On the menu today: Yesterday, Department of Justice special counsel John Durham released his long-awaited — er, long-, long-, long-awaited — report on Crossfire Hurricane, the FBI’s investigation into Donald Trump and his alleged sinister ties to the Russian government. Durham documented that at the headquarters level under former FBI director James Comey, the bureau began taking special interest in the Trump campaign in April 2016, launching a wide-ranging investigation on the thinnest of pretexts, likely driven by political and personal disdain for Trump among top-level FBI personnel — and from this, a thousand progressive conspiracy theories were born. Meanwhile, President Biden continues to act like there is no debt-ceiling deadline.
The FBI Has Earned Itself a Crossfire Hurricane’s Worth of Denunciation
From that lengthy profile of longtime prosecutor John Durham I wrote back in November 2019:
He will not be rushed; there is no guarantee that Durham will reach any prosecutorial decisions before the 2020 elections. And he will investigate so extensively and thoroughly that no reasonable observer will be able to argue that something important was missed.
Three years, six months, and twelve days later . . .
The Department of Justice and the FBI did not have “any actual evidence of collusion” between Russian officials and Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, and began their Crossfire Hurricane probe of Trump’s campaign based on “raw, unanalyzed, and uncorroborated intelligence,” according to a report released on Monday by special prosecutor John Durham.
You can read Durham’s full report here. The FBI issued a brief statement, contending that it’s already fixed what’s wrong:
The conduct in 2016 and 2017 that Special Counsel Durham examined was the reason that current FBI leadership already implemented dozens of corrective actions, which have now been in place for some time. Had those reforms been in place in 2016, the missteps identified in the report could have been prevented. This report reinforces the importance of ensuring the FBI continues to do its work with the rigor, objectivity, and professionalism the American people deserve and rightly expect.
To read the dossier, which is self-evidently shoddy, one is not surprised to find that it was bogus in key particulars. What continues to be mind-boggling, however, is that even after its allegations did not pan out, and even after Steele’s main source for the information, Igor Danchenko, told the FBI that the information was raw hearsay and rumor, exaggerated and even fabricated in parts, the bureau continued to present it in court months into the Trump presidency. At the same time, Director Comey gave provocative public congressional testimony in which he confirmed that the FBI was conducting an FCI investigation into Trump campaign ties to Russia (though such investigations are classified, and the bureau habitually declines to confirm their existence). Comey gratuitously added that criminal indictments could be in the offing.
This was one of the dirtiest political tricks in American history. The damage it has done to American trust in the FBI and our intelligence agencies is incalculable.
In Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral, Ben Smith’s new memoir that covers his years running BuzzFeed, he laments that the Steele dossier revealed that the Left could be as conspiracy-theory-addled as the Right:
I watched with increasing discomfort as the dossier helped lead the sort of educated Democrats who abhorred Trump supporters’ crude rants about mysterious “Clinton body count” murders and child sex rings in Washington pizza joints into similar patterns of thought. They read Steele’s dossier; they connected the dots. They retweeted threads about how the plane of a Russian oligarch — previously unknown to them, now sinister — had made a mysterious stop in North Carolina. They rallied behind Louise Mensch, a charismatic former British politician who was in New York to work for Rupert Murdoch and trying to create a right-wing establishment answer to the Huffington Post called Heat Street. It was far too late in the history of the Internet, and of conservative politics, though — her tory brand of conservatism couldn’t compete with Breitbart.com and Benny Johnson in their fealty to the new order of right-wing populism. What Mensch had instead was a clubby British faith in the ability of some kind of deep state to set things right — expose Donald Trump, execute Steve Bannon — whatever it took.
From the fall of 2016, when she published an early scoop about the FBI investigating Trump’s Russia ties — a good guess or a good tip, nobody ever knew — until the next spring, Mensch seemed, to many liberals, to know what was up. She published an op-ed in the New York Times, and appeared on MSNBC and Real Time with Bill Maher. I invited her to our newsrooms, where she acted like a character in a movie. She was glad we were talking, she told me, [investigations editor] Mark [Schoofs], and [political reporter] Miriam [Elder], because she might be dead by the end of the month. She made confident claims about Donald Trump and Russia — although the evidence to prove it to us was just out of reach. After she left, we sat down to discuss how to pursue her tips. Miriam was skeptical. Imagine, she said, if this had been an old guy with wild hair and a white button-down shirt, ranting about conspiracies, rather than a beautiful British politician? Imagine if she’d arrived with two paper bags full of files, not an iPhone? Weren’t we just dealing with a polished new kind of nut?
