What Durham’s report avoided
There was so much detail in the Durham report that the first round of responses quite naturally focused on what was included. Even if the report basically confirmed what conservatives have said for years about Russiagate, it was good to have it on the record and official, even though the lack of indictments, much less prosecutions, ensured that the miscreants remain, in the immortal words of Bill Ayers, “Guilty as sin, free as a bird.” A number of the worst ones enjoy lucrative contracts as commentators on CNN and MSNBC. And, of course, the outright lies of the ”big fat nothingburger” school of progressive commentary allow the left to make sure that their own supporters never learn of the details.
But after absorbing the details of Durham’s output, those with good memories started to point out what was NOT included in Durham’s work product. Sundance of The Conservative Treehouse:
With John Durham outlining in granular details how the FBI, DOJ and larger intelligence apparatus acted politically to weaponize government on behalf of an allied presidential candidate in Hillary Clinton, a bigger question remains. There never was any merit to the Trump-Russia nonsense, so what exactly were Robert Mueller and Andrew Weissmann doing for two years?
Using the silo defense as a method of obfuscation, John Durham noted in his report [page #2] as below, never delved into that obvious question. Durham specifically, and with great intent, says he did not look at what Mueller and Weissmann were doing; even though, Durham destroyed any predication that might have given merit to the intention of their special counsel existence.
(snip)
Durham never looked at it. Why? Because he knew Robert Mueller and Andrew Weissmann were installed to cover up the original fabrications by the CIA, FBI, DOJ and U.S. intelligence apparatus. Mueller’s probe existed in material fact to hide the Obama weaponization to target Donald Trump. Durham knew this; that’s why he never touched it.
Stop pretending. Once you stop pretending, you realize just how rotten this system is. (snip)
Everything Durham found, Mueller could have easily found, and stated, and ended the nonsense.
Durham’s investigation served a very useful purpose for Mueller:
You might remember, Robert Mueller was in front of congress in July 2019, answering questions about Chris Steele, the dossier and the Steele sources therein. Mueller was able to deflect and dodge answering questions about it because AG Bill Barr put John Durham into place in May 2019.
When Robert Mueller is saying there’s another group in the DOJ looking specifically at the Chris Steele, Dossier, Fusion GPS and Glenn Simpson aspect to the fraudulent 2016/2017 claims about Trump-Russia collusion in the 2016 election, he is talking about the John Durham investigation.
Mueller was citing Durham as the reason why his purview, and subsequent report as released, did not include the Steele dossier, Fusion GPS and Glenn Simpson information.
Mueller was saying that stuff is the responsibility of “the other internal investigative unit,” ie. John Durham.
Retired FBI special agent Mark Wauck points out another big time miscreant who has escaped consequences or even official scrutiny: acting AG Rod Rosenstein, who appointed Mueller:
On August 2, 2017, Rod Rosenstein authorized the continuation of a hoax investigation instigated by the Clinton campaign. Rosenstein, the DoJ official overseeing the FBI's Crossfire Hurricane investigation had had an easy half year to figure out what was going on, to figure out that it was all a hoax. Instead he gave Team Mueller the "full speed ahead" directive. To say that Rosenstein has a lot of explaining to do is a major understatement.
How convenient—for Rosenstein, Mueller, and a host of others—that Durham doesn’t appear to have questioned them on these issues. In actual fact, of course, we know that the hoax nature of the Russia Hoax was known to the FBI—and many, many others—months before January, 2017, because Durham clearly says so. They knew it from the start, so how does a hoax investigation get elevated to a nuclear Special Counsel level investigation of the POTUS—the ultimate political hitjob. (snip)
I can tell you that, in my previous life, whenever I inherited an investigation that had been handled by some other agent the first thing I did was to go back to the beginning to find out for myself on what basis the investigation had been started—what the original predication had been. Common sense, right? Where did this investigation come from, where did it go from that point on? When the FBI came to Rosenstein, shouldn’t he have done something similar—and shouldn’t Mueller have done the same? After all, we’re talking about taking down a recently elected POTUS for being a Russian agent—or something very like that. Are we really supposed to believe that an honest Acting AG would simply say, You go for it, guys—I’ll take your word for it all. And that an honest SC wouldn’t look at the predication? There was absolutely nothing standing in Rosenstein’s way to prevent him from calling bullshit on the whole thing, and Mueller could have done the same. Durham, apparently, didn’t go there.
Wauck also cites and embeds a half-hour discussion between Alex Christoforou and Alexander Mercouris on another significant missing person somehow left out by Durham: Professor Joseph Mifsud.
Wauck comments:
[Durham] spends all sorts of time discussing George Papadopoulos and the “diplomats” from Oz, but somehow—and really quite implausibly—manages not to mention the mysterious ‘Professor’ Joseph Mifsud. Mifsud did, after all, figure quite prominently in the whole Papadopoulos episode. Presumably Mifsud was a figure of some importance, because Bull [Durham] and Bluto Barr traveled to Rome and London to get the skinny on Mifsud, pick up some recording or other—remember? I did a Ctl+F search and there isn’t a single mention of Mifsud.
We here at American Thinker devoted a lot of pixels to Mifsud as the scandal was developing. See, for instance, here, here, here, and here (Clarice Feldman). Mifsud’s absence from the report may be like Sherlock Holmes’s “dog that didn’t bark” – evidence whose absence speaks volumes about what really did happen.