On Eve of 'RussiaGate' Trial, Questions Loom About Special Counsel Durham

With final preparations underway this week for one of the most politically explosive federal prosecutions in years, U.S. Justice Department Special Counsel John H. Durham’s record reveals legal error that undercuts his image as straight-shooting seeker of justice.

In a 2008 ruling that has never been reported by a major news outlet, a New York federal appeals court vacated bribery, wire fraud and racketeering convictions because a team led by Durham, left, then the Deputy U.S. Attorney in Connecticut (and Acting U.S. attorney for supervising the prosecution), illegally withheld evidence that could have helped federal defendant Charles Spadoni defend himself in a corruption case.

Past performance is relevant now because Durham’s three-year probe of alleged illegality pertaining to the 2016 U.S. presidential election is reaching a pivotal and controversial juncture with the trial next month of the prominent cyberlaw attorney Michael Sussmann, right, on a claim that Sussmann falsely denied that he was representing Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton when he sought to alert FBI general counsel James Baker in the fall of 2016 to suspicions of Russian interference.

Sussmann, his attorneys and some independent commentators have denied wrongdoing and claimed that the prosecution is exceptionally weak and also tainted by political partisanship by Durham, a career prosecutor who was also nominated by President Trump for the political post of U.S. attorney for Connecticut.

Pretrial motions will be heard Wednesday before U.S. District Judge Christopher R. Cooper in Washington’s federal court. The trial is scheduled to begin May 16.

Durham’s case against Sussmann, a former partner at the DC office of the firm Perkins Coie, has generated enormous interest in the national press and especially in pro-Trump circles because some in the Trump camp regard it as their last best hope to vindicate Trump’s 2016 election victory as a purely American popular effort, and thereby debunk claims that Russia and its operatives were interfering in the 2016 election to hurt Clinton and other Democrats.

Sussman and his defenders, on the other hand, have defended his actions as both non-criminal and reasonable, particularly in view of what they see as confirmed threats to the elections process posed by Russians, Trump and their allies. Sussmann’s defense lawyers accused Durham, for example, of promoting a “baseless narrative that the Clinton campaign conspired with others to trick the federal government into investigating ties between President Trump and Russia.”

Sussmann’s attorneys also have pointed to evidentiary problems in Durham’s case, including the lack of contemporary notes by the key FBI witness, James Baker, to support the Durham prosecution team’s allegation that Sussmann criminally deceived Baker regarding his relevant clients.

The case, in other words, has come to be regarded in some quarters as either a rigorous and fearless application of the law by Durham and his team — or, conversely, as an example of over-zealous overreach by an unaccountable prosecutor suspected of bringing a baseless prosecution to foster pro-Trump politics.

A consistent theme in the news accounts exploring the Durham investigation is that prosecutor and his team, including Nora R. Dannehy, a former Acting U.S. Attorney in Connecticut and longtime Durham colleague, bring to their work outstanding reputations as career prosecutors long entrusted to fulfill their responsibilities with the highest standards of professional expertise and justice-seeking.

And that is why the 2008 federal court decision finding serious shortcomings in their Spadoni prosecution carries continuing importance, especially because it is so little known.

Here’s the story, “New Questions Raised About Prosecutor Who Cleared Bush Officials in U.S. Attorney Firings,” which we at the Justice Integrity Project originally reported in 2010 in Nieman Watchdog, a niche website published by Harvard University and edited by Barry Sussman, left, the former Watergate editor of the Washington Post who supervised its coverage of that scandal. Sussman (no relation to Michael Sussmann) is also the author of the recently released fifth edition of The Great Cover-up, a widely praised account of the Watergate probe.

That Nieman Watchdog story, focusing primarily the appointment of Durham and Dannehy as special counsel investigating allegations of CIA and Justice Department misconduct. It began this way:

“Four days before Nora Dannehy was appointed to investigate the Bush administration’s U.S. attorney firing scandal, a team of lawyers she led was found to have illegally suppressed evidence in a major political corruption case…..[T]his previously unreported fact calls her entire investigation into question as well as that of a similar investigation by her colleague John Durham of DOJ and CIA decision-making involving torture.”

The New York-based U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals had ruled that Durham’s team should have known that the Spadoni defense was entitled to an FBI’s agent’s notes, which could have been used by Spadoni to argue that his conduct was legal.

The three-judge court ruled unanimously in vacating the major convictions against Spadoni, right. Judges held that the evidence unconstitutionally withheld might have helped Spadoni’s defense against prosecution claims that he and his employer, Triumph Capital, Inc., illegally conspired to hire a political consultant in hopes of winning a major contract from the State of Connecticut.

U.S. District Judge John Gleeson, left, a former federal prosecutor, authored the opinion, which is available here. It did not name the federal prosecutors at fault but the case caption and relevant filings were signed by Durham and Dannehy as the most senior attorneys.

Widespread Praise

Durham and Dannehy have achieved widespread praise and career advancement as special prosecutors entrusted with reviewing several of the most sensitive Justice Department controversies of recent years. These include investigations of suppression of evidence, partisan prosecutions or other alleged serious wrongdoing by Justice Department and CIA personnel in major proceedings of historic stature.

That pattern continued after May 2019, when the Trump-appointed Attorney General William Barr named Durham, later assisted by Dannehy, to investigate the Trump team’s claims that the FBI and other Justice Department concocted phony claims of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election along with Democratic operatives associated with Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

Tabloids, pro-Trump media outlets and some leftist critics of the Democratic Party have labeled the claims of Russian interference “RussiaGate” in many news stories and commentaries that suggest that Russian “interference” is colossal fraud on par with the Nixon-era scandal of the 1972 break-in by GOP and CIA operatives of the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington, DC.

Typical of such coverage are editorials by the Rupert Murdoch-owned New York Post, including a headline in February, Eyes turn to Hillary Clinton, not Trump in the Russiagate scandal. A headline last fall was The real ‘collusion’ was the creation of ‘RussiaGate’ out of absolutely nothing. Fox News, pro-Trump Republican officers and many bloggers have similarly advanced arguments that Trump and Russians have been falsely accused.

John Durham: ‘The Legendary Lawman’

National Review columnist Jim Geraghty was even more forceful in a 2019 column headlined The Last Trusted Prosecutor in Washington, and subtitled: John Durham is the legendary lawman digging into how the intelligence probe of Donald Trump started. It began:

John Durham may be the most consequential and least known figure in Washington right now.

In May, U.S. attorney general William Barr (right) selected Durham, a longtime prosecutor with a résumé so sterling it nearly glows, to investigate the origins of the special counsel’s probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election, and whether it was properly predicated. Some Trump fans believe there was a vast effort by a “deep state” of high-ranking intelligence and law-enforcement officials to smear Trump or hinder his campaign by creating a perception of corrupt ties to Russia. In late October, the New York Times quoted unnamed sources who said that Durham’s probe had officially become a criminal investigation, meaning he now has the power to subpoena for witness testimony and documents, to convene a grand jury, and to file criminal charges.

Since he is an attorney general appointed by President Trump, almost every decision from William Barr is criticized by Democrats as a partisan abuse of law-enforcement powers. But the appointment of Durham received no backlash, and in fact received praise far and wide.

Who is Durham, this rare-as-a-unicorn figure who can reassure lawmakers, talking heads, and court-watchers on both sides of the aisle, in an era when everything seems destined to turn into a loud partisan food fight?

To say Durham is tight-lipped is an understatement; he lets his courtroom arguments speak for him and rarely talks to reporters at all. Those who have covered him for years — or, more accurately, tried to cover him — say that when he does run into reporters, he is cordial but uninformative, and almost never on the record. In Durham’s questionnaire for the Senate while awaiting confirmation to be a U.S. Attorney, he was asked to list his written work. He answered that he had never written or published any books, articles, reports, or letters to the editor.

By contrast, an analysis headlined Russiagate Was Not a Hoax in 2020 by staff writer Franklin Foer argued that the 2017 to 2019 investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, a former FBI Director, and a bipartisan report by the Republican-chaired Senate Intelligence Committee showed that Russians seriously interfered with the 2016 elections and were well-positioned to do so in the future. Similar themes have been advanced in court and by such books as the “Proof” trilogy (Proof of Collusion, Proof of Conspiracy and Proof of Corruption) by Seth Abramson, right, House of Trump, House of Putin by Craig Unger and Russian Roulette by Michael Isikoff and David Corn.

Back-and-forth argumentation on the seriousness of threats began during the post-election transition to the Trump presidency when FBI personnel warned Trump that his campaign advisor Michael Flynn, a retired general and former Defense Intelligence Agency director, was falsely denying Russian contacts while Trump was in the process of naming Flynn to be the first National Security Advisor in 2017. Flynn, shown at left in a 2016 photo by Gage Skidmore, later pled guilty to federal charges, tried to withdraw his plea and ultimately received a pardon from Trump while helping lead a MAGA movement to have Clinton and her campaign personnel prosecuted.

U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan, who presided over the Flynn case, appointed Gleeson, by then a former judge, to serve as a special master to sort through the legal options when a such a defendant seeks to withdraw a guilty plea even after the kind of thorough plea admission that Sullivan had supervised, as our Justice Integrity Project witnessed in covering the case. But the Trump-Barr Justice Department short-circuited the prosecution by dropping it, thereby protecting Flynn, an ardent admirer of Trump famed also for leading campaign rally chants of “Lock her up!” demonizing Clinton.

