That Old Mueller Feeling

R ussiagate special counsel John Durham has caused a stir by alleging that Democratic operatives tied to the Clinton campaign pushed the CIA to monitor Donald Trump even as he was the sitting president of the United States.

Durham had already indicted DNC lawyer Michael Sussmann for lying to the FBI about whom he was representing — the Clinton campaign and one of its operatives, “tech executive” Rodney Joffe — when he brought the Bureau Internet traffic data, which was distorted to suggest that Trump was using a Russian bank as a back channel for communications with his supposed masters at the Kremlin. Trump was then the Republican presidential nominee.

Now, as our editorial relates, Durham alleges that this monitoring of Trump’s Internet communications continued into his presidency. Joffe, who had hoped to land a big job in the anticipated Clinton administration, enjoyed privileged access to the data thanks to a government contract — he was supposed to be helping intelligence agencies combat hacking. Durham says that some of the data he mined was generated by the Executive Office of the President — i.e., the White House.

Sussmann is said to have proffered it to the CIA to urge that they, too, investigate Trump’s supposed collusion with Vladimir Putin’s regime. Sussmann’s defense denies this. His lawyers have raised other concerns about Durham’s case. We’ll see how this tussle turns out.

Meantime, one thing is certain: Just as Joffe had privileged access to government databases, his attorney Sussmann had cozy relations with government officials. Sussmann had been a Justice Department cyber-security prosecutor. That opened doors for the politically connected lawyer at such national-security agencies as the FBI and the CIA.

All very incestuous. And that is likely to be the theme of Durham’s final report: a devious political dirty trick against Trump, which the Clinton campaign and Democratic operatives were able to carry out because of what is derisively called “the deep state,” dominated by Democrats, the Party of Government. It is not just the top government officials, spy agencies, and willful but unaccountable bureaucrats; around them orbits a murky cabal of politically connected insiders, floating between government jobs and lucrative gigs at law and lobbying firms, government contractors, think tanks, public–private enterprises, academe, etc.

But Durham’s final report is a ways away. For the moment, we are left to ponder his prosecutions. As I have previously observed, they have so far been underwhelming. In that regard, they have a lot in common with Robert Mueller’s prosecutions.

The Mueller probe set out, with high Democratic hopes, to nail Trump for “colluding” with Russia. Yet Mueller’s indictments turned out to be long on explosive innuendo but woefully short on proof of major crimes. He performed a public-relations stunt of indicting Russian companies that he calculated would never show up for an American trial; that blew up in his face. For all the bombast about Trump as a potential Putin hireling, so assiduously hyped by the media and congressional Democrats, Mueller’s actual charges mainly involved false statements made to FBI investigators, often about comparatively trivial matters.

Then, at last, came Mueller’s final report: all smoke, no fire. Lots of Russia, Russia, Russia. Lots of tawdry details about vague Trump connections to apparently unsavory Russian characters. Yet no allegation of a grand conspiracy between an American president and Moscow to undermine national security and U.S. interests. Not even close.

Now we have Durham. For three years, as Rich Lowry explains, he has been examining the origins of the thin-gruel Russiagate probe that led to the Mueller fiasco. Trump supporters are on the edge of their seats, waiting for Durham to drop the hammer: A shocking, Watergate-dimension conspiracy between the Obama administration and the Democratic Party to put the government’s intelligence and law-enforcement apparatus in the service of, first, Hillary Clinton’s campaign, and then, after failing to get her elected, the Democrats’ crusade to slander Trump as a Putin puppet in order to undermine, impeach, and remove him.

But for all the extravagant claims about how Durham is supposedly on the verge of breaking the case wide open, the big one never comes. For all the current noise about spying on the Trump White House, Sussmann is charged merely with misleading the FBI about who his clients were. Joffe is not charged. Other Clinton-campaign operatives are not charged. Obama officials are not charged. There is no allegation of fraud on the government, or any indictment claiming that the information proffered to make Trump look corrupt was fraudulent.

Same with Durham’s lone case related to the Steele dossier — the faux intelligence reports by which Clinton operative and former British spy Christopher Steele framed Trump as a Kremlin mole. The FBI used these discredited claims in federal court to obtain spy warrants. Yet Durham has charged just one Clinton operative, Igor Danchenko — and merely for lying to the FBI about his sources. Durham’s indictment does not even allege that the dossier was fraudulent. No charges against Steele or against the Clintonistas with whom he collaborated. No indictment charging a government conspiracy, or even a Clinton conspiracy, to defraud the court. No grand Watergate crime of the century.

And let’s not forget Durham’s first indictment. For all the huffing and puffing, all the righteous condemnation of the FBI’s shameful mendacity, political bias, and sheer incompetence in obtaining court authorization to surveil former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, Durham charged exactly one low-level Bureau lawyer, Kevin Clinesmith. His crime? Lying to . . . yes  . . . the FBI. Not fraud on the court. Not a corrupt pact between the Obama administration and the Clinton campaign to spy on Trump. Just a fib to another FBI official regarding Page’s status as a CIA informant, which the Bureau failed to disclose to the judge. After all we’ve learned about its malfeasance in the collusion caper, the special counsel’s ultimate position is that the poor FBI was duped . . . even by its own attorney!

The Democrat-media complex loved the Mueller investigation but hates the Durham investigation. Other than that partisan slant, though, the two probes seem to have a lot in common.