Durham Is Steadily Exposing the Real ‘Russia Collusion’ Scandal

By David Harsanyi

Friday, November 05, 2021

 

It’s one of the biggest scandals in American political history, and it barely warrants any media coverage.

 

Donald Trump might have desired a closer relationship with Vladimir Putin, but it was Democrats who had aggressively and successfully disseminated Russian disinformation during and after the 2016 election, manipulating a pliant media and law enforcement, plunging the nation into four years of paranoia meant to undermine trust in the American electoral system.

 

Special counsel John Durham has now handed down another indictment, arresting Igor Danchenko, a grifter, suspected Russian spy, and primary sub-source for the “Steele Dossier,” the discredited file that was assembled by opposition-research shop Fusion GPS and funded by the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign through its law firm, Perkins Coie.

 

Not only did the Clinton campaign and Democratic Party operators pay for these uncorroborated allegations, they then spread the lies to government agencies and major media organizations. The candidate herself often perpetuated a conspiracy theory that she almost surely knew was bogus. And because it was Trump, everyone ran with it, including law enforcement.

 

We know a lawyer at the FBI doctored an email and used it as the basis for a sworn statement to spy on Trump-campaign adviser Carter Page — omitting the fact that the underlying evidence was a partisan document — and that Obama officials unmasked members of the opposition party during an election. Department of Justice inspector general Michael Horowitz found that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act applications used to spy on Page were riddled with 17 “significant errors.” More important, Horowitz testified that “the FISA applications relied entirely on information from the . . . primary sub source’s reporting to support the allegation that Page was coordinating with the Russian government on 2016 U.S. presidential election activities.” (My italics.)

 

There were early signs that controversy was a farce. In March 2017, I wrote a tepid piece headlined, “Democrats Shouldn’t Dismiss Nunes’ Spying Claims So Quickly.” At the time, House Intelligence chairman Devin Nunes, somewhat ham-fistedly, assembled a memo detailing how the Trump campaign had been spied on and unmasked and that conversations “with little or no apparent foreign intelligence value were widely disseminated in an intelligence community report” and that the evidence was predicated on a dossier paid for by Democrats. I will save you the hundreds of hyperlinks to liberal commentators calling Nunes a traitor and liar, but let’s just say it was quite the scene.

 

At the time, Nunes was also battered for failing to abide by proper congressional decorum and for sharing his information with the White House before filling in Democrats. Nunes, granted, should have acted in a less partisan manner. Then again, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff, a relentless presence on cable television during this time, not only knew that Nunes was right but lied when claiming Russians had “hacked the election,” and lied again when claiming to be in possession of real-world evidence of criminal conspiracy. There would never be a “credible” investigation. In fact, Schiff didn’t even try to impeach the president for criminal conspiracy related to Russia.

 

These days, Schiff is the author of a best-selling book, but Nunes is vindicated.

 

None of this sparked much skepticism from the establishment media. They would continue to obsess over Russian collusion, making a point of stressing that the partisan oppo-research hadn’t sparked the FBI investigation. “Republicans’ Steele dossier conspiracy theory was dealt a big blow this weekend,” read a piece by Washington Post’s Aaron Blake, one of the many writers at that paper who latched on to the “collusion” story. With Danchenko’s arrest, the Post now contends that “allegations cast new uncertainty on some past reporting on the dossier by news organizations, including The Washington Post.” Will the newspaper return its Pulitzer now?

 

It’s important to remember, as Jonathan Chait of New York magazine helpfully noted in his unhinged opus: “The truth is that much of the reporting of the Russia scandal over the past 18 months has followed the contours of what Steele’s sources told him.” Indeed, Russia collusion was the most successful ratf***ing enterprise in American history.

 

We now know that the premise of the narrative that undergirded hundreds of stories was created in a public-relations lab. What we don’t know is how much the media knew. Even if we generously concede that most journalists were merely dupes rather than participants, the lack of skepticism and professionalism is still jarring.

 

Whether it was reporters telling us that Russian hackers had taken over the U.S. electricity grid to deny beleaguered Vermonters heat or that Trump had created a secret Internet server to surreptitiously communicate with a Russian bank, every “mistake” skewed in the same direction. And we learned during these years that journalists could “correct” stories whose entire premises were concocted.

 

CNN was likely the worst offender. Whether it was erroneously reporting that Trump’s former personal attorney Michael Cohen had testified that the then-presidential candidate had advance knowledge of the 2016 Trump Tower meeting between campaign officials and a Russian operative (untrue, even according to the single highly partisan source they used for the story) or pushing a four-byline story alleging that James Comey was about to publicly dispute the president’s claim that the former FBI director told him three times that he was not under investigation (he would do the opposite), they would never explain how they got it all so wrong.

 

It was CNN that broke a story about Donald Trump Jr. being offered advance access to the hacked emails of the DNC and Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta. The hysteria that followed was amazing. CNN was later forced to “correct” the piece when another paper got its hands on the emails. Two sources had allegedly gotten the date wrong. Yet, somehow, NBC’s Ken Dilanian and other reporters had also independently confirmed the same mistake from their own independent sources. This was one of the most miraculous happenstances in journalistic history!

 

Not that it matters. There will be no repercussions. No explanation. No self-reflection. No professional oversight. No apology.