Another oddity in Durham’s prosecution background is that retired FBI special agent Robert Fitzpatrick co-authored a 2011 memoir that criticized Durham for as essentially whitewashing an investigation that is usually cited as one of Durham’s finest achievements. In Betrayal: Whitey Bulger and the FBI Agent Who Fought to Bring Him Down, Fitzpatrick and co-author Jon Land wrote about Durham’s work in Boston after appointment by Attorney General Janet Reno to investigation Justice Department misconduct documented by U.S. District Judge Mark Wolf in a special report documenting coddling of Bulger’s gang by Justice Department personnel who were using them as informants against Mafia leaders being prosecuted before Wolf.

Fitzpatrick claimed credit for initiating the investigation of the Bulger gang and FBI wrongdoing, and complained that higher levels of the Justice Department were thwarting him. He wrote that Durham took an easy compromise by targeting only the most obvious culprint, former FBI Boston supervisor John Connolly, who is currently serving a life sentence for murder conspiracy.

“Nobody in this country is above the law, an FBI agent or otherwise,” Fitzpatrick quoted Durham as saying at Connolly’s sentencing, thereby “seeming to indicate a plan or at least an intention, to pursue other guilty parties.”

Fitzpatrick continued:

Nothing could be further from the truth. More than a decade later now, no additional arrests or prosecutions have taken place in spite of the fact that I and a number of other law enforcers laid out all the evidence of corruption and leaking for Durham. We basically served up everything he needed on a silver platter, which he ignored then and has continued to ignore since.

A further oddity is that the Justice Department then prosecuted its retired agent Fitzpatrick for false statement for material in his memoir and elsewhere. He pleaded guilty. Neither he nor his co-author were available for comment when our Justice Integrity Project tried to contact them.

Government Accountability

There are many aspects of the current Durham investigation and his overall career that have wide commentary, sometimes at book length. But this column will use an appendix below to summarize a diverse array of such commentary, and instead focus in our remaining space on a couple of over-arching themes.

First is that Durham’s overall career success is publicly premised on the image that the public can rely on Durham and as few other high-ranking prosecutors like his longtime colleague Dannehy to enforce justice even-handedly, not just against private attorneys like Sussmann and Spadoni, but also against federal agents suspected of illegal or unethical conduct, as in their probes of CIA officers who destroyed torture evidence or the Justice Department and White House operatives involved in the 2006 U.S. attorney firing scandal.

That’s government accountability, in sum, at least according to popular understanding, as reinforced by commentaries who increasingly lack the time and sources to penetrate the tight-knit world of high-level law enforcement.

And tight knit it is, and almost opaque to legislative oversight, much less to reporters and the rest of the public. Durham and Dannehy, right, spent much of the past three decades working in the Connecticut U.S. attorneys office. So did Dannehy’s husband, Leonard Boyle, now the interim U.S. attorney running the office responsible for all federal criminal and civil litigation involving Connecticut, albeit under the overall supervision of the U.S. attorney general’s staff at “Main Justice” in Washington, DC. 

All of these officials have made a virtue out of silence and secrecy except in court filings and appearances, as Boyle boasted of Durham in a rare if not unique public appearance by both of them in 2018 at a special lecture / tribute honoring Durham’s career arranged by the University of St. Joseph. As reported by Jim Geraghty in his 2019 National Review column The Last Trusted Prosecutor in Washington: 

To say Durham is tight-lipped is an understatement; he lets his courtroom arguments speak for him and rarely talks to reporters at all. Those who have covered him for years — or, more accurately, tried to cover him — say that when he does run into reporters, he is cordial but uninformative, and almost never on the record.

The only time Durham has offered public remarks on his work was in a March 2018 lecture at the University of St. Joseph in West Hartford, Conn. Durham was introduced by his friend of three decades and frequent prosecutorial partner, Leonard C. Boyle, the deputy chief state’s attorney in Connecticut, and Boyle observed, “At least three members of the press are here tonight, because they probably realize that this may be their only chance to hear John speak about his work, other than in a courtroom. He’s notoriously shy about speaking about himself.”

The impenetrability of such decision-making, while undoubtedly legally correct in most instances, nonetheless carries a potential cost in public accountability when suspicions arise that decision-makers are neither fair nor error free. That has happened on several occasions with both Durham and Dannehy even beyond the Sussmann and Spadoni cases.

For still-mysterious reasons, for example, Dannehy dropped off Durham’s current investigation in the fall of 2020, shortly before the presidential election.

Only Ed Mahony, the longtime star courts reporter for the Hartford Courant, reported for any mainstream publication any indication of her reason for resigning. And even his reporting conveyed in essence a mere hint of unhappiness, based on unidentified sourcing, about the probe’s direction.

That is very thin fare for the public to understand a continuing multi-million-dollar investigation about the integrity of the two major political parties 2016 presidential campaigns and the overall honesty of the FBI, particularly as controversies continue to simmer and while claims of Russian election interference in 2016 have morphed into fears of continuing election threats, enhanced by fallout from the Russian invasion of Ukraine.  

Notable also is that both Durham and Dannehy advanced their reputations and careers by appointments to investigate wrongdoing at the Justice Department regarding the 2006 U.S. Attorneys firing scandal, for Dannehy, and destruction of torture evidence by CIA personnel, Durham’s probe. In both instances, the investigators of the major national scandals found no wrongdoing worthy of any significant sanction. Close scrutiny of Dannehy’s probe, which most reporters or watchdog officials are not in a position to provide, indicated that she interviewed only one of the eight (or arguably nine) of the 93 U.S. attorneys the Bush Administration fired for allegedly political reasons.

Their decision-making was attacked at the time as whitewashing major government scandals that ruined countless lives via unmerited prosecutions. Where is the accountability for any of that?

When the power and majesty of the U.S. Justice Department are brought to bear upon an individual almost everyone pleads guilty. A vigorous defense can easily cost a million dollars in a case like Spadoni’s or Sussman’s. Spadoni, who lost his law license from the prosecution begun in 1999 and thus his ability to make a professional income, and who served a year in jail for deleting from his computer two contracts that proved to be non-existent before the federal prosecution geared up, says his legal costs were more than $5 million, albeit mostly covered by insurance.

Whatever the costs, most people do not have either those kinds of resources or a desire to subject their family and friends to the process, which can often include threats of dubious prosecutions against family and friends to pressure a primary defendant.

One of the great heroes of modern American civic life, the Pennsylvania coroner, author and medical school professor Cyril H. Wecht, M.D., J.D., below, now aged 91, faced legal bills of more than $8 million because he was targeted in 2006 with more than 80 felony charges in a political prosecution. More than 40 of them were “wire fraud” felony charges for using a fax machine for personal use in his part-time job as county coroner, with the total cost to county government calculated by Wecht’s attorneys as less than $3 in ink and telephone charges.

Clearly, some politically ambitious or vengeful personnel at the Justice Department wanted put him in prison for the rest of his life following his long career of rendering independent judgments on the cause of death in more than 500 autopsies a year (and more than 600 in 2021). These included analysis of many high-profile deaths where his independent judgment might conflict with those of police and prosecutors. He performed an autopsy on the imprisoned murderer and former federal informant James “Whitey” Bulger, for example.

His more than 60 books, including textbooks used to train fellow forensic pathologists in medical schools, include two recent ones, The JFK Assassination Dissected and his memoir, The Life and Deaths of Cyril H. Wecht. 

Wecht’s primary prosecutor in 2006, Mary Beth Buchanan, was a politically connected Justice Department executive at Main Justice who had supervised of all U.S. attorneys nationally during the George W. Bush presidency. In leading the prosecution against Wecht, she was gearing up for a future campaign for a Pennsylvania congressional seat.

But her prosecution and political career faltered after Wecht was able to win transfer of his case away from a hostile judge and towards a new one, who pressured the government to dismiss the case.

Not everyone has the will power and connections of a Wecht in perservering to win such a victory. In his case, he won wide support in his Metro Pittsburgh community and via his law team, which included former U.S. Attorney General Dick Thornburgh.

The federal oversight investigation by Dannehy, now counsel to Connecticut’s Gov. Ned Lamont, had nothing to say about that, with no record of even interviewing victims or prosecutors aside from fired New Mexico U.S. Attorney David Iglesias. Her oversight probe, which we have described previously as a whitewash, thereby provided the most superficial illusion possible of effective oversight of massive injustice around the nation in numerous such cases that our organization and others were documenting, much like Durham’s similar probe of CIA wrongdoing.

Judgment Day Looms

The day is fast approaching when Michael Sussmann, another intrepid but doubtless beleaguered defendant, will put Durham and his current investigation to the test. Following a pre-trial hearing on April 27, Sussman’s trial is scheduled to begin on May 16. Your reporter from the Justice Integrity Project will be among the those covering developments, including the jury’s verdict on Sussmann — and in effect on Durham and the rest of like-minded Justice Department officials.

Contact the author Andrew Kreig

Justice Integrity Project Editor Andrew Kreig was assigned by the Hartford Courant, Connecticut’s largest news organization, to cover federal courts from 1976 to 1981. He later served as law clerk to Judge Mark Wolf in Boston from 1990-91 during the judge’s pre-trial oversight of a federal rackeeting case against seven leaders of the New England Mafia, including Raymond Patriarca, Jr., that evolved into the judge’s scrutiny of federal prosecution methods. Any opinions expressed in this column are purely the author’s, with no input from either the newspaper or judge. 

  Related News Coverage

2022

April 19

Politico, Trump suit against Clinton could sustain secrecy on origins of dossier, Josh Gerstein and Kyle Cheney, April 19, 2022. Lawyers contend the former president’s new court foray backs their claims of attorney-client privilege.

The sprawling lawsuit that former President Donald Trump filed recently against former rival Hillary Clinton could, perversely, boost Clinton allies’ ongoing legal efforts to shield details of their anti-Trump political efforts from public scrutiny.

