Commentary | Durham’s dud is worse than it looks — and now Trump suddenly doesn’t want to talk witch hunts – By Lucian K. Truscott IV (Salon) / Feb 4, 2023
Trump’s attempt to bring disrepute to the Mueller report just backfired spectacularly.
It all goes back to Trump’s obsessions.
The thing that you’ve got to remember about Trump, bless his black heart, is that his obsessions invariably take him to places he would rather not have gone. In fact, the entire reason John Durham was ever appointed by Attorney General William Barr as a Special Counsel to look into the origins of Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation in the first place had to do with Trump’s obsessions. He was obsessed that the entire thing, which he famously and repeatedly called the Russia! Russia! Russia! witch hunt, was a plot by the FBI to get him. So, Trump had Barr appoint Durham to investigate the investigators. Put another way, Trump weaponized the Justice Department to pursue his perceived enemies in the FBI, beginning with his nemesis James Comey, the former head who first opened the investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia way back in July of 2016.
The Durham investigation, as it became known over the last four years, has been in the news a lot recently. Durham was appointed in May 2019 to investigate the so-called Crossfire Hurricane FBI counterintelligence investigation, as well as the Mueller investigation, which ran from May 2017 to March 2019. A year into Durham’s investigation, at a Department of Justice press conference, then-attorney general Barr said what he was trying to do was “get to the bottom of what happened in 2016,” which is interesting in and of itself, because the only investigation taking place in 2016 was the FBI’s.
