Director James Comey about what the Clinton campaign was doing, according to the Durham report.
But the FBI did nothing to stop a clearly illegal act from taking place. As Special Counsel John Durham himself put it, the FBI “failed to uphold their mission of strict fidelity to the law.”
What’s worse, it should have been clear to those inside the FBI’s own investigation that they were being used by Hillary’s campaign to defeat Trump. But the FBI went forward with its investigation anyway.
“Unlike the FBI’s opening of a full investigation of unknown members of the Trump campaign based on raw, uncorroborated information, in this separate matter involving a purported Clinton campaign plan, the FBI never opened any type of inquiry, issued any taskings, employed any analytical personnel, or produced any analytical products in connection with the information,” the report said.
Durham noted that this marked a “noticeable departure” from FBI practice and that officials began the investigation without “any actual evidence of collusion in their holdings at the commencement.”
The only plausible answer for this “noticeable departure” is that it was indeed just that — a conscious move on the part of the FBI to intervene in a presidential election on behalf of a political ally.
We wonder: How many voters might have gone to the polls and voted for Trump if the media, FBI, and Clinton campaign and its allies weren’t all loudly proclaiming that Trump was a bought-and-paid-for asset of Vladimir Putin? He was, we were assured, a traitor with sick sexual predilections, the latter a story entirely made up allegedly by Hillary pal and public relations executive Charles Dolan.
This was the real conspiracy among dozens of people and multiple organizations, ranging from the CIA and FBI to the White House and the Hillary Clinton campaign.
That is a real threat to what Democrats like to grandly refer to as “our democracy.”
Or, as USA Today editorial board member and author James Bovard put it in the New York Post, Durham’s final report showed “how the FBI and Justice Department plotted to rig the 2016 presidential election.”
Meanwhile, the Durham report said “the FBI appears to have made no effort to investigate … the Clinton campaign’s purported acceptance” of an illegal campaign contribution “that was made by the FBI’s own long-term [confidential human source] on behalf of Insider-I and, ultimately” a foreign government. In short, the very thing the accusers were charging Trump with doing.
But still, no indictments.
A seemingly exasperated Roger Kimball wondered if the responsible parties would be held accountable. For those who believe they will, he offered for sale “a nice bridge in Brooklyn.”
He’s right, of course. So is American Thinker editor Thomas Lifson, who added that “by issuing no indictments whatsoever, (Durham) enabled the complex story to be buried by the same media in a day or two.”
The ongoing misconduct is overwhelming and pervasive, and clearly indicates a deep state political bias on behalf of the increasingly far-left Democratic Party among FBI, CIA and Justice Department officials.
The leadership of the FBI, frankly, was corrupt in 2016 and remains so today. As for Clinton, she hatched the plan and funded it illegally out of Democratic National Committee coffers. For that blatant misuse of funds, she got a measly $113,000 fine from the Federal Election Commission.
While the FBI says it has “changed,” it is even now slow-walking the investigation into the Biden family’s corruption, though there appear to be documented payments to at least nine members of the family from foreign sources. And don’t forget son Hunter’s incriminating laptop, which the FBI pretended was a Russian hoax until it was proved otherwise.
And what about the 51 former “intelligence” officials who signed a letter attesting to the veracity of the Russia hoax? Should they be allowed to continue to cash in on their government positions even though they supported an out-and-out lie and interfered in a U.S. election for purely partisan reasons?
The Durham report, after nearly four years, while welcome, falls short. America needs a thorough housecleaning at the highest levels. We had hoped strong indictments of those who committed these political crimes would send a powerful message. Now, we’ll have to wait until 2024 for that.
— Written by the I&I Editorial Board
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