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| John Durham |
United States Attorney for the District of Connecticut John
Durham may well be the most proficient anti-corruption prosecutor in the United
States. The University of St. Joseph, which had
invited Durham to speak to its students in 2018, here offers a partial
curriculum vitae recounting some of Durham’s successful prosecutions.
Durham has not been much in the news because his operations tend
to be leak-proof. Though personable and very much respected by his peers, Durham
is not the sort of State Attorney who suffers fools gladly. He is both
professional and plodding. And there is in the core of the man a strong sense
that certain Biblical admonitions – “place not thy trust in princes” – are
helpful in the sometime tedious work of prosecutors.
Perhaps the term persistent, as understood by President Cal
Coolidge, notoriously adept at concision, would be more appropriate: “Nothing
in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is
more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded
genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated
derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan Press
On! has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.”
The problem of presumed collusion between former President
Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin is very much a tangled web.
Politics – the comings and goings of professional politicians, the fragile egos
of political creatures, the raw determination of brittle ideologues, the
attendant propaganda nonsense, always amusing, that informs political campaigns
– does not make the role of corruption hunters easy.
The quickest way out of a difficulty, Winston Churchill once
said, “is through it.” Alexander the Great solved the puzzle of the Gordian
Knot by slicing it through with his sword.
There are two opposite and conflicting theories concerning
Russian collusion and the 2016 Donald Trump-Hillary Clinton presidential
campaign: theory 1) Trump colluded with Russian President Vladimir Putin and
his shadowy associates to deny Hillary Clinton a viable presidential bid;
theory 2) The Clinton campaign, with assists from former President Barack Obama
and a highly politicized Justice Department, concocted a fabulous narrative implicating Trump in collusion with Russian
spooks based chiefly on documentation – the fiction adorned Steele dossier –
and managed to sell the narrative to a preternaturally naive FISA Court judge
who then allowed an assortment of shadowy prosecutors to spy on the newly born
Trump presidential campaign. After years of probing, politically crippling news
stories, and multiple failed attempts to impeach Trump, theory 1) was finally
quietly ditched.
Enter Durham, who cares not a whit about political
machinations, sword in hand.
Thus far, Durham has indicted two culprits, both of whom
appear to be knee deep in skullduggery, for having lied under oath to
prosecutors. And, not entirely coincidental to the probe, both culprits – one a
lawyer, the other a Russian agent -- are
closely associated with the unprosecutable Hillary Clinton, the Democrat
National Committee, and assorted co-conspirators. Warning: The author of this
column wishes to make clear that he is here using the term “co-conspirators” in
its political rather than its legal sense.
We shall see in coming days whether Durham, plodding and
persistent, is able to make the charges in his indictment – much richer in
detail that the usual indictment – stick. A link to one of the Durham indictment
is provided below in a Yahoo coverage piece.
“The special counsel John Durham, who is investigating the
origins of the FBI's Russia probe, dropped a new
indictment Thursday that
raises questions about the roots of the most salacious allegation in the
so-called Steele dossier.”
For the time being, other prosecutors, and some few curious
and as yet uncommitted journalists, will assume that the Durham investigation
has entered its “squeeze the canary until it squawks” mode. It would be a grave
error to assume Durham’s targets of prosecution will not implicate other odd
conspiratorial birds further up the political chain of command.
Political problems and journalistic problems are often
entangled, not always because journalists lean right or left – but also because
journalists who have committed themselves to discovering the truth are often perversely
unwilling to disentangle themselves from their prior commitments. “Every word
written,” the French writer and philosopher Albert Camus used to say, “is a commitment.”
One does not, and should not, easily abandon one’s commitments – unless the
committed have been led by the nose to reasonable operative theories that, on
close inspection, turn out to be political opportunities and fake crises, in
which case a rage at being duped should replace faulty commitments.
We have all known for some time that the primary
documentation – the so called dossier – that persuaded a FISA Court judge to
allow clandestine spying by major investigative authorities on the Trump
campaign was, to put the matter kindly, bogus. The “dossier” was not a dossier;
that is, it was not a file containing verified facts. The Steele dossier was an
opposition research document, a dirt bag collection of seeming incriminating
narratives designed to aid Hillary Clinton in her presidential campaign against
political novice Donald Trump. And the opposition research document was
financed by the Clinton campaign. Around this center of political intrigue, the
Gordian Knot of truths, half-truths and inventive fiction has grown more and
more complex. And we know, do we not, that political opportunity lies in the
dung heap of complexity?
Now – along comes Alexander! Durham is the most dangerous
prosecutor in the country. He is persistent and, by nature and avocation,
non-political. Indeed, that and an
unquenchable – thus far unthwarted -- ambition to uproot the truth buried in
the dung heap is what make Durham a danger to corrupt political officials.
The
Washington Post, not a Trump megaphone, has tendered a veiled apology
for its past reporting: “The allegations cast new uncertainty on some past
reporting on the dossier by news organizations, including The Washington Post.”
However, whether or not Durham will be sped on his way by a truly disinterested
and objective media is yet an open question.
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