By April, Mensch was obviously out of control. I asked a BuzzFeed news reporter, Joe Bernstein, for quantification: he found that she had accused two hundred and ten people of being Russian agents. That included thirty-five American politicians and officials, twenty-six journalists, twenty-six organizations and companies, eighteen other Americans, and eighty random Twitter accounts. Sean Hannity and Bernie Sanders were on her McCarthy-style list. After we published those numbers, Mensch stopped getting invited on MSNBC. But on Twitter, she was giving many Democrats something they wanted to believe and to share. We didn’t create Mensch and those like her by publishing the dossier, but our decision certainly fed a deep and appealing belief that the American legal system would expose the conspiracies that were the only possible explanation for Trump’s election.
Back in November 2021, Axios wrote, “A reckoning is hitting news organizations for years-old coverage of the 2017 Steele dossier, after the document’s primary source was charged with lying to the FBI. . . . It’s one of the most egregious journalistic errors in modern history, and the media’s response to its own mistakes has so far been tepid.”
Yes, “tepid” is one word for it. Did you blink and miss that reckoning? Have you noticed how much more careful, responsible, and cautious the world of big-time journalism is today?
For a lot of liberal elites, the belief that some sort of sinister power — Russia, and we can throw in Cambridge Analytica’s wildly exaggerated claims of being able to control the votes of Facebook users — manipulated the 2016 presidential election was the most psychologically soothing explanation for that year’s election results. And a lot of them desperately needed some comforting rationalization for how such a self-evidently appealing, trusted, empathetic, and reassuring candidate as Hillary Clinton could possibly lose. (For those itching to argue that I’m a sellout to the Left these days, that was sarcasm.)
And yet, Trump’s rise was the U.S. version of a right-wing-populist phenomenon that manifested itself all around the globe during that period and continues today — Viktor Orbán’s election in Hungary in 2010, Brexit in the United Kingdom, Rodrigo Duterte’s election in the Philippines in 2016, Marine Le Pen’s campaigns in France in 2017 and 2022, Jair Bolsonaro’s election in Brazil in 2019, and in some ways, Giorgia Meloni’s victory in Italy in 2022.
Trump was distinct from the Tea Party movement, particularly in his approach to fiscal issues, and yet in some ways he continued the Tea Party’s wariness of government power — the sense that the government catered to the needs of well-connected financial elites and bailed out their bad decisions, and that most progressive manifestations of efforts to “help” people were poorly disguised efforts to expand government control over their lives. Go figure: By the late Obama years, a whole bunch of people were not so thrilled with how the government was being run.
You don’t have to agree with everything these guys say, but you can’t just dismiss their support among their countrymen as sinister Russian plots and social-media-driven brainwashing. Oftentimes, even in democracies, people have legitimate gripes with their ruling class.
Paranoia knows no partisan boundary. On the right side of the aisle, you can find people contending that Venezuelan hackers altered the 2020-election results, or that the Chinese government swung the state of Arizona to Biden and the conspiracy can be proven if they can find evidence of bamboo in the paper. And on the left, you can find figures such as Senator Elizabeth Warren and MSNBC’s Chris Hayes contending that Republicans in Congress are attempting to deliberately wreck the U.S. economy in order to prevent Biden’s reelection in 2024. (They never lay out how the GOP House majority will survive the political consequences of that wrecked economy.)
Speaking of wrecking the American economy . . .
ADDENDUM: Hey, remember about ten minutes ago, when the U.S. approach to the debt ceiling represented marching up to the precipice of economic Armageddon? And that if President Biden, the Democratic-controlled Senate, and the Republican-controlled House of Representatives did not work out a deal, we were all facing a fiscal doomsday scenario that could lead to crashing markets, a big jump in unemployment, higher interest rates, temporary disruption of government payments, etc.
Well, as of this writing, President Biden is still scheduled to leave town tomorrow:
President Biden heads to Japan on Wednesday for a wide-ranging trip that marks a renewed push on his part to confront China’s growing political, military and economic power, at a time when some experts warn that tensions between the two superpowers have grown dangerously high.
Biden is traveling to Australia and Papua New Guinea as well as Japan on the seven-day excursion, which is also aimed at bolstering support for Ukraine, combating climate change and tackling global inflation.
Last week, Biden said he would skip the trip if it’s necessary. Apparently, he doesn’t think it’s necessary. Either the White House knows this is going to end with a deal, or the Biden team is okay with hitting the debt ceiling.
By the way, when Biden has held negotiation meetings on the debt ceiling in recent weeks, he’s sat down with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.