Lawyers for private investigation firm Fusion GPS argued in court filings released Tuesday that Trump’s newly filed racketeering suit bolsters their effort to conceal specifics of the firm’s work with the 2016 Clinton campaign via attorney-client privilege. Trump and his allies have long targeted Fusion, which commissioned the controversial Steele Dossier making salacious and at times unsupported allegations about Trump’s ties to Russia.

Now, top Clinton allies argued in legal papers Tuesday, the details of confidential discussions about the dossier should remain secret in part because Trump’s famous litigiousness — underscored by his new, factually questionable lawsuit — was at the heart of Democrats’ decision to hire Fusion in the first place.

The Clinton campaign and the DNC have long maintained that the dossier prepared for Fusion by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele was part of legal work done by the campaign’s general counsel, Marc Elias, left. However, Elias has never publicly explained what work that was or precisely how Fusion GPS fit into it.

April 13

Washington Post, Judge lets Durham case against Democrat-connected lawyer go to trial, Matt Zapotosky, April 13, 2022. The judge rejected Michael Sussmann’s motion to dismiss the case.

A federal judge on Wednesday refused to dismiss Special Counsel John Durham’s criminal case against Democratically connected lawyer Michael Sussmann, right, paving the way for the matter to head to trial.

The six-page ruling was highly technical, and the judge did not offer a resounding endorsement of the special counsel’s case. But it was an undeniable win for Durham, and sets the stage for a high-profile courtroom showdown next month.

Sussmann was charged in September with lying to the FBI. By Durham’s account, Sussmann claimed he was approaching the bureau’s general counsel in 2016 with potentially damaging information about then-candidate Donald Trump on his own, when in fact he was doing so on behalf of a tech executive he represented and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

John Durham, left, has a stellar reputation for investigating corruption. Some fear his work for Barr could tarnish it.

Sussmann has pleaded not guilty in the case and argued in a motion to dismiss the case that even if he did as Durham alleged, that would not be a federal crime.

The motion hinged on whether the purported lie Sussmann told the bureau — that he was not representing any client — was “material,” or relevant, to what the bureau did. Sussmann argued it was not and asserted that charging tipsters who might hide their motive from federal law enforcement could have a chilling effect on those who might otherwise approach with information.

Judge Christopher R. Cooper, right, indicated it was possible Sussmann’s arguments might ultimately prove right, but legal precedent required the matter to first go to trial.

“Indeed, all the cases Sussmann cites where courts have found alleged false statements to be immaterial were decided after a trial and on appeal from post-trial motions …,” the judge wrote. “So, while Sussmann is correct that certain statements might be so peripheral or unimportant to a relevant agency decision or function to be immaterial … as matter of law, the Court is unable to make that determination as to this alleged statement before hearing the government’s evidence.”

Durham’s team argued Sussmann’s lie was relevant. Had the bureau known that Sussmann was approaching on behalf of two clients with political interests, they might have asked more questions about the source of his information or taken different investigative steps, a Durham prosecutor said at a recent court hearing.

The information Sussmann presented was computer data showing possibly nefarious computer connections between the Trump Organization, which is the former president’s business entity, and a Russian financial institution known as Alfa Bank. The FBI investigated the matter but ultimately could not prove the computer data showed anything nefarious.

April 6

New York Times, More Evidence Bolsters Durham’s Case Against Democratic-Linked Lawyer, Charlie Savage, right, April 6, 2022 (print ed.). Separately, defense lawyers asked a judge to block the Trump-era special counsel from making the Steele dossier a focus of next month’s trial; New Filing by Counsel Might Strengthen Case In Trump-Era Inquiry; The lawyer, Michael Sussmann, right, is accused of lying to the F.B.I.

The Trump-era special counsel scrutinizing the Russia investigation has acquired additional evidence that may bolster his case against a Democratic-linked lawyer accused of lying to the F.B.I. at a September 2016 meeting about Donald J. Trump’s possible ties to Russia, a new court filing revealed.

In the politically high-profile case, the lawyer, Michael Sussmann, is facing trial next month on a charge that he falsely told an F.B.I. official that he was not at the meeting on behalf of any client. There he relayed suspicions data scientists had about odd internet data they thought might indicate hidden Trump-Russia links.

The new filing by the special counsel, John H. Durham, says that the night before Mr. Sussmann’s meeting, he had texted the F.B.I. official stating that “I’m coming on my own — not on behalf of a client or company — want to help the bureau.”

The charge against Mr. Sussmann, which he denies, is narrow. But the case has attracted significant attention because Mr. Durham has used filings to put forward large amounts of information, insinuating there was a conspiracy involving the Hillary Clinton campaign to amplify suspicions of Trump-Russia collusion. Mr. Durham has not charged any such conspiracy, however.

The disclosure of the text to the F.B.I. official in question, James A. Baker, then the bureau’s general counsel, was part of a flurry of late-night filings on Monday by prosecutors and the defense centering on what evidence and arguments the judge should permit in the trial.

At the same time, the filings suggest that the special counsel may use the trial to continue to examine larger efforts linked to the Clinton campaign that raised suspicions about potential collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia — including the so-called Steele dossier.

The dossier is a notorious compendium of opposition research about purported Trump-Russia ties, since revealed to be thinly sourced and dubious. It was written by Christopher Steele, a subcontractor for Fusion GPS, a research firm that Mr. Sussmann’s former law firm, Perkins Coie, had hired to scrutinize such matters.

Mr. Sussmann, a cybersecurity specialist, had worked for the Democratic Party on issues related to Russia’s hacking of its servers. One of his partners at Perkins Coie, Marc Elias, a campaign law specialist, was representing the Clinton campaign and hired Fusion GPS.

Mr. Durham’s new filing refers to the dossier and Mr. Steele — including a meeting with Mr. Sussmann that Mr. Steele has said involved the suspicions about the odd internet data — and Mr. Sussmann’s legal team said that Mr. Durham appears to be planning to bring up the dossier at the trial even though the indictment does not mention it.

Mr. Sussmann’s defense lawyers accused Mr. Durham of promoting a “baseless narrative that the Clinton campaign conspired with

March 11

Washington Post, Judge seeks to defuse legal fight that raised Trump’s ire, Devlin Barrett and Matt Zapotosky, March 11, 2022 (print ed.). An obscure legal filing that sparked a political tempest was just ‘a sideshow,’ the judge declared.

A federal judge on Thursday sought to calm a political tempest whipped up by a recent court filing in a case arising out of the 2016 presidential election, telling prosecutors working for Special Counsel John Durham, left, that the new details they revealed would have “come out in the wash anyway.”

The standoff sparked furious accusations and counter-accusations of political chicanery, but U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper called the legal question “a sideshow” to the upcoming trial of lawyer Michael Sussmann, an expert in cybersecurity who has long represented Democrats.

 In response to a court filing by Durham last month, Sussmann’s legal team accused the prosecutor’s office of using a pedestrian pretrial legal question about potential conflicts of interest to make misleading assertions. Trump and his allies immediately seized on those assertions to accuse Democrats and former officials of misconduct and “spying.”

At Thursday’s hearing, Cooper said he didn’t understand why Durham’s team included those details in the filing, but assumed the decision was made in good faith, noting “much, if not all, of the challenged material is likely to come out anyway” before or at trial.

Sussmann’s lawyer had asked the court to strike from the record those parts of Durham’s filing. The judge declined to do so, though he also cautioned prosecutor Andrew DeFilippis that he should be careful going forward about what he includes in court papers.

“Striking it will not unring the bell and will probably make the bell even louder,” Cooper said. “Keep in mind,” he told DeFilippis, “that the pleadings in this case are under a microscope. … Be mindful of that as we go forward.”

Feb. 18

PressRun, Commentary: The media and Durham’s corrupt “spying” investigation, Eric Boehlert, right, Feb 18, 2022. Ken Starr II. Fox News has lost its mind. Again.

Looking for a partisan outrage to promote as Covid cases plummet and the U.S. economy continues to soar, Fox News, Trump and the ferocious Right Wing Noise Machine have gone all-in claiming Hillary Clinton’s campaign six years ago “spied” on the Republican candidate. The dreamt-up allegation comes courtesy of special counsel John Durham’s dishonest handiwork and his Trump-sanctioned investigation into Russiagate and the hollow claims that Trump had been the target of a massive deep state conspiracy.

The current caper has more holes than the GOP’s Benghazi production, but it’s sucking up lots of Beltway oxygen and generating right-wing hysteria which is the whole point — to create a spectacle of Democrat lawbreaking. (Trump’s demanding Durham’s defendant be executed.)

The good news is the mainstream media are not blindly repeating bogus claims about Clinton “spying,” for the simple reason that nobody has offered any proof.

The bad news is the same elite news outlets are stepping lightly around the real story at the center of the right-wing mob — the unethical nature of Durham’s work and how he’s clearly working with the far right to try to manufacture controversy where none exists.

In the ABC News report, it wasn’t until the ninth paragraph that that network spelled out, “nowhere in Durham’s filing does he state that lawyers for the Clinton campaign paid a tech company to “infiltrate” servers belonging to Trump Tower and later the White House.” That crucial debunking should have been found in the first paragraph, if not the headline.

Durham is Ken Starr II, and the press still hasn’t learned any lessons.

Here’s a quick example of the type of joke investigation Durham is overseeing. Last year, his shining moment was indicting Democratic cybersecurity lawyer Michael Sussman, right, on a single count of making a false statement to an FBI agent, five years after the fact. (The indictment had nothing to do with FBI misconduct, which was supposedly under investigation.)

