There is much falsity in this.
As you might recall, the Durham report was produced by special counsel John Durham, who in 2019 was appointed by then-Attorney General William Barr to examine the origins of the FBI investigation that probed Moscow’s interference in the 2016 campaign and the contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia. Durham, Donald Trump and his crew fervently hoped, was going to prove that Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, former CIA director John Brennan, former FBI director Jim Comey, and other Deep Staters had conspired to cook up the Russia scandal to sabotage Trump. Within MAGA, it was widely assumed that Durham would get the goods, smash this cabal, and lock up all these wrongdoers.
After four years of toil, Durham’s investigation was a whiff. He initiated three criminal cases that had little to do with the notion that such a nefarious plan had been mounted. Two of his targets, indicted for having allegedly lied to FBI agents about non-essential matters, were acquitted. An FBI lawyer pleaded guilty to altering an email that was part of the process to obtain a surveillance warrant on a former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser named Carter Page.
In his final report, Durham, looking for whatever sins he could pin on the FBI, concluded that the bureau erred by opening a full investigation instead of a preliminary investigation when it launched its Russia probe—hardly a major infraction. He found that the bureau’s investigation had been influenced by “confirmation bias” but was not caused by political bias. In other words, the Russia investigation—which had its problems, including improperly citing the Steele dossier in the application for that Page warrant—had been legit, not a conspiracy to demolish Trump. It was no hoax and no witch hunt. Sorry, MAGA.
So why have we returned to Durham’s embarrassing failure to prove Deep State skullduggery? His final report—looking to salvage what he could of MAGA’s conspiracy theories about the Russia investigation—referred to the “Clinton Plan intelligence.” That is the claim that during the 2016 campaign, Clinton approved a scheme to “vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security services.” The source of this allegation, however, was iffy: Russian intelligence that US intelligence agencies got their mitts on.
It's a bit complicated. The gist is that the Clinton campaign in July 2016 decided to engineer a phony scandal tying Trump to Russia and that the FBI then did its bidding. Hence, the Russia investigation was initiated. But the evidence for this claim came from Russian intelligence memos based on material the Russians apparently had stolen, via computer hacks, from Democrats. These memos had been snagged in 2016 by a Dutch spy service that subsequently shared this trove with US intelligence. But a big question for the US spies at the time was whether these Russian memos were solid analyses of hacked material, misrepresentations, or outright fabrications. In his final report, Durham himself said that the documents underlying this claim might be a “fabrication.”
Still, Durham put this conspiracy theory into play by including it in his report and provided fodder to MAGA conspiracy theorists looking to discredit the Russia investigation on behalf of Dear Leader.
It didn’t matter that the claim itself didn’t make a lot of sense. By the time Clinton had supposedly given the orders for this plot, it was public knowledge that Russia had hacked the Democratic Party and leaked stolen emails to hurt the Clinton campaign, that Trump had a long history of spouting friendly comments about Vladimir Putin and had business connections in Russia, and that the Trump campaign had curiously and adamantly denied that Russia was interfering in the US election (seemingly providing cover for the Kremlin). It would have been quite natural—and not at all inappropriate—for any candidate in Clinton’s position to decide to push a narrative about Trump and Russia. Moreover, there was no evidence—Durham found none—that the supposed “Clinton Plan” triggered the FBI investigation, the origin of which has been well documented.
Case closed? Not for Trump, Patel, and the rest of MAGA.
What was supposedly new last week was that Patel helped make public a previously classified 29-page annex to the Durham report that delved deeper into the “Clinton Plan.” This annex detailed the Russian intelligence and the supposed hacked emails of Democrats on which the Russian analyses were based. Look at all this, the MAGA crowd exclaimed. It shows there was a Clinton conspiracy!
News flash: It does not. By the way, the annex was not buried. It had been classified because it contained sensitive information about intelligence sources. Moreover, this was not news.
In September 2020, John Ratcliffe, Trump’s current CIA director who was then director of national intelligence, declassified information from this annex noting that US intelligence in late July 2016 “obtained insight into Russian intelligence analysis alleging that U.S. Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton had approved a campaign plan to stir up a scandal against U.S. Presidential candidate Donald Trump by tying him to Putin and the Russians' hacking of the Democratic National Committee.” But Ratcliffe at that time added this important point: “The [intelligence community] does not know the accuracy of this allegation or the extent to which the Russian intelligence analysis may reflect exaggeration or fabrication.” That is, the spies couldn’t determine whether what they got from the Russians was accurate.
The declassified annex, contrary to Patel’s claim (which has been echoed by Trump and much of MAGA media), doesn’t contradict this. In fact, this annex discloses additional reasons to suspect that material underlying the “Clinton Plan”—which includes emails from Democratic policy advocates and advisers to the Clinton campaign—was spurious. Some intelligence analysts, the annex states, had concluded it was possible the Russians “might have fabricated or altered purported U.S. emails” that were cited as evidence of this plot. Durham also notes in the annex that his office had searched for exact duplicates of these emails and had failed to find any—suggesting these emails were not real. (The people who supposedly sent these emails denied doing so.)
In this annex, Durham acknowledges that his investigators assessed that the two emails at the heart of this conspiracy theory were “a composite of several emails that were obtained through Russian hacking” of American think tanks, including the Open Society Foundations (founded by billionaire philanthropist George Soros) and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Composite” was an interesting word choice for Durham, who was doing his best to keep this bunk alive, for these emails, if composites, could also be considered fabrications. After all, someone had to do the compositing.
Look at the Patel tweet I cited above. The FBI director posted it in response to a tweet from right-wing journalist John Solomon, who posted one of those two emails and declared, “This is the smoking gun evidence inside Durham annex. If it is authenticated by further investigation, it means liberal mega donor George Soros’ team knew the whole Clinton plan for Russiagate hoax four days before FBI opened up probe. And so did Obama, Brennan, and Comey.”
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