The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Durham digging dirt or riding witch’s broom?
WASHINGTON — Connecticut U.S. Attorney John Durham’s TrumpRussia lookback is now a fullthroated criminal investigation, with all the grand jury (dripdrip) secrecy and subpoena power that entails.
His probe may be an honest effort to check whether the FBI or Justice Department put their collective “thumb on the scale” (as Attorney General William Barr put it) in starting up the probe that special counsel Robert Mueller ultimately took over.
Or it may be a witch hunt, a real one as opposed to that other kind President Donald Trump is always talking about.
Durham, of course, was appointed by Barr to look into whether FBI agents initiated the counterintelligence investigation on the basis of legitimate evidence of wrongdoing. Durham also is investigating whether animus toward Trump had anything to do with it, sparking unease among Democrats and career law enforcement and intelligence officials that Durham is dishing out thinly veiled “payback.”
Trump has long insisted that the Mueller probe of connections between Russian intelligence and the Trump campaign was a “hoax.” He claimed full exoneration when Mueller closed the books on the probe earlier this year.
Mueller, for the record, found that while cooperation between the Trump campaign and Russia didn’t rise to the level of a crime, Trump’s staff saw it as beneficial. And Mueller broadly hinted he would have indicted Trump on obstruction charges, but for the DOJ doctrine against subjecting a sitting president to criminal charges.
New reports say Durham has yet to interview a lot of the top officials involved in countering Russian electoral interference, including FBI officials Andrew McCabe and James Baker, and the agent who started the investigation, Peter Strzok. The role of Strzok may be crucial because Mueller fired him after disclosure of text messages to an FBI lawyer (coincidentally his lover) in which he expressed disdain for Trump.
What is not clear is to what degree Durham is out to bolster conspiracy theories favored by Trump and his partisans, including Ukraine (not Russia) as the main actor in 2016 electoral interference.
Displaying a healthy mustache and goatee combination, Durham looks like a plainclothes Civil War reenactor. Or maybe he could play the First Lord of the Admiralty in Gilbert & Sullivan’s “HMS Pinafore.”
A DOJ prosecutor since 1982, he has a long history of busting FBI and CIA personnel. He spearheaded the probe that showed FBI agents helping out Boston gangster Whitey Bulger, as well as the role of CIA officers in torture and “enhanced” interrogation under President George W. Bush.
Barr and Durham have traveled together to Italy and England in pursuit of answers. The Justice Department’s veteran inspector general, Michael Horowitz, is conducting a comparable investigation of good, bad and ugly in the development of TrumpRussia.
Ultimately, it remains to be seen whether Durham will come up with indictable substance that alters public understanding of the TrumpRussia narrative — or bristles from a witch’s broom.
‘A race without end’
Connecticut Secretary of the State Denise Merrill was in Washington to meet the Connecticut congressional delegation on the weighty subject of election security, among other things. Hackers from not only Russia but Iran and China are scanning the election systems of Connecticut and other states, looking for soft “anomalies” that get them inside to muck about and disrupt.
Merrill compares it to “a race without end,” with states needing to be constantly vigilant and update defenses in order to guarantee election integrity.
Of course, the duties of the secretary of the state in Connecticut vary considerably from those of the U.S. secretary of state. Merrill says she travels to D.C. two or three times a year, so she has plenty of opportunity to introduce herself with that impressivesounding title.
Does anyone in Washington ever get confused? Any headscratching and wondering aloud, “Oh, I thought Mike Pompeo had that job”?
Merrill laughs and says no, folks in D.C. are well attuned to the differences between national and statewide secretaries of state. But back home in Connecticut? Not so much, evidently.
“People still do get it mixed up all the time,” she said.
But given the low state of affairs in American diplomacy these days, Merrill could hardly do a worse job in negotiating with Ukraine or Turkey or, heck, Vladimir Putin himself. And, who knows, maybe it’s time for Connecticut to have a foreign policy to call its own.