Column: The Mueller Boosters Decry Durham’s ‘Debacle’

Once upon a time, there was a story about two special investigators. First came Robert Mueller, appointed by President Trump’s original Attorney General Jeff Sessions to probe for collusion between Trump and the Russian government. The second was John Durham, appointed by Trump’s second Attorney General Bill Barr to probe the origins of what sparked the Mueller investigation.

In the media’s eyes, Mueller was a righteous hero like Eliot Ness, devoted to exposing Trump. While he was previously praised for his ability to be a straight-shooter by Democrats, Durham has now been labeled a right-wing fixation in the media. Liberal media won a major victory when Mueller released his final report for 2019. Mueller’s team of prosecutors, dominated by Democrats, heavily borrowed from their anti-Trump investigations.

CNN’s Brian Stelter and Oliver Darcy touted how journalists “pointed out that the Mueller report corroborated much of the reporting that’s been done for the last two years.” CNN reporter Shimon Prokupecz echoed that Mueller had “corroborated a lot of the good journalism that was done.”

CNN analyst Bill Carter praised the media for its courageous refusal “to let go of the tail of the real narrative.” It didn’t matter that Mueller’s report failed to achieve the primary liberal/Democrat objective of removing Trump as a Russian-imposed president. More important was the narrative than were court outcomes.

By contrast, when Durham’s first trial – of Clinton lawyer Michael Sussmann – ended in a not-guilty verdict from a D.C. jury on May 31, CNN’s “Reliable Sources” newsletter proclaimed it was “Durham’s debacle”! 

Oliver Darcy complained Durham’s probe “has been hyped endlessly by the right-wing media machine,” then quoted fellow liberal Philip Bump at The Washington Post, who proclaimed this was “a lengthy fishing expedition that simply doesn’t have the goods.”

CNN reporter Marshall Cohen announced “The verdict is a major defeat for Durham and his Justice Department prosecutors, who have spent three years looking for wrongdoing in the Trump-Russia probe.”

Darcy also noted leftist journalist Jonathan Chait argued in New York magazine that even bringing the Sussmann charge of lying to the FBI was “a testament to the failure of his probe, since all he was charging was false statements. Team Mueller was able to use false-statements charges against Roger Stone and Michael Cohen in order to charge them.

CNN and liberal media outlets are hateful of the Durham probe for two reasons. Conservative media stars like Sean Hannity hyped Durham’s potential to undo the Democrats in the 2020 election. The fact that Durham didn’t do that should underline his independence. He didn’t issue election-eve indictments, like Lawrence Walsh did to the Republicans with Caspar Weinberger in 1988.

But the second reason is Durham’s revelations of how the Clinton campaign tried to ply its often-fraudulent opposition research to friendly “mainstream” outlets. They don’t want anyone focusing on how Christopher Steele and Fusion GPS were granted a wide berth to accuse Trump of a foreign-owned presidency. Sussmann was taking Clinton campaign research into a top-level meeting at the FBI so the Clinton campaign could tell reporters the FBI was investigating Trump’s ties to the Russians in the last days of the 2016 campaign. 

This punditry shows that media bias can be as widespread as the promotion of scandals. John Durham received a hostile welcome from the journalists, who wanted people to believe all the fanciful stories about Trump. Any attempt to dig into the manufacturing of their sensationalist narratives has to be disparaged as a “debacle.”