"'Republic of Pretend.'"

The Durham Report.

The unfunny fiasco. Los Angeles, 2017. (Cody Williams, cc by 2.0/ Wikimedia Commons.)

23 MAY—There are certain things I do not quite get since Special Counsel John Durham’s report on the epically corrupt conduct of Donald Trump’s enemies during the 2016 election campaigns went to Congress last week. Many things, actually. For all the ground Durham covers in his 306–page report, I don’t get why he left a lot of things undone and unexamined, a lot of names unnamed and a lot of conclusions unconcluded after a four-year investigation into the very unfunny fiasco known as Russiagate. 

And then there are a few things I do get. Chief among these is that, with the already-evident burying of the Durham Report, we now witness the obliteration of a highly significant passage in our national history. To be deprived in this way of our past—of the facts of our time—is a kind of condemnation. This comes with consequences. I get these things. What our institutions of government and our corporate media perpetrate as we speak, this abuse of those alive now, of those who will follow us, altogether of the history that belongs to us, imposes a great responsibility upon us. This last is something I hope we all get. 

The Durham Report is at bottom a confirmation more than a revelation, as various commentators have noted. Those among us willing to look squarely at events and evidence without fear or favor in the true meaning of this phrase understood years ago that the Democratic Party and the Federal Bureau of Investigation—among others, I have to add—conspired to concoct the Russiagate ruse in the service of Hillary Clinton’s bid for the presidency. The Durham Report gives us a lot of detail as to just how this was done. We are now able to follow the bouncing ball once Clinton, personally so far as I understand it, got it rolling by way of what Durham calls the Clinton Intelligence Plan. 

This detail is important. Susan Schmidt, an experienced journalist with a good record to her credit, runs it down in a piece for Racket News that ScheerPost republished a day after Attorney–General Merrick Garland sent the Durham Report to Congress. Glenn Greenwald produced an excellent segment on the report in his System Update program. Matt Taibbi and Walter Kirn, the novelist and essayist, considered Durham, Russiagate, and the latter’s fate in their America This Week podcast. Chris Hedges weighed in Monday. 

I appreciate the Durham Report for the chronology of events it indicates. This is now easier to follow than it has been previously. In simple terms, Clinton authorized an operation to frame Trump within days of the leak of emails from Democratic Party servers in July 2016. The FBI’s leadership acted quickly to set this operation in motion. It first considered using the offhand remarks of George Papadopoulos, a minor Trump campaign volunteer, to obtain surveillance warrants against various of Trump’s advisers. When that proved too flimsy, the agency’s top officials turned to the Steele Dossier. The agency knew it was junk, but they punched it up sufficiently to get the warrants needed to proceed against Trump and his people. 

This was Crossfire Hurricane, the FBI’s anti–Trump op at the heart of the Russiagate hoax. 

“The truth is, we had almost all of the information a long time ago. What we didn’t have was the certification of the information by a government authority, by a legal authority,” Walter Kirn remarks in America This Week. “I think Durham did a job of showing reach to the highest levels of the government. Apparently everyone was briefed on the reality of this thing early on, very early on. All the highest authorities knew it was bullshit.” 

Perfectly fair comment, an astute summation. Then Kirn continues in a very curious way: 

In a way, I guess it became necessary that the system vindicates itself by finding that which could not be found and asserting that which could not be proved, to the point that the moment where it mattered passed away. ,” he remarks. “President Trump’s no longer president. All of the harms that were done by this thing have been done. They changed our history, they changed our media. They changed our sense of information and why it’s important.

Kirn is right to suggest that “the system” appears to figure that a report such as Durham’s can now be released because it is all water under the bridge—a little in the way the U.S. will acknowledge one or another of its coup operations long after the facts have ceased to matter. Similarly, it looks as if Garland found this an opportune moment to send the Durham Report to Capitol Hill, effectively to  remove the entire Russiagate affair from the common American consciousness. With a presidential election 18 months away, Biden’s attorney-general must dispose of Russiagate and Durham’s probe as hastily and as best he can. 

But I am not with Kirn when he asserts all the harm has been done. No, it has not. Russiagate changed history all right. And the destruction of this history is to my mind the greatest harm of all. This is the very oddest thing about the Durham Report: It purports to rip off the veil shielding the plot against Donald Trump from view, but it shapes up after a few days’ consideration as part of the effort to bury the Russiagate hoax the way the Warren Commission buried the facts of the Kennedy assassination for many years.