The Patriot Post® · Rigged Swamp Acquits Yet Another Spygate Suspect
Another DC jury has spoken, and in doing so it makes official what we Rule of Law types have been fearing for months: Beltway Democrats can get away with anything.
That jury found Russian national Igor Danchenko not guilty yesterday on four measly “false statements” charges, refusing to convict him of having lied to the FBI about his sourcing for the anti-Trump pack of lies known as the Steele dossier. Danchenko, a former employee of the left-leaning Brookings Institution, was the primary source of sniveling Christopher Steele, a British ex-spy who did his Trump-hating best to help Hillary Clinton, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, and the rest of them take down the candidacy and then the presidency of Donald Trump with what turns out to be nearly a perfectly executed conspiracy.
The jury didn’t waste much time, reaching its decision after less than two days of deliberations. The Danchenko acquittal rubs rock salt into the Sussmann wound from earlier this year, and it delivers another stinging defeat to once-vaunted federal prosecutor John Durham, whose long-running Spygate investigation has come up utterly empty in terms of criminal accountability for scumbag Democrats.
Is it just us, or should John Durham have spent a helluva lot less time going after bit players like Michael Sussmann and Igor Danchenko, and a helluva lot more time investigating the FBI? It’s a rhetorical question, of course, but one well worth considering. As Paul Sperry at RealClearInvestigations has noted, Durham has focused almost exclusively on FBI informants while leaving their FBI handlers alone.
We saw the writing on the wall earlier this year, when an appallingly pro-Hillary jury acquitted Clinton campaign lawyer Sussmann of lying to the FBI, thus bringing to a bitter end a once-promising case and dashing the hopes of every idealistic American who (foolishly) believes Lady Justice is blind.
That Sussmann jury had “three Clinton donors, an AOC donor, and a woman whose daughter is on the same sports team with Sussmann’s daughter,” noted constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley. “With the exception of randomly selecting people out of the DNC headquarters, you could not come up with a worse jury.”
Whether it was the perfect crime, or prosecutorial incompetence, or some combination thereof, the lack of any accountability for Spygate is both depressing and infuriating, and it bodes ill for our republic. The caper included high-level culprits in both the Obama Justice Department and the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, but justice won’t be served to any of them.
So what happened? Why have wrongdoings so obvious to us been so hard for John Durham to prosecute? We’ll have to wait for his memoirs, but it seems to us that Durham lost this case two years ago, when he allowed an FBI lawyer named Kevin Clinesmith to cop a plea.
Clinesmith was part of the FBI’s crooked Crossfire Hurricane investigation and then part of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s subsequent investigation, but he was fired in early 2018, when his electronic messages revealed a strong anti-Trump animus. Before he was canned, though, Clinesmith doctored a crucial evidentiary email to say that former Trump-campaign national security adviser Carter Page was “not a source” for the CIA — when in fact the email from a CIA official stated exactly the opposite. Page had been working for the CIA and thus shouldn’t have come under FBI suspicion of being a Russian asset. The willful alteration of that email was hugely significant because it helped the FBI obtain its FISA warrant to spy on Page, and ultimately on then-candidate Trump himself.
So, for his part in a willful attempt to subvert and ultimately remove a duly elected president, Clinesmith was sentenced by an Obama judge to 12 months’ probation and 400 hours of community service.
We aren’t a federal prosecutor, but it seems to us that Durham should’ve squeezed the cider out of Clinesmith; should’ve held a maximum sentence over his head until he told the world just who ordered him to doctor that email. Because if there’s one thing we can be sure of, it’s that Clinesmith didn’t think to do it all by his mid-level-bureaucratic self.
“We’ve been waiting and waiting,” said former Trump spokesman Sean Spicer, “and told hold our breath there’s more coming — just be patient, be patient. This is — I don’t even think disappointing does justice to how bad this is. This is just — after everything that the Right has been through and all of the misallegations and misappropriation and the ‘Russia, Russia, Russia’ that was taken us through the first couple years of this Trump administration. To see this all go down the tubes, and all of the faith put into this special counsel, John Durham, unbelievably disappointing.”
You’re telling us.
Two-tiered justice is alive and well in The Swamp — one tier for Republicans and another tier for Democrats.
POSTSCRIPT: It’s been said here in our humble shop and elsewhere that even without criminal convictions and prison sentences, the Durham probe has done us the service of having exposed the Spygate scheme and its Deep-State players. While that’s certainly true, it only applies to the small slice of the citizenry that pays attention to such things. History tends to note — and the people tend to remember — the big things rather than the little ones, the straightforward results rather than the subtle backstories, the convictions for conspiracy rather than the acquittals for false statements.