In Durham Investigation vs. the Press, Who’s the Straight Shooter?
Instead of ankle-biting, big media might join the special prosecutor in airing the secrets of 2016.
By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.
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Feb. 18, 2022 6:21 pm ET
John Durham, famously tight-lipped, gave a rare speech at the University of St. Joseph in West Hartford, Conn., four years ago. The first words out of his mouth concerned the “awesome power” of prosecutors and the importance of proceeding in secret because sometimes the prosecutor’s suspicions about people are wrong.
When President Trump named Mr. Durham in 2018 to be U.S. attorney for Connecticut, so eager were the state’s two Democratic U.S. senators to take credit that they rushed out a statement noting Mr. Durham’s “immense respect as a no-nonsense, fierce and fair prosecutor.”
The Bush and Obama administrations trusted him to investigate potential CIA abuses. The Clinton administration trusted him to investigate FBI corruption in dealings with the Boston mob. Mr. Durham, after 45 years, became untrustworthy to Democrats and their press allies only when he began investigating a matter inconvenient to Democrats and their press allies—when Trump Attorney General William Barr tasked him with reviewing the FBI’s Russia-meddling investigations.
And yet, if he’s so untrustworthy, hard to explain is the extraordinary decision by the Washington Post, based solely on a Durham indictment, to retract several of its stories lending credence to the Steele dossier, saying it no longer could stand by its own reporting.
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This brings us to the irony of the press carping about Mr. Durham; it ankle-bites at side aspects of his proceedings, since nobody can really counter the colossal burden of his revelations, that the press and FBI let themselves be manipulated into promoting baseless smears against a presidential candidate and president.
The latest buzz concerns his case against Democratic lawyer Michael Sussmann, accused by Mr. Durham of lying to the FBI to conceal a Clinton campaign role in spurious evidence he was presenting of Trump-Russia collusion.
A new filing doesn’t bring new charges. It simply asks a judge to examine potential conflicts of interest involving Mr. Sussmann’s legal counsel and certain Clinton campaign associates. If the filing contains any “aha!” value, it reinforces the revelation that Clinton agents were behind a now-discredited story at Slate.com and the New Yorker magazine that Mr. Trump, a Russian bank and a Michigan healthcare company were in secret computer cahoots.
The filing also adds a tidbit: One of the clients whose web data a Sussmann associate cynically exploited was the White House itself. Cue an uproar.
As I suggested to emailers last weekend who were on fire about the news, maybe just wait and let Mr. Durham show us in the courtroom what it all means. All along, my guess has been that he’s less interested in racking up convictions than in exposing how the press and FBI participated in their own gaslighting for partisan ends.
It wasn’t some off-the-wall whimsy to suggest, in 2019, that candidate Joe Biden might do himself and the country a favor by endorsing the Durham investigation. Crazies on both sides could step back from the brink. It would benefit Trump voters especially to know that, while some of the paranoia they’ve been encouraged to adopt may be unfounded, their concerns aren’t unreasonable and are being treated respectfully by the legal system. Likewise, Democrats and Hillary Clinton supporters had every reason also to be upset about galumphing actions of the FBI in 2016, which likely cost Mrs. Clinton the presidency.
Instead of circling the wagons, major news outlets might try giving Mr. Durham some competition in getting to the bottom of these matters. The moment is propitious. Despite Sarah Palin’s loss this week in a libel action against the New York Times, her case only adds to a groundswell for overturning a 58-year-old Supreme Court precedent granting the press extraordinary immunity when it falsely defames a public figure. Others, including Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, have urged such a revisiting. Congress, in less than 12 months, may be in the hands of Republicans who take a dim view of the media.
This would be a good time for the press to show it’s not just another corrupt interest group, that it really does seek to report, without fear or favor, the truth about matters rightly important to the public. A large irony must be noted. The “self-censorship” and “chilling effect” the Supreme Court worried about in 1964 has become rampant, not from lawsuit fears but because the press frequently is unwilling to pursue news that would be unwelcome to its partisan allies.
All the more so because news outlets not only had a front-row seat, in real time, for the matters Mr. Durham is trying to reconstruct in retrospect. The press was also an actor. Its behavior in promoting one of the biggest partisan lies in American history deserves to be reported on too.
