Specialists in the law and practice of counter-intelligence can argue whether Durham has correctly interpreted the appropriate modalities of FBI procedure. Very possibly, Durham is correct. Yet even if he is, isn’t this all kind of underwhelming? Durham’s sponsors hoped to reveal a globe-spanning conspiracy to vilify an innocent Donald Trump. What he delivered for them instead was a list of arguable procedural infractions by the FBI.
Not to belittle the importance of procedural infractions—perpetrators can go free if the infraction is serious enough—but such an infraction doesn’t necessarily make the perp innocent. If the case is dropped because of faulty procedures, that’s a sanction against police misconduct, not an absolution of the accused.
Post-Durham, we are exactly where we were pre-Durham.
U.S. government agencies have meticulously documented the help Russian espionage agencies provided to the Trump campaign in 2016. It is a matter of record that the Trump campaign wanted and sought even more help—specifically, that it tried to communicate with WikiLeaks about material from hacked Democratic Party communications.
People in the Trump orbit were caught lying and lying again about their Russian connections. As president, Trump took extraordinary pains to conceal his discussions with Putin, even from other members of his own administration.
That’s all beyond dispute. Durham’s efforts to reopen the disputes failed miserably. What may matter more, however, is what the Durham report does, rather than what it says. What the report says is in essence a classic Miranda-rights criminal defense of a kind that conservatives dislike when it benefits a mugger or a car thief: “The cops messed up in this way or that, and therefore my client must go free, even though we all know he did exactly what he is accused of.”
But what the report does is offer an excuse and escape to Republicans and conservatives who want to protect Trump without outright defending him. Durham tells the story of Trump-Russia while deleting both Trump and Russia. A great many people are eager for that telling. It changes the subject to something much less uncomfortable than the evidence that the Trump presidency was compromised by a corrupt foreign dictatorship.
This revisionism also offers partisans an exciting future possibility: a justification for new rounds of post-Trump culture war. Dan Crenshaw, for example, is a rising leader in the Republican Party—one who has always kept some moral and political distance from Trump, and who is firmly anchored to the pro-Ukraine, anti-Putin side of the GOP House caucus. Yet even he tweeted after Durham:
I’ve never been a reactive “lock ’em up” type. But this Durham report is a lock ’em up moment. We should be looking for statutes that apply to these egregious violations of public trust. If they don’t exist, it’s time we create them so it never happens again.
Similarly, Nikki Haley, the former UN ambassador and a candidate for the 2024 Republican nomination, today demanded retaliation against the FBI: “If we can’t hold the FBI accountable for the Russian hoax, we are no different from South Sudan or the Democratic Republic of Congo. This type of corruption should never happen in America.”
Crenshaw’s and Haley’s menacing but vague language makes clear that they both understand there’s almost certainly no statute to invoke here. They are not calling for measures consistent with the rule of law but are instead appealing to dark fantasies of cultural revenge. But fantasies of cultural revenge are a powerful resource in Republican politics. Durham’s report provides hope that this resource can be distilled and bottled for future use, all its Trump-vintage muck boiled away.
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