100 The Barr-Durham Fiasco: The Return of Comey’s Fake Russian Document
UPDATE:
Solid both substantively and editing wise. Need to remember the status of EW’s links-are the ones we’re using already linked to?
John Durham Fabricated His Basis to Criminalize Oppo Research
UPDATE:
I know I sound shrill about this.
But what Trump and Barr have done is WITHOUT PREDICATE (the same complaint Durham makes, with far less evidence) undermined an investigation that showed that 5 top Trumpsters lied about their relationship with Russia.
— emptywheel (@emptywheel) May 15, 2023
NYT catches Durham in a lie. https://t.co/lrEeBXyMKp
— emptywheel (@emptywheel) May 15, 2023
Wow. Really corrupt choice by @WaPo to have right wing mouthpiece @DevlinBarrett write their piece on Durham.
Haven't they been embarrassed enough by his proven propaganda about right wing lies?
— emptywheel (@emptywheel) May 15, 2023
This is the right context for @DevlinBarrett's conflicted report on this shoddy document.
This is nonsense. WaPo reporters should be offended that Barrett was even assigned to it, given his multiple conflicts. https://t.co/TgtdaayiaZ
— emptywheel (@emptywheel) May 15, 2023
My thread on the Durham Report.
Durham took well over twice as long as Mueller and found, literally, bupkis. https://t.co/CpjSiTdGwk pic.twitter.com/6xXxw9vWur
— emptywheel (@emptywheel) May 15, 2023
Substance appears set here too
Recently Andrew Weismann-on Alex Wagner? Maddow-lamented how Barr has been corrupted under former fake “President Trump.”
Here I must respectfully disagree-Barr wasn’t corrupted he was always like this, check the Bush years. But belief in this canard-Trump corrupted Barr-is very widespread. Of course, James Comey also claimed this-after originally claiming to believe Barr’s summary was honest and accurate. Mr. 500 Year Flood’s instincts remain as awful as ever.
To be fair he was hardly alone-this bad take more or less was-is- remains the conventional wisdom-even Weismann still claims to believe Barr was fine until Trump corrupted him. Then there was Ben Wittes petulant apologetics for Barr.
FN: Glenn Greenwald seems to have the exact opposite take which in its own way is no less ludicrous than the Savvy Institutionalist take-Greenwald claimed that Barr’s role in pardoning Roger Stone was no big deal and Democrats making a big deal about it were hypocrites as they didn’t care when this very same Bill Barr midwifed Bush Sr’s pardon of Casper Weinberger-in the middle of being on trial in 1992. The Savvy take is that Trump corrupted Barr, Greenwald’s seems to be that-what? Trump uncorrupted Barr?
End FN
Overall most of the Savvy, the institutionalists, etc tended to trust Barr and even now while they express disappointment it’s somewhat qualified.
In Chapter A we discussed the fact that unlike the Savvy conventional wisdom I always strongly suspected that Bill Barr was a partisan hack-Trump didn’t make him that way he was always that way-which is why Trump hired him. I did admit that at the 11th hour the weekend of the Mueller Report Barr’s fake exoneration letter I had some mild hope that maybe Barr would play it straight after all. This was based on some optimism EW had shown in a tweet. She apparently had based this optimism on some of her legal journalist contacts.
To be clear the idea that Barr was “trustable” to use Kevin McCarthy’s neologism didn’t make any sense to me. But I was hoping that maybe EW’s take would prove superior to my own on this. Spoiler alert-in this case it didn’t.
UPDATE: Find where I’d previously discussed EW’s optimistic tweet… Not necessarily for this chapter.
The reason I had been so skeptical about Barr came down to one word: history. In Chapter The Real Whitewater we looked at that history. Short story is Barr came into his confirmation hearing in January 2019 with a long rich history as a partisan Republican hack.
This long, rich history encompassed not only pardoning Casper Weinberger and the 5 other Iran-Contra co-conspirators and hiding the full report on the memo that purported GOPLand the FBI had the legal authority to kidnap Manuel Noriega, but also a central role in the real Whitewater scandal. Indeed, as per usual, GOP parallel and counternarratives are based on projection: the faux Russiagate scandal-that there was no Russian interference or collusion in 2016, rather the “Deep State” set him up was pure disinformation.