Durham’s indictment, which is based on the testimony of one witness who has contradicted himself, claims Sussmann committed perjury by denying he was working for the Clinton campaign at the time he brought his information about Trump’s Russian ties to the FBI in 2016. The false statement claim is a laughably small crime to serve as the centerpiece of Durham’s $4 million investigation, which has produced two indictments. (By contrast, Robert Mueller indicted 34 people as part of his Russia probe.)

As blogger Marcy Wheeler details, Durham’s allegation is based on the central claim that Sussman had secretly “coordinated with representatives and agents of the Clinton Campaign.” When Sussman’s lawyers in a court filing last October demanded to know with whom Sussman had directly plotted with on the Clinton campaign, Durham refused name anyone. That’s because at the time, Durham had not interviewed anyone with the Clinton campaign to see if Sussman had coordinated with them.

It’s amateur hour. “There’s tons of instances of where Durham demonstrably failed to do basic investigative work before charging Sussmann five years after a claimed lie,” notes Wheeler, who’s been picking apart Durham’s shoddy work for years.

Feb. 17

Washington Post, Amid high-profile dispute with prosecutors, lawyer charged by Durham asks court to toss his case, Matt Zapotosky, Feb. 17, 2022. The lawyer charged by Special Counsel John Durham with lying to the FBI when he passed along information about then-candidate Donald Trump has asked a judge to dismiss the case — saying that even if he did what Durham alleged, it was not a crime.

Attorneys for Michael Sussmann, argued in a motion to dismiss on Thursday that Durham’s case was virtually unprecedented and, if allowed to proceed, might dissuade other tipsters from coming forward. Durham, they asserted, has not charged Sussmann with giving false information to the FBI, but rather, with lying about whether he was approaching the bureau on behalf of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

“This is a case of extraordinary prosecutorial overreach,” Sussmann’s lawyers wrote. “The law criminalizes only false statements that are material — false statements that matter because they can actually affect a specific decision of the government.”

A spokesman for Durham, left — appointed in 2019 to review the FBI’s investigation of possible ties between the Trump campaign and Russia — declined to comment.

At the core of Sussmann’s indictment is a September 2016 meeting in which he gave the FBI data showing possibly nefarious computer connections between the Trump Organization, which is the former president’s business entity, and a Russian financial institution known as Alfa Bank.

By Durham’s account, Sussmann claimed he was not sharing the information on behalf of any clients, but was in fact acting on behalf of two: a tech executive and Hillary Clinton’s campaign. The FBI investigated the matter but ultimately could not prove the computer data showed anything nefarious.

New York Post, Editorial: Eyes turn to Hillary Clinton, not Trump in the Russiagate scandal, Editorial Board, Feb. 13, 2022. Democrats are calling for Clinton to be investigated for her role in Russiagate.

Russiagate, the collective delusion that Donald Trump was secretly a Russian agent aided and abetted by the Kremlin, the topic of uncountable inches of Washington Post and New York Times copy and the entire primetime lineup of MSNBC, was a dirty trick by the Hillary Clinton campaign. Not just part of it. All of it. One of the most diabolical, successful misinformation campaigns ever concocted.

We already knew that the Steele dossier was garbage. Christopher Steele was paid indirectly by the Clinton campaign to dig up dirt, which he did by turning to other Clinton operatives, laundering every outlandish rumor about Trump he could find into an “investigative” document.

He shopped it to the FBI, which couldn’t verify his sources or any of his stories, but the agency dragged out the investigation to cast maximum suspicion on the new president. In the meantime, Steele found willing accomplices in the media to push his propaganda. The dupes at BuzzFeed even decided to print the whole pack of lies, with the flimsy rationale of “Well, why not?”

We got to the point where New York magazine was running a cover story that was one long piece of fan fiction that Trump was secretly a real-life version of “The Americans,” a sleeper agent now seated in the highest office in the land. The Times and Washington Post won a freaking Pulitzer!

A made-up story

Now another piece of Russia, Russia, Russia is kaputski. A computer server operated by Trump’s company was secretly communicating with a Russian firm, claimed Slate magazine and endless Twitter threads of would-be tech experts.

But as outlined in his latest indictment, special counsel John Durham believes that was just a story made up by tech executive Rodney Joffe, who desperately wanted a job with the Clinton administration. He monitored and cherry-picked privileged Internet data he had access to, and molded it to look like something nefarious.

2021

Dec. 23

Washington Post, Since October 2020, special counsel John Durham has spent $3.8 million probing Russia investigation, Matt Zapotosky, Dec. 23, 2021 (print ed.). Special counsel John Durham’s review of the FBI investigation into possible coordination between Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and the Russian government has cost U.S. taxpayers about $3.8 million since October 2020, according to a Justice Department report released Wednesday.

From April through September, Durham reported a tab of about $2.36 million, including about $1.89 million his team spent and about $471,000 recorded by other Justice Department offices as being in support of his work.

Nov. 19

OpEdNews, Analysis: The Steele Dossier and the J. Mayer Analysis: Revisited, Steven Jonas, right, Nov. 18, 2021. Oh my. The “Steele Dossier” has resurfaced, by the magic hand of that Barr/Trump creation designed to supposedly “set things right about Trump and the investigations of him,” John Durham.

And so, I decided to go back and take a look at some of what I wrote about Steele Dossier at the time it all was the rage (figuratively and literally). In what I thought is well-summarized in a column in which I reviewed an in-depth study of the Dossier, its origins, and sources, written by the very careful The New Yorker journalist, Jane Mayer.

Let me first say that, unlike many of my friends on the Left, some of them quite good friends, I fully believe that Trump and the Trumpites colluded with the Russians to help them win the election. Indeed I have believed that that could have been possible from the time the first rumors about the possible compact began to appear in the summer of 2016, and certainly when David Corn’s first article on the matter, in the context of the “Steele Dossier,” was published in October, 2016.

Nov. 17

New York Times, Guest Essay: How Did So Much of the Media Get the Steele Dossier So Wrong? Bill Grueskin (Mr. Grueskin is a professor of professional practice and former academic dean at Columbia Journalism School. He has held senior editing positions at The Wall Street Journal, The Miami Herald and Bloomberg News), Nov. 15, 2021. 

On Jan. 10, 2017, BuzzFeed News published a photo rendition of a 35-page memo titled “U.S. Presidential Election: Republican Candidate Donald Trump’s Activities in Russia and Compromising Relationship With the Kremlin.”

Those who were online that evening remember the jolt. Yes, these were just allegations, but perhaps this was the Rosetta Stone of Trump corruption, touching everything from dodgy real estate negotiations to a sordid hotel-room tryst, all tied together by the president-elect’s obeisance to President Vladimir Putin of Russia.

Sure, the memo provided little hard evidence or specific detail, but, BuzzFeed said, it had “circulated at the highest levels of the U.S. government” and had “acquired a kind of legendary status among journalists, lawmakers and intelligence officials.” This, along with tantalizing tidbits like “Source A confided” or “confirmed by Source E,” gave it a patina of authenticity, especially to those unaware that spycraft often involves chasing unverified information down dead ends. Any caveats — even BuzzFeed’s own opening description of the allegations as “explosive but unverified” — could be dismissed as a kind of obligatory cautiousness.

That memo, soon to become known as the “Steele dossier” when a former British intelligence officer named Christopher Steele was publicly identified as its author, would inspire a slew of juicy, and often thinly sourced, articles and commentaries about Mr. Trump and Russia.

Now it has been largely discredited by two federal investigations and the indictment of a key source, leaving journalists to reckon how, in the heat of competition, so many were taken in so easily because the dossier seemed to confirm what they already suspected.

Many of the dossier’s allegations have turned out to be fictitious or, at best, unprovable. That wasn’t for want of trying by reporters from mainstream and progressive media outlets. Many journalists did show restraint. The New York Times’s Adam Goldman was asked by the Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple about two years ago how reporters should have approached an unverified rumor from the dossier. He responded, “By not publishing.”

Proof via Twitter, Investigative Commentary: Major media must stop enabling far-right lies about the Steele dossier and the Trump-Russia scandal, Seth Abramson, left, Nov. 17, 2021. Both these lies and those enabling them give aid and comfort to a neofascist insurrection. This thread debunks the New York Times oped above, Guest Essay: How Did So Much of the Media Get the Steele Dossier So Wrong?, by former Columbia Journalism School dean Bill Grueskin (30-part Twitter thread):

There’s no proof in this article [by Grueskin], nor could there be, of how media “got the Steele dossier so wrong” — as the media never reported that *any* part of the dossier had been conclusively confirmed, never misreported its origins and wrote on the dossier far less than is now claimed.

Indeed, the supposed smoking gun with respect to media reporting on the Steele dossier is that one news outlet received a leak from a source close to the Mueller investigation indicating that Mueller had found *some* evidence that *one* claim in the dossier might be accurate.

It turns out that that leak—not the outlet’s reporting that it’d received a leak—was incorrect, and Mueller found no evidence to substantiate that component of the dossier. This component remains neither confirmed nor denied, though Trumpists lie and say it has been disproven.

1/ As I know from hard experience, columnists often don’t get to write their own headlines. But what this means is that someone at the New York Times either wrote or specifically approved this headline, which is not just a lie but an easily disproven one, at that. And here’s why:

2/ There’s no proof in this article, nor could there be, of how media “got the Steele dossier so wrong”—as the media never reported that *any* part of the dossier had been conclusively confirmed, never misreported its origins and wrote on the dossier far less than is now claimed.

3/ Indeed, the supposed smoking gun with respect to media reporting on the Steele dossier is that one news outlet received a leak from a source close to the Mueller investigation indicating that Mueller had found *some* evidence that *one* claim in the dossier might be accurate.

4/ It turns out that that leak—not the outlet’s reporting that it’d received a leak—was incorrect, and Mueller found no evidence to substantiate that component of the dossier. This component remains neither confirmed nor denied, though Trumpists lie and say it has been disproven.

