Cheap Seats 2023 By Rich Trzupek

The Durham Report - 06/21

By Rich Trzupek
  Cliff-Notes version of comments from the left regarding the report issued by special counsel John Durham regarding allegations of Russian collusion advanced by the FBI during the Trump administration: What a complete waste of time! No prosecutions. No conspiracies! A giant nothing-burger extraordinaire!
  Cliff-Notes version of comments from the right regarding the report issued by special counsel John Durham regarding allegations of Russian collusion advanced by the FBI during the Trump administration: Ah-ha! There it is! Those sons-of-bitches at the Bureau were working to destroy Trump all along and they came within a hair’s breadth of pulling it off! Lock the bastards up!
  Neither version is accurate. The real lesson of the Durham report is one that neither side wishes to hear. An old attorney friend of mine (who happens to lean left) once commented that “the process is the penalty”.  That sums up the point of the Durham report quite nicely.
  What is damning about the Durham report is not that it describes criminal behavior or accuses various officials of committing crimes. The point of the Durham report is that it exposes the way public officials in positions of great power can legally manipulate the machinery of the bureaucratic state to further goals that are clearly personal, prurient and political. The Durham report is not an indictment of any particular swamp dweller so much as it is yet another call to drain the swamp itself. The FBI didn’t break the rules, because the FBI wrote the rules.
  Comey, McCabe, Strzok and the rest of the rest of the righteous mopes who worked so hard for so long to undermine the Trump administration didn’t operate outside the law. Rather, they operated deep within the dark recesses of the law – the law’s dungeons as it were. They knew, better than anyone, what was legally defensible and what wasn’t. Every maneuver was carefully designed to approach the precipice of illegal, blatant partisan behavior but never to be so bold as to actually cross it.
  Were they thus “evil” in the conventional sense? I don’t think so. An alligator living in the Everglades is not “evil” when he kills a person who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The alligator is simply responding to his surroundings in a way that it perceives grants it the greatest possibility of continued survival. It’s reacting to living in a swamp, just as the behavior of senior FBI officials during Trump’s administration was an outgrowth of their living in their particular murky bureaucratic environment. If there is one thing that 38 years of working with bureaucrats has taught me it is this; the vast majority of them live in narrow, sheltered worlds and they haven’t the slightest clue that is the case.
  For Comey, McCabe, Strzok and the rest, clinging to the Russian collusion nonsense for so long was not only justified, it was necessary. They had received seemingly credible evidence that Russia had actively interfered in the 2016 Presidential Election. It was therefore their sworn duty to chase those allegations to the ground. Right? Well – if we’re being charitable – maybe at first, but this house of cards tumbled apart rather quickly.
  The Durham report clearly shows that the FBI had ever-increasing piles of evidence that suggested in stronger and stronger terms that the Steele dossier, upon which the whole Russian collusion story depended, was a steaming pile of crap bought and paid for by the Clinton campaign.
  If this were an ordinary criminal investigation there would have come a time – and I think pretty early on – when the FBI would have dropped the matter as a huge waste of time and money. But they didn’t do that. They kept at it, convincing themselves that it was their public duty to do so. President Trump needed to be taken down and they would leave no stone unturned in their efforts to make that happen.
  So they kept digging, month after month, year after year, providing left-wing conspiracy whacks like Rachel Maddow with seeming justification for repeating the words “Trump” and “Russia” in the near vicinity of each other approximately one bazillion times.
  The amount of time and money that clowns like Comey and McCabe wasted in their righteous crusade is mind boggling. If they were in the private sector they would have been sent packing in disgrace about mid 2017, as much for incompetence as for wasting prodigious sums of money.
  But the chilling conclusion of the Durham report is that they did not act illegally. They followed the law to as fine a point as the law provides. To appropriate a saying from the younger generation: don’t hate the player, hate the game.
  The important question is: do we have the courage and will to change the game?
  E-mail: richtrzupek@gmail.com