However while it was disinformation we can’t say it was creative fiction-as this is largely what did happen in 1992 where Barr and his fellow Reagan-Bush hacks at the DOJ attempted to use the faux scandal of Whitewater to help Bush eke out a reelection.
As we saw in Chapter Whitewater:
“At around the same time, though, people at the highest levels of the Bush administration found out about the Whitewater referral and started in motion a series of actions intended to speed up the handling of it. According to the report, on Sept. 17, 1992, Edie Holiday, the secretary to the Cabinet in the Bush White House, contacted then Attorney General William Barr and — after some awkward back and forth — asked Barr if he “would be aware of a pending matter in Justice (she may have said it was a criminal referral) about a presidential candidate or a family member of a presidential candidate.”
“At around the same time, according to the report, then-White House counsel C. Boyden Gray also apparently took action. He inquired about the status of the referral with the head of the Resolution Trust Corp. (RTC), the agency from which the referral to the U.S. attorney originated.”
“What is clear is that Barr went on to get in touch with Ira Raphaelson, the Justice Department’s special counsel for financial institution fraud, and asked him to find out whether such a referral existed. When Raphaelson didn’t uncover one at first, Barr asked him to try again. From here, the story takes a turn that is either comic or Kafkaesque.”
“Though Barr had no apparent reason to believe that the budding case against the McDougals was being handled inappropriately, he instructed his subordinates at the Department of Justice and the FBI to commence a series of contacts with local officials in Little Rock to make sure the case was being handled appropriately. The OIC Report is replete with self-serving statements from these officials, to the effect that they simply wanted to make sure it was handled neither more quickly nor more slowly than any other similar case. Barr, the report explains, told a subordinate that “he did not want action on it artificially sped up or slowed down — it was to be dealt with on its merits and in the normal course.”
“In the succeeding pages, statements such as these are coupled with actions that clearly belie them. Everything in this case should be handled like every other case, Washington seemed to be telling the U.S. attorney in Little Rock. But after reading the OIC’s recounting, it is virtually impossible to conclude that Barr and his colleagues at Justice were concerned with anything except the possibility that the potential case might not be moving as quickly as it could.”
So the Russiagate canard is based on projecting the GOP’s own rich history of “October Surprises” onto its opponent-that has been the victim of these recurring OS(es) starting in 1968-one of the central tenets of this book.
FN: It’s rather stunning to realize that Jeff Gerth of all people is the the forefront of the Russiagate canard-just like he was at the forefront of the Whitewater canard 30 years ago-still Clinton hating after all these years.
What Bill Barr and Friends tried-ultimately unsuccessfully-to achieve in 1992 had been successfully achieved in both 1980-aka the delayed release of the hostages aka Iranian Ayatollah Collusion-and 2016-Trump-Russia Collusion.
However, even in saying that 1992 was unsuccessful, we should be more precise. It was unsuccessful in taking down Clinton that time but it proved very useful long term in dirtying up the Clinton brand. Whitewater led-after 7 years of this phony scandal being weaponized to Bill’s impeachment-arguably this impeachment so damaged that Clinton brand that it was too much for HRC to overcome in her own future Presidential runs. Certainly the narrative that she was somehow “untrustable” was largely thanks to Whitewater cum impeachment.
The (post Nixon)GOP playbook is very predictable. Speaking of 2016, there’s another link to Barr-besides the fact that the GOP successfully used the October Surprise model that fell short in 1992 when Barr played it; but that led to the sullying of the Clinton brand that plausibly caused Hillary’s 2016 defeat.
In Chapter Leeden Manifesto, we discussed Comey’s fake Russian document-the fake Russian document that was part of the motivation of his Very Careless Press Conference on July 5, 2016. So many questions were raised by this eyebrow raising episode-among many is that while many at the FBI and DOJ dismissed it as trash, Comey continued to assert it was real in behind closed door Congressional testimony.
FN: What happened to fake Russian document chapter? A baffling aspect-that remains as it never was answered-is wether Comey knew it to be fake or if he didn’t know it was fake.
UPDATE: Probably don’t need the links here just CF Chapter Fake Russian Doc
https://www.businessinsider.com/james-comey-fake-document-russia-fbi-clinton-email-2017-5
Maybe Barr and Durham spoke to Comey but they also apparently wrongly believe the fake Russian document was real.
I’m being a little tongue in cheek here, I don’t think this is literally true it just underscores how much Comey was still plugged into the GOP co-conspirator Weltanschuang a la Heidegger. Indeed, there seems to be three kinds of people at the FBI-those who have long since decided that this piece of Russian disinformation is Russian disinformation, those who always believed this piece of Russian disinformation is Russian disinformation and those who still claim not to know.
This group includes not just Mr. 500 Year Flood Jim Comey but many (Hillary Clinton hating)senior FBI agents
While Comey used this piece of Russian intel disinformation to predicate his very careless-as well as very unethical if not illegal presser-it turns out Barr-Durham used it to predicate their baseless No Collusion investigation a la Russiagate. A baseless-that is to say unpredicated-“investigation” which lasted over double the time of the Mueller investigation itself.
FN: The GOP co-conspirators had whined that Mueller had gone on so long-by any historical standard this didn’t pass the laugh test, true, but irrelevant-when it contradicts a preferred narrative-and many in the MSM itself not just Trump and his GOP co-conspirators preferred this narrative to the (accurate)narrative of Russian Collusion.
But after almost four years — far longer than the Russia investigation itself — Mr. Durham’s work is coming to an end without uncovering anything like the deep state plot alleged by Mr. Trump and suspected by Mr. Barr.
Moreover, a monthslong review by The New York Times found that the main thrust of the Durham inquiry was marked by some of the very same flaws — including a strained justification for opening it and its role in fueling partisan conspiracy theories that would never be charged in court — that Trump allies claim characterized the Russia investigation.”
FN: Again GOP projection. And it is necessary to point out that the Russia investigation was in fact well predicated-it wasn’t in fact unpredicated just because Republicans-and Matt Tabbi and Glenn Greenwald-keep saying it’s so. The real difference between Democratic led investigations-Iran-Contra, Russian Collusion-and GOP led ones is that Democratic led ones are actually well predicated and the MSM is much less comfortable with them.
And now-the return of Comey’s Russian disinformation:
“Mr. Durham used Russian intelligence memos — suspected by other U.S. officials of containing disinformation — to gain access to emails of an aide to George Soros, the financier and philanthropist who is a favorite target of the American right and Russian state media. Mr. Durham used grand jury powers to keep pursuing the emails even after a judge twice rejected his request for access to them. The emails yielded no evidence that Mr. Durham has cited in any case he pursued.”
FN: Of course, Greenwald who’s allegedly so concerned about privacy has nothing to say.
End FN
In a recent post on Gerth’s Russiagate inspired mess of an expose, Marcy Wheeler distinguishes between her own work on the Russia investigation-pointing out that:
“But I didn’t shirk the critique of the Russian investigation. I did a long series on the DOJ IG Report; this summary post links to all the others” what she-accurately-pans as “Russian denialists.”
“But I also showed ways that DOJ and FBI under Barr obfuscated the real take-away from the Page report.”
“I correctly laid out all the problems with John Durham’s indictment of Michael Sussmann. More uniquely, I correctly laid out all the problems with John Durham’s indictment of Igor Danchenko (this post includes links to all my Danchenko prosecution coverage).”
FN: Personally I wouldn’t necessarily agree that I “shirked the critique of the Russian investigation”-just that the work I was-continue to do, namely this book…-was such a large plate I was already choking. And it was clear the actual motivation of this critique originated with GOPers-or anti anti Trump leftists, etc-was the opposite of good faith. While EW has done a great job pointing out the multitude of errors from the Russiagaters, I felt my energy and vigilance was better served elsewhere-it was clear that there would be no shortage of people critiquing the Russian investigation for partisan or simply anti Hillary Clinton reasons-a la Greenwald-Tabbi. OTOH this book contains subjects-notably Roger Stone-Jerome Corsi and the “unreported background” to the Comey Letter-see chapter Unreported Background that has been covered nowhere else.
The problem I never stopped tripping on-still haven’t-is there was no actual predication for Barr-Durham’s Excellent Parallel No Collusion! narrative.