5/ The same Trumpists who say that this component of the dossier—a claim about Michael Cohen and Prague—has been “disproven,” and say so on the basis of Cohen’s denials and his alibi for a tiny sliver of the time-period in question, *also* say Cohen is a *liar* and a *scoundrel*.

6/ So what do the journalists that “got the Steele dossier so wrong” say of the Cohen-Prague claim? The truth—no more, no less. Which is that it remains neither proven nor disproven, but that Steele told the FBI his dossier was 30% incorrect, and this *could* be part of that 30%.

7/ The simple fact is this: though media bent over backwards—with the exception of a single outlet, the fringe, left-leaning, non-mainstream Mother Jones—to *not* report on the dossier before the 2016 election, Trumpists are angry that its existence was ever reported on at *all*.

8/ More than that, we *know* what Trumpists wanted media to do: lie to voters about the dossier. How do we know? Because Trumpists *celebrate* a late October 2016 NYT article in which the FBI denies the existence of any evidence in its possession—e.g. the dossier—on Trump-Russia.

9/ So even as media made sure the raw, unconfirmed intel in the Steele dossier would play *no part* in the 2016 election—then reported on the dossier’s *existence* without saying any of it had been proven, and reporting on its origins—*critics* wanted a *disinformation campaign*.

10/ Here comes the first twist in this thread: I agree with the NYT headline. I fervently believe major media got Steele’s dossier “so wrong.” Media got the dossier “so wrong” by refusing to report on how much of it had been confirmed or corroborated and misreporting its origins.

11/ It took a fringe digital rag, The Daily Caller—not major media!—to reveal that the Ritz-Carlton Moscow allegation (the “pee tape” allegation) was fully briefed by Fusion GPS in fall 2015 (not a typo) via funding from *GOP sources* and *before Steele was contracted by Fusion*.

12/ Are you hearing the information I just wrote for the first time? Probably. That’s because major media “got the Steele dossier so wrong” by falsely reporting it was the indirectly DNC-funded Orbis that unearthed the “pee tape” issue in 2016, not the GOP-funded Fusion in 2015.

13/ Moreover, Fusion GPS’s Glenn Simpson testified under oath—something almost no Trumpist will do (and those who do perjure themselves)—that at the time Fusion contracted with Steele and Orbis in June 2016, Steele *didn’t know* who was funding him or who his ultimate client was.

14/ Steele himself has since testified—again (notice a trend?) voluntarily and under oath—that what Simpson testified to was true: Steele didn’t know his funder or his client when he took on the work. Yet those who say media “got the Steele dossier so wrong” claim otherwise. Why?

15/ There’s never been any evidence Steele or Simpson perjured themselves on this point—yet the very people who claim to be so concerned that media “got the Steele dossier so wrong” routinely say Steele *explicitly agreed with the DNC and Clinton campaign* to find dirt on Trump.

Washington Post, Fact Checker Analysis: The Steele dossier: A guide to the latest allegations, Glenn Kessler, Amy B Wang and Marianna Sotomayor, Nov. 17, 2021. On Jan. 10, 2017, BuzzFeed News took the unusual step of publishing what it described as memos containing “specific, unverified, and potentially unverifiable allegations of contact between Trump [campaign] aides and Russian operatives.”

This dossier, alleging a “well-developed conspiracy of cooperation” between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin, was assembled by a former British intelligence agent, Christopher Steele, working under contract for a private investigation firm at the behest of Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Many of the memos, which suggested deep sourcing within Russia, had quietly circulated in media and law enforcement circles for months before BuzzFeed made them public.

Nov. 4

Foreign affairs analyst and consultant Igor Danchenko, above left, who’s been described as the Steele dossier’s primary researcher, was arrested as part of an investigation by John Durham, above right, the special counsel appointed by Trump’s Justice Department to investigate the origins of the Russia probe.

New York Post, Editorial: The real ‘collusion’ was the creation of ‘RussiaGate’ out of absolutely nothing, Editorial Board, Nov. 4, 2021. They all knew – and did nothing to stop the Russia collusion hoax.

If you haven’t been paying attention to all the ins and outs of RussiaGate and the so-called “collusion” scandal, that’s all you need to know about Thursday’s arrest of Russian analyst Igor Danchenko.

The Hillary Clinton campaign hired a bunch of shady operatives to put together a collection of lies and innuendo about Donald Trump and shop it to the FBI. It was the ultimate political dirty trick, one that was aided and abetted by the media long after Trump took office.

Igor Danchenko, the guy who supposedly gathered all the spurious “dirt” in the infamous Steele dossier, is accused of lying at least five times to investigators, special counsel John Durham alleges. Those lies were to cover up the fact that he really had no sources for his claims — or, in some cases, the sources were Clinton associates.

How’s that for a vicious circle? Clinton officials feed their Russian stooge disinformation, it gets laundered through British spy Christopher Steele, and the FBI uses it as the basis for wiretapping the future president’s team.

Nov. 1

 

Wayne Madsen Report (WMR), Investigative Commentary: Durham’s phony investigation a waste of scant DOJ resources, Wayne Madsen, left, syndicated columnist, author of 21 books, former U.S. Navy Intelligence officer and NSA analyst, and former featured public affairs commentator on both Russian and American broadcast news networks, Nov. 1, 2021.

Attorney General Merrick Garland, below right, who has become the least popular member of President Biden’s Cabinet, is continuing to allow a holdover special prosecutor from the Trump administration to engage in a costly and time-consuming “investigation” of absolutely nothing rising to a level of criminality.

On October 19, 2020, just a few weeks prior to the 2020 election, U.S. Attorney for Connecticut John Durham was secretly appointed by then-Attorney General William Barr as special counsel to investigate Trump’s alleged “Russia Hoax.” Durham was originally tasked by Barr in April 2019 to investigate the Justice Department’s ongoing internal probe of federal law enforcement surveillance activities of the Trump campaign for connections to Russia. Trump falsely insisted that the investigation was a “witch hunt.”

Durham has been permitted by Garland to continue with a fool’s errand of an investigation that has resulted in two dubious indictments. It is clear that Durham’s targets now include the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign, the Robert Mueller investigation of that campaign, and anything else that Durham (and his puppeteer Trump) decides is worthy. Garland has failed to show any desire to order Durham to wrap up his investigation or be shown the door.

Essentially, Durham has become a new Ken Starr. Starr was the independent Whitewater counsel who began an investigation into Bill Clinton’s involvement in an Arkansas real estate deal and ended with a dubious probe of Clinton for receiving a blowjob in the Oval Office from White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

Durham is operating under a mandate to “broadly examine the government’s collection of intelligence involving the Trump campaign’s interactions with Russians.” Durham has now turned the investigation on to top Democrats.

In November 2019, Durham succeeded in obtaining a guilty plea by FBI attorney Kevin Clinesmith for altering an email request for a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant for Trump foreign policy adviser Carter Page. The FISA request was part of the FBI’s CROSSFIRE HURRICANE probe of the 2016 Trump campaign.

In December 2019, the Justice Department’s Inspector General, Michael Horowitz, right, concluded in a 400-page report on CROSSFIRE HURRICANE that the investigation had a proper criminal predicate.

In a highly-unusual move, Barr and Durham immediately denounced the IG report’s findings. However, Durham has obtained no evidence that the IG report was incorrect. Nevertheless, Durham, an extreme right-winger with ties to the fascist Roman catholic Opus Dei order, continued with his own witch hunt against top intelligence officials of the Obama administration, including CIA director John Brennan and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. New York magazine reported that Durham also launched criminal probes of former President Barack Obama and former Vice President Joe Biden, the latter being Trump’s 2020 presidential opponent.

Finding no criminality on the part of Brennan, Clapper, Obama, or Biden, Durham turned his attention to the Clinton Foundation. Eventually, Durham began investigating Perkins Coie law partner Michael Sussmann. On September 16, 2021, Durham was able to return an indictment of Sussmann for falsely telling the FBI that he was not representing the 2016 Clinton campaign when he told them about the suspicious nature of communications between network servers of Russia’s Alfa Bank and the Trump Organization. Durham was splitting hairs in the indictment. While Sussmann had represented the Democratic National Committee (DNC) in the case of its email servers being hacked in 2016, he was not an official of the Clinton campaign, as alleged by Durham’s twisted logic contained in his indictment.

It was clear that Durham’s political target is another Perkins Coie partner, election attorney Marc Elias, left, who had also commissioned Fusion GPS to conduct 2016 opposition research of the Trump campaign. Elias continues to be the primary attorney challenging Trump charges of election fraud in various states, as well as new GOP-enacted state laws designed to restrict voter suffrage, particularly among ethnic minorities. Another Durham political target is Jake Sullivan, the current national security advisor, who was Clinton’s national security aide during the 2016 campaign.

Durham’s indictment of Sussmann was also directed at four computer scientists — David Dagon and Manos Antonakakis of George Tech; Rodney Joffe, formerly an executive of Neustar; and Zetalytics chief data scientist April Lorenzen — who provided forensic evidence of a link between the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank. Durham’s indictment, which labeled Lorenzen as “Originator-1,” Antonakakis as “Researcher-1,” Dagon as “Reseacher-2,” and Joffe as “Tech Executive-1,” actually states that they did not like Donald Trump, a clear indication that Durham has unethically, and, perhaps, illegally misused his office.

