We relayed and contextualized the latest developments from the Durham investigation earlier in the week – including a major indictment that revealed even more Democratic fingerprints all over the discredited "Steele dossier," which served as a central basis for the Trump/Russia probe that hung like a cloud over American politics for years. New information continues to trickle in, including this connection to the Biden White House, but major damage to the dossier (and therefore the entire Russia inquiry) has already been done.
Washington Post media columnist Erik Wemple has some questions about credibility and journalistic ethics:
The Danchenko indictment doubles as a critique of several media outlets that covered Steele’s reports in 2016 and after its publication by BuzzFeed in January 2017. As discussed in this series, CNN, MSNBC, Mother Jones, the McClatchy newspaper chain and various pundits showered credibility upon the dossier without corroboration — and found other topics to cover when a forceful debunking arrived in December 2019 via a report from Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz...The indictment provides further insight into why the FBI had concluded that the dossier was mostly a jumble of claims that were inaccurate, unconfirmed or already publicly reported. Sourcing for the dossier was threadbare in the most charitable of depictions...
...The dossier revised the wording here and there, but provided a report that was “substantially the same” as what [Democratic insider and Clinton ally Charles] Dolan had passed along, in the words of the indictment. Talk about circular logic: The dossier was funded by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee — via research group Fusion GPS — yet here was a career Democrat feeding information to its primary collector. It gets more embarrassing: The indictment alleges that Dolan never actually had drinks with a Republican pal; instead, he “fabricated the fact of the meeting,” in the words of the indictment, and pieced together the gossip from news sources. That looks pretty bad, especially alongside Steele’s recent defense of the dossier to ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos. “I stand by the work we did, the sources that we had and the professionalism which we applied to it,” Steele said, speculating there would be more revelations down the road.
His point about the Russia-obsessed media brigade suddenly losing interest when their narrative started to implode is an important one. It's an illustration of what Rush Limbaugh used to call the "drive-by media" effect. Wemple suggests that retractions may be in order, noting that other information regarding Russia's interference efforts in the presidential 2016 election does not excuse much of the media's breathless and credulous coverage of the Steele dossier. Journalists "can't use the larger Trump-Russia tableau to deflect from their coverage of the dossier. A reckoning is years overdue," he writes. This tension played out on "The View," when former State Department spokeswoman Morgan Ortagus confronted House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff over the dossier scandal. He deflected as best he could, but she got in the last word, rightly targeting Schiff's credibility:
Schiff: "None of [Trump's] serious misconduct is in any way diminished by the fact that people lied to Christopher Steele." @MorganOrtagus: "No, I think just your credibility is."
— Mary Margaret Olohan (@MaryMargOlohan) November 9, 2021
pic.twitter.com/9QR2W4NEb0
Schiff and many others obsessed over the Steele dossier, and treated it as serious and accurate, when in fact it was Democratic opposition research garbage. The fact that Trump did some bad things (several of the examples Schiff raises in his self defense are totally unrelated to Russia), and other disturbing facts about his conduct -- and Russia's -- have come to light, does not change the centrality of the dossier to an investigation that now appears to have been rooted in a political dirty trick. If you hype and amplify something that is exposed as unsubstantiated and debunked trash, that's on you. Schiff did so repeatedly. It's also hard to take seriously his feigned incredulity that -- gasp -- someone lied to Steele, given his own aggressive lying about Trump "colluding" with Russia, even after the Mueller investigation found no such collusion. He just kept lying about it. Ortagus' credibility shot was very well deserved. Much of the media is in the same boat. So now what? Former federal prosecutor Andy McCarthy deduces likely outcomes by reading some tea leaves:
Will there be criminal charges that target the real 2016 collusion — not between the Trump campaign and Russia, but between the Clinton campaign and U.S. officials who abused government investigative powers for political purposes? Almost certainly not. All signs are that Durham will end his investigation with a narrative report. It has looked that way for a long time. There are reasons why then-attorney general Bill Barr appointed then-Connecticut U.S. attorney Durham as a special counsel shortly before the Trump administration ended...Barr obviously knew enough about Durham’s investigation to grasp that there was unlikely to be a grand, overarching criminal-conspiracy case; there had, however, been rampant malfeasance and abuse of power that might never come to light absent a comprehensive investigative report. Durham’s indictment of Danchenko and his mid-September indictment of Democratic lawyer Michael Sussmann appear to confirm that he is building toward a final report, not wide-ranging criminal charges.
McCarthy allows that more indictments may come down, but they're not likely to amount to a vast criminal conspiracy. Instead, more embarrassment and shame may well lie ahead for the FBI, the Steele brigade, and anyone – press included – who flogged the unraveled "collusion" storyline for years. Absent criminal charges, what will accountability look like? And to Wemple's argument, will the media bring themselves to cover the destruction of a story that they leaned into with great gusto, coloring the American political conversation for most of the Trump presidency? They obsessed over the story when it fit their preferences. Will they cover it as aggressively as it blows up in their faces? Based on their conduct thus far, the answer is looking like a resounding "no," which demonstrates how the media has earned widespread distrust and scorn from the American people. I'll leave you with this:
NEW: John Durham's investigation, his indictments, & his apparent theory of the case seem to be affirming what has long been suspected: that many of the biggest Trump-Russia collusion claims can ultimately be traced back to Clinton's campaign.@DCExaminerhttps://t.co/DuhhMvLuFV
— Jerry Christmas ?????? (@JerryDunleavy) November 8, 2021
