Bull Durham's [Not A Real] Report

The Duran guys have come up with the shrewdest assessment of the Bull Durham report I’ve seen so far. They articulate my initial reaction—that I wasn’t seeing anything that you and I and anyone else who had followed the news didn’t already pretty much know.

Alex Christoforou starts the exchange by wryly noting that it turns out that Durham is a real person, he really exists, and he has produced a real report. Trump has been vindicate, the Russia Hoax really was a hoax—no big surprises.

Alexander Mercouris guffaws at this and responds that what Durham has given us isn’t a real report at all.

What [Durham] has given us is an awful lot more detail on what we already knew, but he has completely left unresolved lots and lots of issues.

For example. Bull 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 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.

But there’s no reason for Mifsud—wherever he happens to be—to feel slighted. There are others who get the same treatment from Bull. Prominent among them is Rod Rosenstein. My search did turn up three references to Rod, but none were of any substance. Somehow I doubt that Rod feels miffed at this treatment. This passage from a smart post at CTH suggests—while somehow avoiding naming Rod—why that would be so. Below will be the heart of what CTH has to say. Note two things first:

(1) In the footnote Bull explicitly states that, since his investigative authorities did not specifically order him to “consider the handling of the investigation into President Trump opened by the FBI on May 16, 2017, he didn’t do so. What he’s referring to is the Mueller Witchhunt. However,

(2) the Mueller Witchhunt, the Special Counsel investigation, was explicitly predicated upon the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation—which Bull correctly states had no basis whatsover and never should have been opened. That means that the Mueller Witchhunt was simply a continuation of Crossfire Hurricane and was authorized by Rod Rosenstein, although Bull doesn’t give poor Rod the credit that is his due.

So, here’s CTH:

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.

Durham writes a 316-page report, meticulously detailing the false construct of the Trump-Russia narrative.  Yet for some reason, the Mueller/Weissmann investigation, an entire special counsel investigation that was predicated and justified by that false Trump-Russia narrative, never found the same evidence?

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.

In what seems now like another life I devoted any amount of time to this issue. Here’s how I put it in one of several posts:

You may recall that Rod Rosenstein's initial authorization letter for a Special Counsel, dated May 17, 2017, outlined the scope of Team Mueller's authorized investigation in the broadest terms. Basically that letter stated, in a guarded fashion, that Mueller was to continue the Crossfire Hurricane investigation as described by disgraced former FBI Director James Comey in testimony before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence on March 20, 2017. Comey had described an investigation of "four Americans."

The substantially unredacted copy of the second Rosenstein "scope memo" largely confirms that. It states that Team Mueller is authorized to investigate the four Americans--Carter Page, Paul Manafort, George Papadopoulos, and Michael Flynn. A fifth subject's name remains redacted, along with the allegations against that fifth subject.

With regard to the first three subjects--Page, Manafort, and Papadopoulos--the primary and precipitating allegation is the same. Each is alleged to have:

Committed a crime or crimes by colluding with Russian government officials with respect to the Russian government's efforts to interfere with the 2016 election for President of the United States, in violation of United States law;

Please note that these allegations were definitively known to be a hoax perpetrated by the Clinton campaign no later than January, 2017. [That’s a reference to the Steele “Dossier” and Danchenko.] We have Devin Nunes' word for it, and there is no reason to doubt Nunes, since he's been consistently on the money. Further, shortly before Team Mueller was created, in early May, 2017, the FBI official in hands on control of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation, Peter Strzok, stated in a text to FBI lawer Lisa Page that they both knew that a Special Counsel investigation was likely to be a dry hole, that there was likely "no there there."

And yet. 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. Recall Jonathan Turley’s key points:

Here are what [Turley] see as five key points that the media should—but won’t—dig into:

(1) There was never a foundation for the launching of the Russian collusion investigation that occupied most of the Trump presidency.

(2) Salacious reports like the Moscow hotel tape appear to be entirely invented by the Steele team funded by the Clinton campaign.

(3) the Steele dossier was not only funded and pushed by the Clinton campaign, but General Counsel Marc Elias pushed the media campaign (and later refused to cooperate voluntarily with investigators).

(4) DOJ and FBI officials violated core departmental standards, including some [who had] … a "predisposition" to investigate Trump.

(5) [T]he lack of support and contradictions of these allegations were clear from the outset.

Again: From the start. They—everyone who really mattered—knew it was bullshit all along. Just as we all did. How did it take so long for Durham to write that report?

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.

Which isn’t to say that the Bull Non-Report doesn’t contain worthwhile confirming information. Susan Schmidt provides an 8 point sorta vignette that lays out the enormity of this hoax:

"Damn, That's Thin", "I Know", "It Sucks": The Untold Story Of The Trump-Russia Investigation

Here’s a brief excerpt to show how bad it was. To understand this, you need to know that UKALAT means the FBI’s top liaison official in London—a highly sensitive and responsible position:

3. “It’s thin”; “There’s nothing to this.”