Durham’s “over his skis” indictment charged that the scientists had “exploited” their access to Internet data to concoct a conspiracy between the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank. In fact, as reported by WMR on March 29, 2021, the actual conspiracy was between Barr and his Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division, Brian Benczkowski. Knowing full well of the Trump-Alfa Bank connection, Barr placed Benczkowksi, someone who had no prosecutorial experience, in charge of the Criminal Division to protect Trump and Alfa Bank. It just so happened that at his previous law firm, Kirkland & Ellis, Benczkowski’s client had been Alfa Bank.

WMR also reported that “connected to the Alfa Bank server, which Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner wanted to secure with a Russia-supplied encryption system, was Spectrum Health of Grand Rapids, Michigan. The chairman of the board of Spectrum Health is Richard DeVos, Jr., the husband of Trump’s Education Secretary, Betsy DeVos, left, and brother-in-law of Mrs. DeVos’s brother, Erik Prince of Blackwater infamy. Alfa Bank has a business relationship with Amway, the firm co-founded by Richard DeVos, Sr., the father of Betsy DeVos’s husband.” It was later discovered that a YotaPhone, a Russian-made smart phone not generally available in the U.S. market, was connected to transmissions from servers at the White House, Trump Tower in New York, and Spectrum Health in Michigan.

Durham has been using the Justice Department to conduct a far-right and conspiracy theory-laden crusade against Trump’s political foes. It is Durham who has misused his special prosecutor position for his own political goals and interests.

 Oct. 1

New York Magazine via MSN.com, Opinion: John Durham’s Attempt to Discredit Trump’s Russiagate Enemies Is Falling Apart, Jonathan Chait, Oct. 1, 2021. When Donald Trump’s attorney general appointed John Durham to investigate what Trump insisted was a deep-state conspiracy against him, a question hovered: What exactly was Durham thinking? Durham had a respectable résumé as a prosecutor in a career that did not seem to lead straight into a role as Trump’s Roy Cohn.

Was he simply accepting the role out of diligence and the understanding that, if he found no crimes, he could put Trump’s absurd charges to rest? Or — unlikely but possible — would he uncover real proof of a criminal conspiracy at the FBI to undermine Trump? Or had Durham undergone the same Fox News–induced brain melt that has turned figures like Barr, Giuliani, and many others into authoritarian conspiracy theorists?

In the wake of Durham’s first and perhaps only indictment, we can safely rule out the first two explanations.

Durham’s indictment does not even allege that the FBI committed any wrongdoing. Instead, it charges that the FBI was lied to — by Michael Sussmann, a lawyer who passed on leads about Trump’s ties to Russia that the bureau was unable to verify. Durham’s indictment claims Sussmann committed perjury by denying he was working for the Clinton campaign at the time he brought his information about Trump to the FBI in 2016.

The first weakness in the indictment is that even if every word Durham writes is true, the charge he has amounts to a very, very small molehill. Interested parties uncover crimes all the time. There’s just no reason to believe that Sussmann’s relationship with a law firm working for Clinton would have made any difference to the FBI — which was already investigating Trump’s ties to Russia and which wound up discarding Sussmann’s lead anyway as a dry hole.

Second, the evidence that Sussmann lied to the FBI is extremely shaky. As Benjamin Wittes notes, the sole basis for charging Sussmann with perjury is the recollection by FBI official Jim Baker. Baker testified to Congress that he remembered very little about his conversation with Sussmann, i.e.:

Baker: [I]n that first interaction, I don’t remember him specifically saying that he was acting on behalf of a particular client.

Jordan: Did you know at the time that he was representing the DNC in the Clinton campaign?

Baker: I can’t remember. I have learned that at some point. I don’t — as I think I said last time, I don’t specifically remember when I learned that. So I don’t know that I had that in my head when he showed up in my office. I just can’t remember.

Jordan: Did you learn that shortly thereafter if you didn’t know it at the time?

Baker: I wish I could give you a better answer. I just don’t remember.

Yes, the “Jordan” who dug out the evidence that seems likely to undermine Durham’s case is Trump superfan Jim Jordan. Wittes concludes, “It is hard for me to understand how a criminal case against Sussmann can proceed in the face of this testimony.”

The perjury charge is merely the window dressing in the indictment. The meat of it — the part that has Trump defenders excited — is a narrative laid out by Durham attempting to paint Sussmann and the experts he worked with as liars who smeared Trump. That narrative part does not describe actual crimes, of course. Prosecutors can write whatever they want in their indictment. This one is like a Sean Hannity monologue wrapped around a parking ticket.

And even the “speaking indictment” portion of Durham’s charge is falling apart now. Today, both CNN and the New York Times reported that Durham selectively quoted from emails in order to furnish a completely misleading impression that Sussmann’s researchers lied.

Sept. 20

Former Olympian McKayla Maroney testifies about coach’s abuse and FBI indifference (Pool photo by Saul Loeb of Reuters).

Washington Post, Opinion: Two miscarriages of justice reveal a sickening disparity, Ruth Marcus, right, Sept. 20, 2021. Two individuals allegedly made false statements to federal investigators. One now faces trial on a felony charge. The other does not. I defy you to read about their cases and conclude that justice is served in either instance, or that it is being applied even-handedly.

Let’s start with the person who has been let off the hook, because the decision is so infuriating and underscores so dramatically the unfairness of the other prosecution. W. Jay Abbott was the special agent in charge of the FBI’s Indianapolis field office in 2015, when it received reliable reports that USA Gymnastics physician Larry Nassar had sexually abused multiple gymnasts.

One of Nassar’s victims, McKayla Maroney, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee last week about describing how Nassar had repeatedly molested her to one of Abbott’s agents, only to have the agent reply, “Is that all?”

What happened next? For months, nothing, as far as the FBI was concerned. Abbott’s office was supposed to refer the allegations to the FBI’s Lansing, Mich., office, the city where Nassar worked. But that never happened — and Nassar went on to abuse at least 70 more young athletes until he was arrested by Michigan state police 16 months later.

During that time period, Abbott met and corresponded repeatedly with the head of USA Gymnastics, Steve Penny, about a tantalizing job prospect, heading up security for the entire U.S. Olympic Committee.

When the Justice Department’s inspector general interviewed Abbott, since retired, about the bureau’s handling of the Nassar case, he “made multiple false statements” about both the conduct of the investigation and his job talks, in violation of the federal false statements law, the inspector general concluded in a searing report released in July.

Abbott claimed he had spoken with FBI counterparts in Detroit and Los Angeles about the Nassar allegations; both agents denied such conversations, and there was no documentation they occurred.

The inspector general “found no evidence” to support Abbott’s claims — and further concluded that “Abbott’s false statements were knowing and intentional.”

But Abbott also insisted to the inspector general that he had never applied for or taken other steps to secure the Olympics job. This was, according to the inspector general, untrue, deliberately so, and stretched across two sworn interviews, including after Abbott was confronted with evidence to the contrary.

“Abbott, by his own admission, was concerned that applying for a job with the U.S. Olympic Committee posed a conflict of interest with the FBI’s handling of the Nassar investigation, which was a high profile, sensitive matter,” the report noted. “Under this circumstance and given the risk involved, we found it highly unlikely that Abbott forgot about his ultimate decision to apply for the job.”

The inspector general asked the Justice Department’s criminal division to prosecute Abbott for false statements. It declined in September 2020. The lesson? You can lie to federal investigators with impunity.

The second case, with an opposite outcome, involves Michael Sussmann, right, a Washington lawyer who represented the Hillary Clinton campaign, the Democratic National Committee and a tech company executive during the 2016 election. Sussmann, a former Justice Department official with expertise in cybersecurity, sought a meeting with FBI general counsel James Baker to pass on information about digital connections between a computer linked to the Trump Organization and a Russian bank with ties to the Kremlin.

Justice Department special counsel John Durham, left, appointed by former attorney general William P. Barr to probe whether there was FBI or intelligence community wrongdoing relating to allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 election, obtained the indictment announced last week, the second criminal charge arising from his two-year probe.

It alleges Sussmann told Baker at the meeting, on Sept. 19, 2016, that he wasn’t doing work on those allegations “for any client.” That led Baker “to understand that Sussmann was acting as a good citizen merely passing along information, not as a paid advocate or political operative,” when in fact, according to the indictment, Sussmann was acting on behalf of the tech executive and the Clinton campaign.

Sussmann’s “lie was material” — meaning that it could have affected the investigation — because it “misled” FBI officials “concerning the political nature of his work and deprived the FBI of information that might have permitted it more fully to assess and uncover the origins of the relevant data and technical analysis,” the indictment alleges.

As former federal prosecutor Randall D. Eliason has noted, this single false statement, before a single witness, is about as weak as a case can get. Whatever he told them, FBI officials knew full well that Sussmann represented Democrats and the Clinton campaign.

Baker didn’t take notes of the meeting. The evidence of Sussmann’s alleged misstatement, such as it is, comes from handwritten notes of the conversation made by another FBI official later that day. Sussmann also billed the meeting to the Clinton campaign, according to the indictment, an assertion his lawyers contest.

Where, you might ask, is Attorney General Merrick Garland in all this? In an exquisitely difficult position. Even though Durham is a Barr-appointed special counsel, Garland retains the power to supervise his investigation. But stepping in to prevent Durham from seeking this flimsy indictment risked generating a political uproar, with unsettling echoes of Barr’s heavy-handedness. Now, it is too late.

While Abbott collects his government pension, Sussmann, who has resigned from his law firm, faces ruin. These twin miscarriages of justice, each wrong on its own, are sickening when taken together.

Sept. 17

Washington Post, Editorial Board: John Durham’s zombie Russia investigation produces an iffy indictment. Is this all there is? Editorial Board, Sept. 17, 2021. After more than two years and the persistent goading of former president Donald Trump, special counsel John Durham, the lawyer Trump-era attorney general William P. Barr tapped to probe the Justice Department’s 2016 Russia investigation, finally did something on Thursday. He indicted attorney Michael Sussmann for allegedly lying to the FBI.