So I never thought there was much value dignifying the Russiagate fiasco with an answer as its motivation was clearly bad faith and it had nowhere close to adequate predication.
Certainly EW has done a good job raising questions on the Steele Dossier-though as she well knows that wasn’t the central predication for opening the investigation in any case. I tend to think that her hypothesis on the SD is plausible-Russia quite possibly smuggled some disinformation into the Dossier-so as to undermine it-mission accomplished, alas.
FN: Quite possibly much of this disinformation was sent through Oleg Deripaska-who played what she calls a double game-it turns out he also had ties to Steele and Glenn Simpson.
End FN
Speaking of the Dossier, the NYT plays the usual false equivalence game
“During the Russia investigation, the F.B.I. used claims from what turned out to be a dubious source, the Steele dossier — opposition research indirectly funded by the Clinton campaign — in its botched applications to wiretap a former Trump campaign aide.66
“The Durham investigation did something with parallels to that incident.”
“5In Mr. Durham’s case, the dubious sources were memos, whose credibility the intelligence community doubted, written by Russian intelligence analysts and discussing purported conversations involving American victims of Russian hacking, according to people familiar with the matter.”
It’s hard to believe but it will be six years this May since Comey’s fake Russian doc was first reported on. NYT provides some important history of how this piece of disinformation compliments of Russian intelligence emerged.
The memos were part of a trove provided to the C.I.A. by a Dutch spy agency, which had infiltrated the servers of its Russian counterpart. The memos were said to make demonstrably inconsistent, inaccurate or exaggerated claims, and some U.S. analysts believed Russia may have deliberately seeded them with disinformation.”
It’s not really the same thing-while it’s clearly too complex an idea for a Savvy pundit to grasp-clearly as they can never grasp it-that kind of dossier is full of raw intelligence which by definition isn’t going to be a 100% accurate-so proving that aspects of it aren’t accurate doesn’t mean the entire thing is “dubious.”
FN: To be sure as a chess player who loves the King’s Gambit I’ve come to take the “dubious” canard as a backhanded compliment…
What the Dossier certainly did not do is attempt to weaponize hacked emails stolen by Russian intelligence. But despite the nefarious origins of this document from Russian intelligence and the fact that many believe it an obvious fake, Durham didn’t see any problem here. Yes there were facts but Durham had some, uh-alternative facts.
“Mr. Durham wanted to use the memos, which included descriptions of Americans discussing a purported plan by Mrs. Clinton to attack Mr. Trump by linking him to Russia’s hacking and releasing in 2016 of Democratic emails, to pursue the theory that the Clinton campaign conspired to frame Mr. Trump. And in doing so, Mr. Durham sought to use the memos as justification to get access to the private communications of an American citizen.”
“One purported hacking victim identified in the memos was Leonard Benardo, the executive vice president of the Open Society Foundations, a pro-democracy organization whose Hungarian-born founder, Mr. Soros, has been vilified by the far right.”
“In 2017, The Washington Post reported that the Russian memos included a claim that Mr. Benardo and a Democratic member of Congress, Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, had discussed how Loretta E. Lynch, the Obama-era attorney general, had supposedly promised to keep the investigation into Mrs. Clinton’s emails from going too far.”
But Mr. Benardo and Ms. Wasserman Schultz said they had never even met, let alone communicated about Mrs. Clinton’s emails.
But none of this concerned the partisan Republican Durham.
“Mr. Durham set out to prove that the memos described real conversations, according to people familiar with the matter. He sent a prosecutor on his team, Andrew DeFilippis, to ask Judge Beryl A. Howell, the chief judge of the Federal District Court in Washington, for an order allowing them to seize information about Mr. Benardo’s emails.”
“But Judge Howell decided that the Russian memo was too weak a basis to intrude on Mr. Benardo’s privacy, they said. Mr. Durham then personally appeared before her and urged her to reconsider, but she again ruled against him.”
“Rather than dropping the idea, Mr. Durham sidestepped Judge Howell’s ruling by invoking grand-jury power to demand documents and testimony directly from Mr. Soros’s foundation and Mr. Benardo about his emails, the people said. (It is unclear whether Mr. Durham served them with a subpoena or instead threatened to do so if they did not cooperate.)”