A message exchange on August 11, 2016 between the attaché and the supervisory agent shows the Americans were as skeptical as the British.

UKALAT-1: Dude, are we telling them [British Intelligence Service-I] everything we know, or is there more to this?

Supervisory Special Agent-1: That’s all we have.

Supervisory Special Agent-I: not holding anything back

UKALAT-1: Damn that’s thin

Supervisory Special Agent-I: I know

Supervisory Special Agent-I: it sucks

4. The Trump campaign investigation was premised on “raw, unanalyzed and uncorroborated intelligence,” and U.S. intel agencies possessed no “actual evidence of collusion” when the probe began

According to Durham, the senior FBI officials who ordered the probe did not look at the Bureau’s intelligence databases, or consult its experienced Russia analysts, who could have told them they had seen no information about Donald Trump being involved with Russian leadership officials.

Nor did they seek such information about Trump and Russia from the CIA, the NSA or the State Department.

“Neither US law enforcement nor the intelligence community appears to have possessed any actual evidence of collusion” when the investigation began, the report said.

Further, the FBI opened a full-scale investigation “without ever having spoken to the persons who provided the information.”

Schmidt also goes into the business of Brennan’s referral letter to the FBI sharing with them what he had previously communicated to Obama, Biden, Loretta Lynch, Comey, and all the Intel Cabal heads—that Hillary was about to launch a Russia Hoax (actually, it had already started in the MSM). Devin Nunes goes into this Brennan business in a video interview which I’ve transcribed, and which presents a chilling summary of the implications:

I take this from my early perusing of the report. The Department of Justice and the FBI are solely owned by the Democrat Party and their propaganda machine. This Durham report oughta scare the hell out of everyone because--think about this--it's only gotten worse since this time period! We're talkin' about 2016 and 2017 and 2018. This changed the course of human history. It changed the course of our elections. Remember--we had to sit through year after year after year of Trump and Republicans having something to do with Russia. Even to this day you have lunatics who say that every single day. So the Department of Justice, the FBI--congratulations! You scumbags! You have successfully poisoned the minds of millions of Americans, while at the same time you're gonna have half of America--including myself--who doesn't trust anything the Department of Justice or the FBI have to say. That's what they've accomplished.

[Obama and Biden were both briefed that the Russia Hoax was, in fact, a hoax but did nothing to stop it--they even helped spread the lie.]

This is an interesting part that I've quickly looked at. There was this idea that John Brennan, the Director of the CIA, had gone to Obama, Biden, etc. and had briefed them that this was a plot by the Hillary Clinton campaign. Now, that was in July-August of 2016 that that happened. Now fast forward--and I know this was a long time ago for everyone, but let me just remind you. In late 2016 Obama initiates an Intelligence Community Assessment to see what Vladimir Putin did with the Trump campaign. Remember that? And we got a report done in a matter of just a few weeks--it was the fastest government has ever acted. That was done right in time for, what? Right before President Trump assumes office. But this doesn't square either. We have Brennan who--now we know--was part of the 51 spies who lied, who already knew this [the Russia Hoax] was a Clinton Campaign stunt, he testifies multiple times before Congress--I mean, he came and briefed me, Gang of Eight--you had Comey, Brennan, all of these guys in early January right before Trump takes office who knew that this was a Clinton Campaign stunt, yet they continued to lie to the American public and to Congress. Why would those guys never have testified, why would they never have said to the United States Congress during our investigation, I'm talking 2017, why would they not come and say, 'Hey, we know this was a Clinton Campaign stunt, we knew it back in 16, we briefed President Obama and Biden.' That's why this is so damned dirty and corrupt and I think we're gonna learn a lot more as we read through it.

[In light of the Durham Report what does Nunes think of the Biden corruption investigations and the "stunning" fact that witnesses are missing?]

Actually, I'm not stunned at all. Here's why--and I've actually been warning my former Republican colleagues, 'Be ready, because they've gotten away with everything from 2016 to today.' They spied on me, they got subpoenas against my lawyers, the Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, the Department of Justice [Rod Rosenstein] went and got subpoenas against my lawyers while I was conducting an investigation--we're supposed to be a separate branch of government--they put my lawyers under subpoena, got all their emails, bank records, everything else, effectively reverse spying on me. So, if they would do that back in 2017, huh! you think that people wouldn't go missing? This is what Comer and Jordan and company hafta watch out for, because we're dealing with a very corrupt Department of Justice and FBI at this point.

It was a coup, plain and simple. Not just about Hillary’s emails. Not by a long shot. And they’ll all skate.

Anyway, to wind up, here’s that The Duran segment—you’ll like it: