John Durham exposed Washington corruption: his own

Marcy Wheeler summarizes Durham spending years claiming to have the goods on the anti-Trump DEEP STATE only to open up Al Capone’s vault:

In the wake of special counsel John Durham’s embarrassing second acquittal earlier this month, Durham’s fans—from theWall Street Journal editorial page to former Attorney General Bill Barr to Donald Trump himself—have tried to justify Durham’s work by claiming he disclosed corruption.

Perhaps he did. But whose? Indeed, the Durham fiasco has disclosed, first and foremost, how much damage Republicans are willing to do in an attempt to deny the results of Robert Mueller’s own special counsel investigation.

[…]

Durham’s own investigations have flopped. In June, a District of Columbia jury found lawyer Michael Sussmann not guilty of lying to hide a tie between the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign and a tip about some cybersecurity anomalies Sussmann shared with the FBI in September 2016. Then, after the government finished its case, a Republican-appointed judge ruled that Durham had charged the primary source for Christopher Steele’s dossier, Igor Danchenko, with lying even though the alleged false statement was “literally true.” Then a jury did the rest. It acquitted the Russian analyst of four additional charges. Forty months in, two juries and a judge concluded Durham had proven no crime.

Trump once bragged that Durham was going to uncover “the crime of the century.” But for all the right-wing celebration of purportedly momentous new disclosures, the most stunning revelations from the Danchenko trial were details of how Barr and Senator Lindsey Graham recklessly demanded the release of Danchenko’s first FBI interview report, which led directly to his exposure and ruin as an FBI source. After Danchenko helped the FBI to vet (and discredit) the Steele dossier in 2017, he served as an FBI source for over three years. By the time Barr and Graham burned Danchenko, he had contributed to 25 FBI investigations across six field offices. “Losing Mr. Danchenko as a confidential human source harmed national security,” his handling agent Kevin Helson agreed with Danchenko’s lawyers at trial. As Helson described, Danchenko was even “reporting on some things that were against Trump.”

The good news for Durham is that “Russiagate was a hoax” conspiracy theorists are as impervious to empirical reality as QAnon, and given the near-total overlap in these circles this is pretty much true by definition.