So, John Durham has finally done it. The special counsel has dropped a true bombshell confirming the worst fears of millions of supporters of Donald Trump, outlining a criminal conspiracy by the 2016 Hillary Clinton presidential campaign to spy on Trump’s campaign - and then his White House. That is cause for celebration among those who have claimed this to be true all along, yes? Actually, no.
Hillary Clinton (Photo by John Sommers II/Getty Images)
One look at the timing of this staggering allegation that Clinton’s team hired a shady operative to surveil the 45th president before and during his presidency “for the purpose of gathering derogatory information about Donald Trump” will lead one to the conclusion that exactly nothing will come of it. Yes, even though what Durham alleges could legitimately be termed treason – as it has been by Trump aide Corey Lewandowski among others – this revelation has already gone the way of the Hunter Biden laptop story; buried to protect a candidate who might as well have been nominated by a media which did everything short of producing commercials for Joe Biden, while it slandered Trump on a daily basis.
Imperfect Timing – By Design
Two elements of timing speak volumes on how disappointed you will be if you expect elite journalists to react like, well, journalists - they are advocates now. First, even though he was endowed with the full weight of the federal government and Department of Justice behind his investigation, it took just short of three years – yes, three years - for Durham to reach a conclusion long assumed by those who were on to Hillary Clinton’s rank corruption long ago.
More importantly, voters in 2020 should have damn well been informed of the illegal activity conducted by one party against the other in 2016. What value do these revelations have - outside of ending any distant hope of another Clinton candidacy - now that the election following the one under investigation is more than 15 months in the rearview mirror? Of what use is this confirmation of what everyone suspected when voters were deprived of the truth when it mattered - before November of 2020?
Now, you can possibly explain away the over 1,000 days it took for the fully-funded investigation to get to the truth. There was undoubtedly much to untangle. But you cannot do so with the timing of the release: the Saturday of Super Bowl weekend. There is a well-worn saying around D.C. that if you have news that reflects well on you, release it early in the week so there is plenty of time to bask in the prime-time afterglow. But if you need to release something detrimental to you, do it on a Friday afternoon when everyone is headed for the weekend. Going one step further, sending what should be a triumphant release on one of the few days of the year when almost no one is focused on the news, sends a deeply troubling message. Durham has unleashed a bombshell, but wants it buried. How can that be?
Well, as much as his reputation as a top-flight prosecutor proceeds Durham, so does his longtime, certified membership of the Deep State - the permanent, revolving bureaucracy to which people like him belong - and which brooks no influence from outside of its circle. Duty compelled this lawyer who has served as a government prosecutor for 45 years to release his finding, but not to do so at a time which might embarrass others in the deep state guild - and help Trump.
And of course, true to the “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” precedent set during the 2020 election, this freshly revealed scandal did not merit even a mention in the “newspaper of record.” But then, we knew this formerly respectable publication – and leftist rags across the land that follow it pied piper-like - long ago sold their soul to kneecap Trump, and they are hardly going to let a mere treasonous conspiracy by one of their party’s ex-golden girls prevent them from completing their appointed rounds when all they have to do is what they did with the scandalous Hunter Biden story - ignore it.
The only reason these faux journalists are willing to even ask questions of Biden more challenging than his favorite ice cream is because his disastrous presidency – which they abandoned their journalistic integrity to assure – has now embarrassed them so severely. Could anyone actually believe Putin would be massing troops on the Ukrainian border or that our southern border would be overrun, inflation would rage, and a crime wave would persist if Trump was still in the White House? Or is it mere coincidence that Putin kept his powder dry during the Trump era - and then began rattling his sabers as soon as Biden set foot in the Oval Office? You can bet the gaslighting corporate media will continue to twist itself into pretzels to posit that what you see with your own eyes is mere illusion.
John Durham
Never Say Never Again
Durham’s timing in the heart of Super Bowl weekend is making the media’s job just that much easier, since their single-minded pursuit is to make sure Donald Trump - or anyone of “his ilk” as Hillary put it recently in her typically inartful fashion - is never again allowed to set foot on their turf. Hell, they now wear a full-fledged 2020 conspiracy to take down Trump as a badge of honor, witness the seminal post-election piece in Time magazine bragging on the stunning depth and breadth of the conspiracy, describing it as “a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information.”
Of course, since it succeeded in unseating Trump, you can be certain another like-minded coalition will be assembled that is willing to do almost anything - legal or illegal - to prevent another Trump victory. And they will hardly let corruption and criminal activity by one of their chosen vessels stand in the way.
But this scandal also won’t amount to much because most Trump supporters were already convinced of the plot to destroy their man, in both 2016 and 2020, and the rest of the country will never know about these actions – that might well compel serious prison time – because the media will bury it. A survey of swing state voters following the ‘20 election revealed that at least half of voters had no knowledge of the Hunter Biden laptop story, but if they had been made aware of the laptop’s shocking contents, the outcome of the election would have been reversed. Lesson: given their success in destroying Trump by withholding a major story, the media is now more emboldened than ever to simply ignore even stories of enormous import.
Ultimately, like so many of his other proclamations which were immediately dismissed by the advocacy media as crazy or paranoid, what Trump and his followers were alleging all along about a conspiracy to torpedo his 2016 campaign and his presidency have now been proven entirely true - and if anything, worse than we might have imagined. The only question now is how much more militant this revelation will make the 45th president and his fiercely loyal – and infuriated - band of followers, intent on turning 45 into 47.
~ Read more from Tim Donner.
