Special Counsel John Durham made a calculated decision to transform his only criminal trials — of Clinton lawyer Michael Sussmann and Steele dossier source Igor Danchenko — into forums for telling the story of the FBI’s pursuit of the unsubstantiated Russia collusion narrative.
From pretrial motions and brutal cross-examinations of FBI witnesses to his parting words at the Danchenko trial, Durham telegraphed his disdain for the FBI’s behavior to jurors in the courts of both law and public opinion.
The jury might very well conclude the FBI mishandled the Russia case, the veteran prosecutor declared Monday in his closing argument. “The government is not here to defend the FBI’s performance in these matters,” he added. Such comments gave license to jurors to acquit, as they did in the end.
Before it was over, Durham dropped bombshell after bombshell, with most landing on the FBI rather than the defendants:
- Hillary Clinton personally approved sharing the Russia collusion narrative against Trump in fall 2016 even though her campaign wasn’t sure it was true, former campaign manager Robby Mook testified.
- The FBI offered Christopher Steele a whopping $1 million if he could prove the sensational allegations in his dossier, but he didn’t, FBI witnesses testified.
- The FBI included allegations from the Steele dossier in its FISA application to spy on the Trump campaign even though it hadn’t verified a single element of the dossier, an FBI analyst testified.
- Danchenko was hired as a confidential human source and recommended for hundreds of thousands of dollars even though the FBI had concerns he was tied to Russian intelligence and had lied to the bureau.
- A Clinton-friendly PR executive, Charles Dolan, testified he lied to Danchenko, who then passed that lie on to Steele’s dossier and then lied about Dolan being a source of the allegation.
- The FBI ignored the warnings of its own analyst that the allegations of collusion might be disinformation inserted by Russian intelligence.
The tales of deceit, duplicity and disinformation, in the end, were too much for jurors to hold the two informers to the FBI — Sussmann and Danchenko — to account.
Justice must be served. The fbi is a rogue agency that is out of hand. Seems they are more involved in controlling elections than investigating crime.
Just one more agency that we should not have. They are all illegal but you People will never believe it. The IRS is illegal too, ask any IRS agent if they can show you where they are legal, need a video to back this up it is out there search for it. Pretty interesting things out there when you know where to look for things.