“Rather than fighting in court, the foundation and Mr. Benardo quietly complied, according to people familiar with the matter. But for Mr. Durham, the result appears to have been another dead end.”
“In a statement provided to The Times by Mr. Soros’s foundation, Mr. Benardo reiterated that he never met or corresponded with Ms. Wasserman Schultz, and said that “if such documentation exists, it’s of course made up.”
With Barr’s efforts to rehabilitate his image-his late break with Trump, his cooperation with the J6C-it’s important to remember-but knowing the Savvy MSM’s sorry record, it probably won’t- that Barr took the same posture in the run-up to the 2020 election he was looking to maximally weaponize a wholly politicized and predicated investigation politically.
“By summer 2020, with Election Day approaching, Mr. Barr pressed Mr. Durham to draft a potential interim report centered on the Clinton campaign and F.B.I. gullibility or willful blindness.”
“On Sept. 10, 2020, Ms. Dannehy discovered that other members of the team had written a draft report that Mr. Durham had not told her about, according to people briefed on their ensuing argument.”
“Ms. Dannehy erupted, according to people familiar with the matter. She told Mr. Durham that no report should be issued before the investigation was complete and especially not just before an election — and denounced the draft for taking disputed information at face value. She sent colleagues a memo detailing those concerns and resigned.”
“Two people close to Mr. Barr said he had pressed for the draft to evaluate what a report on preliminary findings would look like and what evidence would need to be declassified. But they insisted that he intended any release to come during the summer or after the Nov. 3 election — not soon before Election Day.”
“In any case, in late September 2020, about two weeks after Ms. Dannehy quit, someone leaked to a Fox Business personality that Mr. Durham would not issue any interim report, disappointing Trump supporters hoping for a pre-Election Day bombshell.”
This is important as the fact that Durham didn’t ultimately issue a pre-election report has often been further cited as a point in Barr’s favor. What this makes clear is that Durham’s ultimate pass on issuing up such an October Surprise was not because of but in spite of Barr’s efforts and wishes.
Meanwhile in the big picture, in the 30,000 foot view the Republican hacks pushing Russiagate used Russian intelligence disinfo to prove Russian intelligence in 2016 played no important role in Trump’s illegitimate victory.
This is what Barr-Durham did it and… what John Ratcliffe did:
“Stymied by the decision not to issue an interim Durham report, John Ratcliffe, Mr. Trump’s national intelligence director, tried another way to inject some of the same information into the campaign.”
“Over the objections of Gina Haspel, the C.I.A. director, Mr. Ratcliffe declassified nearly 1,000 pages of intelligence material before the election for Mr. Durham to use. Notably, in that fight, Mr. Barr sided with Ms. Haspel on one matter that is said to be particularly sensitive and that remained classified, according to two people familiar with the dispute.”
“Mr. Ratcliffe also disclosed in a letter to a senator that “Russian intelligence analysis” claimed that on July 26, 2016, Mrs. Clinton had approved a campaign plan to stir up a scandal tying Mr. Trump to Russia.”
The letter acknowledged that officials did “not know the accuracy of this allegation or the extent to which the Russian intelligence analysis may reflect exaggeration or fabrication.” But it did not mention that there were many reasons that suspicions about the Trump campaign were arising in that period — like the diplomat’s tip, Mr. Trump’s flattery of President Vladimir V. Putin, his hiring of advisers with links to Russia, his financial ties to Russia and his call for Russia to hack Mrs. Clinton.
“The disclosure infuriated Dutch intelligence officials, who had provided the memos under strictest confidence.”
So, at the end of the day Barr-Durham attempted to substantiate the Russiagate fiasco that claimed Russian intelligence didn’t help Trump get elected with: Russian intelligence.
UPDATE:
EW has been a defender of Garland on the J6 investigation but at least she acknowledges that he’s been way too permissive with Durham-but this again goes to the same Biden-Garland canard of trying to be bipartisan at any cost.
Merrick Garland Makes David Weiss a Special Counsel – emptywheel
(1) Seth Abramson on Twitter: “FACTS https://t.co/G6kGA9v6wU” / X
UPDATE: