The Patriot Post® · The American Experiment Is Failing

It’s said that you can’t fall off the floor — meaning that at a certain bottoming-out point, there’s nowhere to go but up. Somehow, though, the floor keeps resettling itself underneath us.

The latest example of this was the release of the Durham report, which offered a scathing indictment — so to speak — of the FBI’s collaboration with the Democrat Party to first destroy Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and then, barring that, to destroy his presidency.

Special Counsel John Durham did officially expose the bureau’s treacherous Crossfire Hurricane investigation operation, and it also implicated “scandal-free” Barack Obama with this all-but-ignored smoking gun from the report: “According to his handwritten notes, CIA Director Brennan subsequently briefed President Obama and other senior national security officials [Joe Biden, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, and FBI Director James Comey] on the intelligence, including the ‘alleged approval by Hillary Clinton on July 26, 2016, of a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisors to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by Russian security services.’”

High-level dirty trickery and political corruption such as this is usually reserved for banana republics.

Of course, this revelation was utterly ignored by our mainstream media, which ho-hummed the entire 306-page report and refused to call attention to its deeply troubling conclusions. Ask an average American about the Durham report and you’ll likely get a shrug of the shoulders. Media bias and the ignorance it breeds bodes ill for a constitutional republic, which relies on an informed citizenry. Thus, when our Fourth Estate refuses to fairly and dispassionately report objective truths, it becomes a fifth column.

Perhaps more ominous than media bias, though, is that Durham’s years-long investigation failed to secure any criminal convictions other than a wrist-slap against a low-level FBI cutout, Kevin Clinesmith, for altering evidence in order to secure a FISA warrant that was then used by the bureau to spy on Donald Trump. Are we to believe that Clinesmith did this entirely on his own initiative? Such a suggestion is laughable. But such is the nature of political trials in Washington, DC, a rigged town that votes nine-to-one for Democrats. This gross imbalance poisons the fairness and impartiality of a prospective jury pool, reduces the likelihood that the Left will be held to account for its crimes against the Right, and thereby all but guarantees the recurrence of such criminality.

Ours is not a healthy republic. Otherwise, its people would cast informed votes, Rule of Law would be respected and enforced, and smarmy sleazebags like Peter Strzok would end up behind bars rather than defending the indefensible on MSNBC.

Last week, The Federalist’s Margot Cleveland called attention to perhaps the most alarming part of the Durham report: the special counsel’s conclusion that the illness of our FBI can’t be fixed by merely enacting legal and procedural reforms. She wrote: “Monday’s special counsel report detailed extensive evidence of Department of Justice and FBI misconduct concerning the launch and handling of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation, and equally overwhelming proof of partisan motives and double standards. While the facts are critical of both the bureau and the DOJ, more scandalous is John Durham’s conclusion that the inexcusable targeting of a political opponent cannot be prevented absent a curing of the corrupted hearts and minds of law enforcement and intelligence agencies.”

Hearts and minds. Those aren’t Cleveland’s words; they’re John Durham’s words. And they point to something far more fundamental than that which might be fixed with a few procedural safeguards. At the conclusion of his executive summary, Durham wrote the following:

This report does not recommend any wholesale changes in the guidelines and policies that the Department and the FBI now have in place to ensure proper conduct and accountability in how counterintelligence activities are carried out. Rather, it is intended to accurately describe the matters that fell under our review and to assist the Attorney General in determining how the Department and the FBI can do a better, more credible job in fulfilling its responsibilities, and in analyzing and responding to politically charged allegations in the future. Ultimately, of course, meeting those responsibilities comes down to the integrity of the people who take an oath to follow the guidelines and policies currently in place, guidelines that date from the time of Attorney General Levi and that are designed to ensure the rule of law is upheld. As such, the answer is not the creation of new rules but a renewed fidelity to the old. The promulgation of additional rules and regulations to be learned in yet more training sessions would likely prove to be a fruitless exercise if the FBI’s guiding principles of “Fidelity, Bravery and Integrity” are not engrained in the hearts and minds of those sworn to meet the FBI’s mission.

And what might that mission be? “To uphold the Constitution and protect the American people.” Can anyone say with a straight face that the FBI has lately lived up to either aspect of that critical mission and that solemn oath?

“The answer,” as he rightly put it, “is not the creation of new rules but a renewed fidelity to the old.” Whether intended or not, it’s an assessment that has implications far beyond this one investigation.