Holman W. Jenkins Jr.
WSJ, Oct. 25, 2022
“The press’s unspoken justification is that playing it straight in such matters would be bad for the country and good for Mr. Trump. Don’t buy it.”
Only John Durham can say why he proceeded as he did. The 45-year veteran prosecutor was assigned to examine the FBI’s decisions related to the Trump collusion investigation. Aside from an early guilty plea from an FBI lawyer who falsified evidence, he pursued only two outside informants for allegedly lying to the agency.
Some on the right blame him for not going after FBI officials directly, though it’s not clear what these officials might be charged with. Incompetence is not a crime. Illegal leaks are a crime but notoriously hard to prove in court.
The dumbest journalism, though, reasons (without saying so) that Mr. Durham is a colossal failure because he was somehow assigned, or assigned himself, to fulfill the fantasies of Donald Trump. An adjective-overloaded piece by Margaret Carlson in the Washington Monthly dissolves into nothingness when you realize how completely she relies on this premise without betraying any awareness that she’s relying on it.
My own guess is Mr. Durham viewed his informant indictments as merited but orthogonal to his larger purpose. He was counting on civil society, i.e., the press, to lead a necessary conversation about the FBI’s role in 2016 and after.
In both trials, Mr. Durham himself filled the record with information to make conviction difficult, showing the FBI wasn’t fooled by alleged lies told by Clinton associates and perhaps even welcomed the lies. I would be insensate not to notice that, in his closing arguments in the Danchenko case last week, he adopted phraseology similar to two columns here a year ago, when he told jurors the FBI’s own behavior was the “elephant in the room” and stressed the importance of law enforcement not letting itself be manipulated for political ends. … source