When Special Counsel John Durham testified on June 21 before the House Judiciary Committee, Democrats put his reputation and credibility on trial. The purpose of the hearing was to review Durham’s investigation into the origins of the debunked Trump-Russia conspiracy theory – the alleged plan to influence the 2016 presidential election. The special counsel’s most significant finding, however, was that those suspicions of collusion between Moscow and the 45th president were planted and nourished by the campaign of Donald Trump’s election rival, Hillary Clinton.

Of greatest concern is that, according to what Durham’s team uncovered, the director of the FBI and other senior Obama administration officials had been briefed on intelligence revealing that the Clinton campaign had hatched a plan to incriminate Trump. That intelligence was put aside while the FBI rushed into a multi-pronged counterintelligence operation targeting Trump, the Trump Organization, and various individuals connected to his 2016 campaign.

While Democrats assailed him and, in one case, practically accused him of acting on behalf of Trump, Durham told the committee:

“The FBI was too willing to accept and use politically funded and uncorroborated opposition research, such as the Steele dossier. The FBI relied on the dossier and [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] applications, knowing there was likely material originating from a political campaign or political opponent.”

Hillary Clinton (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

The FBI as a whole has become a target for Republican and conservative ire. It was never a case of the whole agency working against Trump, however. Those FBI officials who had reservations about Crossfire Hurricane becoming – or at least being seen as – a politically motivated operation to get Trump were ignored. As Durham explained, the agents working Crossfire Hurricane were even kept in the dark about certain intelligence that might have taken their investigative efforts in a different direction. Former FBI Director Jim Comey at the time declined to share with those agents a memorandum containing information about Clinton’s plans to set up Trump.

This memo related to a briefing on the Clinton campaign’s efforts given by then-CIA Director John Brennan, who realized the Clinton intelligence could not be ignored. Brennan — no fan of Trump — nevertheless did his due diligence, briefing Loretta Lynch, the attorney general at the time, as well as Barack Obama and Joe Biden, who, of course, were president and vice president.

“We interviewed the first supervisor of the Crossfire investigation, the operational person,” Durham told Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) during the hearing. “We showed him the [Clinton campaign] intelligence information and he indicated he had never seen it before.”

One might say the Deep State manipulated its own people to get a desired outcome. Clinton’s complicity in fabricating the Russia collusion story was buried. A team of FBI investigators was pointed in the wrong direction and left chasing rumors, gossip, and secondhand media reports to uncover a conspiracy that never existed.