The Patriot Post® · Where Does Spygate Go From Here?
It came as little surprise given the makeup of the Washington, DC, jury that John Durham failed to win a conviction against Michael Sussmann for lying to the FBI. As constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley observed, “With the exception of randomly selecting people out of the DNC headquarters, you could not come up with a worse jury.” And as our own Douglas Andrews asserted, a rigged jury from the DC Swamp assured that Hillary Clinton’s lawyer wasn’t about to receive a guilty verdict.
So, was Durham’s investigation all for naught? It would be tempting to conclude as much, though to do so would miss the important truths that Durham has exposed cementing the reality that the bogus Russia collusion story was entirely weaved out of whole cloth by the Clinton campaign, and furthermore that high officials in Barack Obama’s Justice Department were more than willing to play along in a plot they knew was a hoax from the very beginning.
Donald Trump’s former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe noted that the verdict was not just, yet he argued, “I’m optimistic that not only will [Durham] be successful in some of the ongoing prosecutions, but can expand the indictments that he wants to bring given the involvement of certain FBI officials in spreading a false narrative to the American people.” Durham’s investigation has changed the narrative regarding Spygate — there’s no longer talk of Russian collusion, but rather the focus has turned to the “Clinton conspiracy.”
As Byron York noted last week: “We learned that a senior FBI agent involved in the Trump-Russia investigation, Joe Pientka, sent a note to another agent about the Alfa-Bank tip: ‘People on the 7th floor to include Director are fired up about this server. Reachout and put tools on … it’s not an option — we must do it.’ The FBI building’s seventh floor is where top management, including then-Director James Comey, had offices.”
Former Attorney General William Barr echoed Ratcliffe’s view. “First, I think [Durham] crystallized the central role played by the Hillary campaign and launching as a dirty trick the whole Russiagate collusion narrative and fanning the flames of it,” he said. “And, second, I think he exposed really dreadful behavior by the supervisors in the FBI, the senior ranks of the FBI, who knowingly used this information to start an investigation of Trump and then duped their own agents by lying to them and refusing to tell them what the real source of that information was. And that was appalling.”
Where does Durham go from here? Durham has charged Igor Danchenko, a primary source for British ex-spy Christopher Steele in his infamous dossier, with five counts of lying to the FBI. That trial is scheduled to begin in October. But once again, the value of Durham’s investigation is that it has exposed and put on the record the corrupt actions of both the Clinton campaign and officials within the Justice Department. It would still be good to get a guilty verdict or two.