This, to put it mildly, is not the confirmation of some broad 2016 deep-state conspiracy against Mr. Trump that the former president apparently desired.

The danger of special counsel investigations is that, given unlimited time and resources, they often find some bad action tangentially related to their original inquiry that may have had little or no substantial negative impact. Mr. Durham has uncovered alleged wrongdoing that has little to do with whether federal officials tried to sabotage the Trump campaign.

Wonkette, Analysis: Special Counsel John Durham Blows His Measly Load Trying To Make Serverghazi Happen Again, Liz Dye, right, Sept. 17, 2021. For years the wingers have promised special counsel John Durham was preparing to rain down hell on the Deep State and do LOCK HER UPS to Hillary Clinton and all the dastardly Democrats in DC.

In 2019, Attorney General Bill Barr tasked the former US Attorney for Connecticut with cobbling together evidence of a Justice Department conspiracy to frame Donald Trump for cahootsing with Putin to steal the election. But aside from one conviction of a low-level DOJ attorney for falsifying an email related to Season 1 dipshit Carter Page, it’s been crickets.

Until yesterday when John Durham, left, did the home team proud by bringin’ it to those Deep State conspirators for their evil attempt to bring down saintly Donald Trump by making him look like he was in bed with Mother Russia.

Just kidding! Durham indicted an outside lawyer on a single count of lying to the FBI. PFFFFFFFT.

Yesterday the special counsel announced the culmination of three years of work: one measly charge against attorney Michael Sussman for failing to disclose that he was working for the Clinton campaign and the DNC when he met with FBI general counsel James Baker to hand over information about the “Alfa Bank server” in Trump Tower that was mysteriously pinging back and forth with a server in Russia. As if anyone in DC, down to the busboys at Busboys and Poets, is unaware that Sussman’s former law firm Perkins Coie is associated with major Democratic causes.

Wall Street Journal, Editorial: Durham Cracks the Russia Case, Editorial Board, Sept. 17, 2021. The special counsel’s indictment tells the real story of 2016 collusion. John Durham on Thursday indicted a Clinton campaign lawyer from 2016 for lying to the FBI, but this is no ho-hum case of deception. The special counsel’s 27-page indictment is full of new, and damning, details that underscore how the Russia collusion tale was concocted and peddled by the Clinton campaign.

Mr. Durham charged Michael Sussmann, an attorney at the Perkins Coie law firm that represented the Clinton campaign. Mr. Sussmann is accused of making false statements to then-FBI general counsel James Baker in a Sept. 19, 2016 meeting when he presented documents purporting to show secret internet communications between the Trump Organization and Russia-based Alfa bank.

The indictment says Mr. Sussmann assured Mr. Baker he was not doing this work “‘for any client,’ which led the FBI General Counsel to understand that SUSSMANN was acting as a good citizen merely passing along information, not as a paid advocate or political operative.” This was false, says the indictment, which documents how Mr. Sussmann was working with other Democrats (including fellow Perkins Coie lawyer Marc Elias ) and billing his time to the Clinton campaign.

Sept. 16

New York Times, Trump-Era Special Counsel Secures Indictment of Lawyer for Firm With Democratic Ties, Charlie Savage, Sept. 16, 2021. The defendant, Michael Sussmann, is accused of lying to the F.B.I. in a meeting about Trump and Russia. He denies wrongdoing. John H. Durham is the special counsel the Trump administration appointed in 2019 to scour the Russia investigation for any wrongdoing.

A prominent cybersecurity lawyer was indicted on a charge of lying to the F.B.I. five years ago during a meeting about Donald J. Trump and Russia, the Justice Department announced on Thursday.

New York Times, Durham Is Said to Seek Indictment of Lawyer at Firm With Democratic Ties, Charlie Savage, Adam Goldman, Michael S. Schmidt and William K. Rashbaum, Sept. 15, 2021. The lawyer, Michael Sussmann, is accused of lying to the F.B.I. in a 2016 meeting about Trump and Russia. He denies wrongdoing.

April 14

New York Times, Subpoenaing the Brookings Institution, Durham Focuses on Trump-Russia Dossier, Charlie Savage and Adam Goldman, Updated April 14, 2021. The special counsel scrutinizing the Russia inquiry, a Trump-era leftover, appears to be retreading ground that an inspector general explored in 2019.

Exiled from Twitter, former President Donald J. Trump issued a sarcastic statement recently inquiring about the ongoing public silence from John H. Durham, the special counsel who has been investigating the Trump-Russia inquiry since May 2019.

“Where’s Durham?” said Mr. Trump, who repeatedly predicted before last year’s election that Mr. Durham’s investigation would prove a deep-state conspiracy against him. “Is he a living, breathing human being? Will there ever be a Durham report?”

Mr. Durham ignored the complaint publicly, and the scope of his inquiry remains opaque. But one aspect has come into focus recently, according to people familiar with the investigation: Mr. Durham has keyed in on the F.B.I.’s handling of a notorious dossier of political opposition research both before and after the bureau started using it to obtain court permission to wiretap a former Trump campaign adviser in 2016 and 2017.

In addition to questioning witnesses who may have insight into the matter, Mr. Durham has obtained documents from the Brookings Institution related to Igor Danchenko, a Russia researcher who worked there a decade ago. Mr. Danchenko later helped gather rumors about Mr. Trump and Russia for that research, known as the Steele dossier, according to people familiar with the request.

By asking about the dossier, Mr. Durham has come to focus at least in part on re-scrutinizing an aspect of the investigation that was already exposed as problematic by a 2019 Justice Department inspector general report and led to reforms by the F.B.I. and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

2020

The Atlantic, Analysis: Russiagate Was Not a Hoax, Franklin Foer, Aug. 19, 2020. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence confirmed what the Mueller report could not.

Rereading the Mueller report more than a year after its publication is an exercise in disappointment. One gets the feeling that Robert Mueller didn’t press his inquiry to its end. Instead of settling the questions that haunt the 2016 campaign, he left them dangling, publishing a stilted document riddled with insinuation and lacunae. He rushed his work, closing up shop before finishing his assignment.

While Mueller received all the hype, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence kept its head down. Yesterday, having avoided cable speculation almost entirely, the SSCI released the fifth and final volume of a report on Russia’s attempt to sway the last election in Donald Trump’s favor. It finally delivered what Mueller either could not or would not: a comprehensive presentation of the evidence in the matter of “collusion.” The report confirms that Russiagate is no hoax. Whether or not the Trump campaign illegally coordinated with the Kremlin, Trump has no grounds for proclaiming vindication, much less that he’s the victim of a witch hunt.

Credit largely goes to Mark Warner, left, the ranking Democrat on the SSCI, who shrewdly orchestrated the proceedings. Cultivating a close relationship with the SSCI’s Republican chair, Richard Burr, he worked to keep the investigation deliberately low-key. (The committee did the bulk of its work behind closed doors, without leaks.) As a result, the committee on the whole miraculously avoided the politicization that tainted the broader debate over Russian interference. Each of its findings won bipartisan approval prior to publication. Instead of rushing forward, the committee left the incendiary question of collusion for last.

The thousand-page fifth volume doesn’t definitively settle the question, in part because the SSCI was unable to procure a full record of events. The White House engaged in gamesmanship, invoking executive privilege to deny witnesses and block access to a paper trail. A slew of important witnesses invoked the Fifth Amendment. Others, such as Paul Manafort, lied relentlessly to investigators. The election of 2016 is one of the most closely studied events of recent memory, yet even the best-informed students of Russian interference don’t have a comprehensive understanding of it.

When Mueller’s prosecutors appeared in court, in February 2019, they implied that the most troubling evidence they had uncovered implicated Manafort, the Trump campaign chairman. This wasn’t a surprising admission. Throughout their filings, Mueller’s team referred to Manafort’s Kyiv-based aide-de-camp, Konstantin Kilimnik, as an active Russian agent. Manafort had clearly spoken with Kilimnik during the campaign, and had even passed confidential campaign information to him, with the understanding that the documents would ultimately arrive in the hands of oligarchs close to the Kremlin.

One of the great disappointments of the Mueller Report is that it fails to provide narrative closure after building so much anticipation for the Kilimnik story line. Mueller did not fully explain why Manafort’s relationship with his Ukraine-based adviser so bothered his prosecutors. Why had Manafort passed along the documents? And what did the oligarchs want with them?

The committee fills in the gaps somewhat. It reports that Manafort and Kilimnik talked almost daily during the campaign. They communicated through encrypted technologies set to automatically erase their correspondence; they spoke using code words and shared access to an email account. It’s worth pausing on these facts: The chairman of the Trump campaign was in daily contact with a Russian agent, constantly sharing confidential information with him. That alone makes for one of the worst scandals in American political history.

2019

Nov. 22

Washington Post, Justice Dept. watchdog finds political bias did not taint top officials running the FBI’s Russia, Ellen Nakashima, Matt Zapotosky and Devlin Barrett, Nov. 22, 2019. The Justice Department’s internal watchdog is expected to find in a forthcoming report that political bias did not taint top officials running the FBI investigation into possible coordination between Russia and the Trump campaign in 2016, while at the same time criticizing the bureau for systemic failures in its handling of surveillance applications, according to two U.S. officials.

The much-anticipated report due out Dec. 9 from Inspector General Michael Horowitz, right, will allege that a low-level FBI lawyer inappropriately altered a document that was used during the process to renew a controversial warrant for electronic surveillance of a former Trump campaign adviser, the officials said. The inspector general referred that finding to U.S. Attorney John Durham, and the lawyer involved is being investigated criminally for possibly making a false statement, they said.

