JOHN DURHAM INVESTIGATION TURNED 1,000 DAYS OLD

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The John Durham investigation turned 1,000 days old. It marks a major new milestone in Durham’s effort to substantiate the conspiracy theories Barr sent him off chasing years ago. The Durham investigation has now lasted 326 days longer than the Mueller investigation, not quite half again as long. But I’m sure Durham will last the 11 days required to hit that milestone, too. Reading the tea leaves, it appears the special counsel’s end game is something other than a sweeping indictment. Four months after indicting Michael Sussmann, he learned that Sussmann had provided at least one other anonymous tip on behalf of Rodney Joffe, in addition to the one Durham has labeled a crime. Durham also discovered two phones used by James Baker, which he had never before bothered to look for in DOJ IG custody, precisely where he had been told one of them was years earlier. At the rate Durham is discovering basic things he should have learned years before indicting Sussmann (and, probably, Igor Danchenko), he might be prepared to make a responsible prosecutorial decision about whether to charge these cases in another two years or so. If special counsel John Durham has cracked the core of the Russiagate case, if he has established that the Steele dossier on which the FBI substantially based its spy warrants was fraudulent, does that mean he is nearing a sweeping conspiracy indictment? Will there be criminal charges that target the real 2016 collusion — not between the Trump campaign and Russia, but between the Clinton campaign and U.S. officials who abused government investigative powers for political purposes? Almost certainly not. All signs are that Durham will end his investigation with a narrative report. It has looked that way for a long time. There are reasons why then-attorney general Bill Barr appointed then-Connecticut U.S. attorney Durham as a special counsel shortly before the Trump administration ended. Unlike ordinary federal prosecutors, who either file charges or close investigations without comment, special counsels are required by regulation to write a report for the attorney general. As we saw with special counsel Robert Mueller’s report in 2019, there is typically great outside pressure on the AG to make such reports public (though doing so is not required). Barr obviously knew enough about Durham’s investigation to grasp that there was unlikely to be a grand, overarching criminal-conspiracy case. I am not saying there will be no more indictments. There could be. But if there are, they will likely be similar to the indictments of Sussmann and Danchenko — who, you no doubt noticed, were separately charged, and are not alleged to have conspired with each other or anyone else. Durham has charged the two defendants only with lying to the FBI. And tellingly, he did not file charges against people with whom Danchenko and Sussmann collaborated in supplying specious information to investigators, much less accuse the investigators themselves of misconduct. For a criminal prosecution, though, it is not sufficient to prove that something bad happened. Prosecutors must also prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the bad thing happened because the participants knowingly and willfully planned it that way. It looks like Durham can’t prove that. The bottom line of all this is that Durham’s position is that the FBI was duped, not that it was part of a grand conspiracy. In other words, more wasted money by the Republicans just like the siz Bengazi investigations by the Republican held House of Representatives.