Donald Trump has maintained for the majority of the last three years that the investigation being conducted by special counsel John Durham is about to blow the lid off of a huge plot to discredit him and steal the 2016 election.
Durham’s probe missed on Tuesday once more. Igor Danchenko, the main source for the now-famous dossier on Trump’s connections to Russia, was cleared of all charges this time. That makes one of the prosecutions Durham engineered fail twice already this year. Michael Sussmann, an attorney for Hillary Clinton’s campaign, was cleared of lying to the FBI while providing information about Trump and Russia in May.
According to Marshall Cohen of AWN, “In both cases, the defence contended that Durham was an overzealous prosecutor who cherry-picked evidence, intimidated witnesses, and attempted to fabricate an anti-Trump conspiracy where none existed.”
Durham has no open cases, and news reports indicate that he is wrapping up the inquiry. Only one guilty plea has been entered thus far in the three-year saga—that of a low-level FBI agent who was given probation.
There is a significant discrepancy between what Durham promised to unearth and what the special counsel has actually discovered, primarily because to Trump.
In November 2021, Trump said, “Hats off because, it’s coming out, and it’s coming out at a level – Durham has come out with things that are really spectacular.” “We all kind of knew that happened, and now that we have evidence, I think they’re only going to get deeper and deeper, and it all points back to the Democrats, Hillary, and the corrupt lawyers,” one person said.
He then presented the following in February of this year:
“It appears that this is only the beginning because, if you read the filing and have any idea of what happened—I predicted this long ago—you’ll notice a lot of other things taking place that are really just a continuation of the crime of the century. Nobody has ever witnessed anything quite like this major occurrence.
Although it’s unclear what Durham will include in his report, it’s important to keep in mind that the special counsel investigation into Russia’s alleged interference in the 2016 presidential election, led by Robert Mueller, was both a) shorter and b) found much more criminal wrongdoing than Durham’s current investigation.
37 individuals and organisations are facing 199 criminal charges as a result of the Mueller investigation. Seven individuals admitted guilt. Two were found guilty in court. Seven received prison terms. Some of the most important members of Trump’s team, like the campaign chairman Paul Manafort and the top White House adviser Michael Flynn, were implicated in the issues that Mueller uncovered.
The Durham investigation hasn’t even come close to that mark so far. When Durham releases his final report, he will have one more opportunity to demonstrate whether he has actually discovered anything.
But up until now, this has merely been more of Trump’s boasting: Full of noise and fury, but meaningless.