But Horowitz will conclude that the application still had a proper legal and factual basis, and, more broadly, that FBI officials did not act improperly in opening the Russia investigation, according to the officials, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive report.

The report generally rebuts accusations of a political conspiracy among senior law enforcement officials against the Trump campaign to favor Democrat Hillary Clinton while also knocking the bureau for procedural shortcomings in the FBI, the officials said. On balance, they said, it provides a mixed assessment of the FBI and Justice Department’s undertaking of a probe that became highly politicized and divided the nation.

Nov. 4

National Review, Opinion: The Last Trusted Prosecutor in Washington, Jim Geraghty, Nov. 4, 2019. John Durham is the legendary lawman digging into how the intelligence probe of Donald Trump started.

John Durham may be the most consequential and least known figure in Washington right now.

In May, U.S. attorney general William Barr, right, selected Durham, a longtime prosecutor with a résumé so sterling it nearly glows, to investigate the origins of the special counsel’s probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election, and whether it was properly predicated. Some Trump fans believe there was a vast effort by a “deep state” of high-ranking intelligence and law-enforcement officials to smear Trump or hinder his campaign by creating a perception of corrupt ties to Russia. In late October, the New York Times quoted unnamed sources who said that Durham’s probe had officially become a criminal investigation, meaning he now has the power to subpoena for witness testimony and documents, to convene a grand jury, and to file criminal charges.

Since he is an attorney general appointed by President Trump, almost every decision from William Barr is criticized by Democrats as a partisan abuse of law-enforcement powers. But the appointment of Durham received no backlash, and in fact received praise far and wide.

Who is Durham, this rare-as-a-unicorn figure who can reassure lawmakers, talking heads, and court-watchers on both sides of the aisle, in an era when everything seems destined to turn into a loud partisan food fight?

To say Durham is tight-lipped is an understatement; he lets his courtroom arguments speak for him and rarely talks to reporters at all. Those who have covered him for years — or, more accurately, tried to cover him — say that when he does run into reporters, he is cordial but uninformative, and almost never on the record. In Durham’s questionnaire for the Senate while awaiting confirmation to be a U.S. Attorney, he was asked to list his written work. He answered that he had never written or published any books, articles, reports, or letters to the editor. (The Senate confirmed him unanimously, with home-state senator Richard Blumenthal (D., Conn.), right, calling him “a fierce, fair prosecutor” who “dedicated his life to public service and the pursuit of justice.”) Durham is nicknamed, inevitably, “the Bull,” and his reputation makes clear he doesn’t take any of it from anyone.

‘A Passion for Anonymity’

Former attorney general Michael Mukasey, left, who appointed Durham to investigate the destruction of videotapes of CIA waterboarding, says he was recently contacted by a reporter in Connecticut who wanted to write a profile on Durham, whom the reporter said he knew. “I called John to check the accuracy of that claim, and he confirmed that he knew the reporter but made it clear and specific that he had no use for personal profiles,” Mukasey said. “He thinks about the work, period — not about how it will be received in this or that quarter, or what caricatures people with a motive or a bias may draw of his work or of him. It is for that reason that I think he will be unaffected by the pressure of how his work will be received and how he will be portrayed — indeed, how some in the media have already started to portray him.” Mukasey said Durham reminded him of the title of Franklin Roosevelt adviser Louis Brownlow’s autobiography, A Passion for Anonymity.

The only time Durham has offered public remarks on his work was in a March 2018 lecture at the University of St. Joseph in West Hartford, Conn. Durham was introduced by his friend of three decades and frequent prosecutorial partner, Leonard C. Boyle, the deputy chief state’s attorney in Connecticut, and Boyle observed, “At least three members of the press are here tonight, because they probably realize that this may be their only chance to hear John speak about his work, other than in a courtroom. He’s notoriously shy about speaking about himself.”

But in his subsequent remarks, Durham made it sound like his reticence to speak publicly wasn’t mere shyness so much as deliberate strategy to serve justice: “One thing that I try to bear in mind, and try to encourage in new young prosecutors, particularly those who are making their bones or cutting their teeth, is an awareness of the incredible power that is wielded by law enforcement, and perhaps federal law enforcement in particular. Issuing a subpoena can destroy somebody’s reputation. It can damage their business, hurt their families. It is an awesome power that we have, that should only be used in appropriate instances. . . . It is as important for the system as for prosecutors to protect the secrecy of proceedings, not because we want them to be secret, but because we’re not always right. Maybe accusations that are lodged against somebody are untrue, and again we can destroy a person if that information gets out.”

2017

 

Russia’s official news agency photographed President Trump’s meeting with Sergey V. Lavrov in the Oval Office on Wednesday. The American press was denied access. Credit Alexander Shcherbak/TASS, via Getty Images  

Washington Post, Trump revealed highly classified information to Russian foreign minister and ambassador, Greg Miller and Greg Jaffe, May 15, 2017. President Trump revealed highly classified information to the Russian foreign minister and ambassador in a White House meeting last week, according to current and former U.S. officials, who said Trump’s disclosures jeopardized a critical source of intelligence on the Islamic State. The information the president relayed had been provided by a U.S. partner through an intelligence-sharing arrangement considered so sensitive that details have been withheld from allies and tightly restricted even within the U.S. government, officials said.

The partner had not given the United States permission to share the material with Russia, and officials said Trump’s decision to do so endangers cooperation from an ally that has access to the inner workings of the Islamic State. After Trump’s meeting, senior White House officials took steps to contain the damage, placing calls to the CIA and the National Security Agency.

2010

Nieman Watchdog, New Questions Raised About Prosecutor Who Cleared Bush Officials in U.S. Attorney Firings, Andrew Kreig, July 25, 2010. Four days before Nora Dannehy was appointed to investigate the Bush administration’s U.S. attorney firing scandal, a team of lawyers she led was found to have illegally suppressed evidence in a major political corruption case. Andrew Kreig writes that this previously unreported fact calls her entire investigation into question as well as that of a similar investigation by her colleague John Durham of DOJ and CIA decision-making involving torture.

In September 2008, the Bush Justice Department appointed career federal prosecutor Nora Dannehy to investigate allegations that Bush officials in 2006 illegally fired nine U.S. attorneys who wouldn’t politicize official corruption investigations.

But just four days before her appointment, a federal appeals court had ruled that a team of prosecutors led by Dannehy illegally suppressed evidence in a major political corruption case in Connecticut. The prosecutors’ misconduct was so serious that the court vacated seven of the eight convictions in the case.

The ruling didn’t cite Dannehy by name, and although it was publicly reported it apparently never came up in the news coverage of her appointment.

But it now calls into question the integrity of her investigation by raising serious concerns about her credibility — and about whether she was particularly vulnerable to political pressure from within the Justice Department.

Now, almost two years later, Dannehy has provided arguably the most important blanket exoneration for high-level U.S. criminal targets since President George H.W. Bush pardoned six Iran-Contra convicts post-election in late 1992.

The DOJ announced on July 21 that it has “closed the case” on the nine unprecedented mid-term firings because Dannehy found no criminal wrongdoing by DOJ or White House officials.

But the official description of her inquiry indicates that she either placed or acceded to constraints on the scope of her probe that restricted it to the firing of just one of the ousted U.S. attorneys, not the others — and not to the conduct of the U.S. attorneys who weren’t ousted because they met whatever tests DOJ and the White House created.

Dannehy’s probe, my reporting suggests, was compromised from the beginning.

She was appointed by Bush Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey on Sept. 29, 2008. On Sept. 25, the Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York City found misconduct in a 2003 trial she had led.

The court found that the prosecution suppressed evidence that could have benefited the defendant, Connecticut businessman Charles B. Spadoni. Spadoni had been convicted of bribing former state Treasurer Paul Silvester to invest $200 million of state pension money with his firm.

But the appeals court found that prosecutors had failed to turn over to the defense an FBI agent’s notes of a key interview they conducted with Silvester’s attorney. In doing so, the court ruled, “the government deprived Spadoni of exculpatory evidence going to the core of its bribery case against him.”

The court reversed Spadoni’s convictions on seven counts of racketeering, racketeering conspiracy, bribery and wire fraud, leaving intact only an obstruction of justice conviction.

Prosecutors found by a court to have committed misconduct typically face some sort of internal investigation within the Justice Department. Whether there was any such investigation, and why or why not, is not publicly known.

As it happens, the Spadoni case also raises concerns relative to the ongoing federal probe of potential Bush administration wrongdoing in covering up torture that is being led by John H. Durham, another prosecutor from Connecticut. Durham supervised Dannehy’s decade-long prosecution of Spadoni.

He also was appointed by Mukasey in 2008. Durham’s initial charge was to investigate suspected destruction of torture tapes by CIA personnel. In 2009, Holder expanded that probe to other decision-making, including by DOJ personnel.

Until now, neither DOJ nor anyone else has linked Dannehy and Durham by name to the prosecutorial misconduct against Spadoni, as far as I can determine. The court decision doesn’t cite specific actions by the two. But it clearly refers to their case, and the information is readily available online in Lexis and in any good law library.

In April, as the acting U.S. Attorney for Connecticut, Durham signed a DOJ filing denying the merit of the appeals court finding of prosecution misconduct, while calling for Spadoni’s continued prosecution for the remaining charge of obstruction of justice for deleting computer files in advance of a potential subpoena.

I sought additional comment beyond the court filings from Dannehy, Durham and Thomas Carson, DOJ’s spokesman for its Connecticut office. Carson wrote me, “We have no further comment, as the matter is still pending.

Source: https://www.justice-integrity.org/1926-on-eve-of-russiagate-trial-questions-loom-about-special-counsel-durham