Special Counsel John Durham and the Press’s Battle With Truth To the media, ignorance is bliss when it comes to the true 2016 election story. By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.
Members of the press are rooting for the failure of the latest John Durham prosecution, because they think it absolves them of their roles in the collusion hoax.
Nor are the feelings of special counsel Durham hard to guess. They are likely identical to those of a previous exposer of FBI misfeasance, Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz, who could not have failed to be surprised and a little appalled at the media’s indifference to the truths he and his team labored to reveal at taxpayer expense.
It was Mr. Durham himself, in his initial and expansive indictment of Democratic lawyer Michael Sussmann, who dwelled and dwelled on every reason for believing the FBI had not been fooled by the lie Mr. Durham charged the lawyer with telling in the collusion hoax.
The message is even clearer in this week’s prosecution of Steele dossier principal “researcher” Igor Danchenko, who has also pleaded not guilty to lying to the FBI. The world now knows, thanks to Mr. Durham, that the FBI put Mr. Danchenko on its payroll for 3½ years and kept him there as late as October 2020, long after it knew the dossier was a package of lies. One effect of this arrangement was to discourage the analyst-about-town Mr. Danchenko from telling the press or other investigators the truth about the dossier’s fraudulence while the FBI was still suggesting to the public and courts it was “credible.”
As a news story, alas, all this runs into the blinkeredness, not to mention giant helpings of personal cowardice, of many reporters covering it.
Telling is a Washington Post scene-setter on the Danchenko trial that began by misrepresenting the three-year-old words of the Justice Department’s Mr. Horowitz, who said he found no “documentary or testimonial evidence” of improper motivation in the Clinton email and Trump collusion investigations.
If a reporter thinks Mr. Horowitz here is saying he got to the bottom of matters and, yep, the agency is clean as a hound’s tooth, Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos needs to investigate what’s happening inside his newspaper. The inspector general plainly states that, in the absence of an unlikely memo or testimony blurting out an admission of wrongdoing, he was required to accept the good faith of FBI actions for which no “satisfactory explanations” were offered.
These include FBI actions in the Hillary Clinton case, which almost all agree were improper and probably cost Mrs. Clinton the election. These include actions in the Trump case that involved unambiguous malfeasance, such as doctoring evidence for a surveillance court and presenting evidence the FBI knew had been discredited.
Mr. Horowitz thereupon went straight to Congress to urge declassification of his complete findings so the public could know the full truth about the FBI’s 2016 actions. Not only did his words go almost universally unreported in the press, most outlets still haven’t told their readers that a so-called classified appendix even exists.
This is the same press that turns away from clear evidence that former top CIA officials spread an obvious lie about the Hunter Biden laptop to protect Joe Biden in the 2020 race.
The big problem here is the story you’re not being told because it would expose the press’s own gullibility and worse in the collusion farrago. In 2016, the FBI no sooner disposed of the Clinton investigation than it launched the Trump collusion investigation. Only after Election Day, though, did this investigation start spawning illegal, apparently politically motivated leaks and become the vehicle for pushing the Steele dossier into public view.
Why? It’s humanly impossible that the motives and feelings that engulfed the FBI’s top coterie at this time were not dominated by the realization they had likely put Mr. Trump in the Oval Office as the result of actions set in motion by what they knew to be fake Russian “intelligence” (the burden of that secret inspector general’s report).
In fact, the contemporaneous texts of FBI counterintelligence deputy Peter Strzok as well as Kevin Clinesmith, the FBI lawyer who pleaded guilty to falsifying collusion evidence, plainly blame their agency for electing Mr. Trump.
It can scarcely be exaggerated how mortifying and damaging it would be to the intelligence community if the truth were widely known by the American people. The Russia hoax saved the day by changing the subject, just as the Hunter Biden hoax may well have accounted for Joe Biden’s victory—a thing that even people who welcome Mr. Biden’s victory ought to be able to be honest about.
But there’s a reason almost every good book about journalism by a journalist, from Evelyn Waugh’s “Scoop” to Christopher Koch’s “The Year of Living Dangerously,” is unflattering about some of the people our profession attracts. My appeal to Mr. Bezos particularly would be: The Washington Post has become a significantly stupider newspaper on your watch. Do something about it.
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