One of the most famous scenes from the movie “The Naked Gun” involves main character Frank Drebin (the great actor Leslie Nielsen) pretending to be a baseball umpire. The reason for this is unimportant and goofy. What is important is that Drebin quickly realizes he needs to act like an umpire to maintain the ruse.
The hometown pitcher throws the ball. The catcher catches it. The crowd waits. Drebin, realizing his role, offers a tentative, “Strike?” The crowd cheers. Drebin basks in it.
A second pitch. It’s caught. Drebin is quicker this time, and more energetic. Milking it. “Strike!” The crowd goes nuts.
Then the third pitch. Before it has even hit the catcher’s glove, Drebin begins peacocking, prancing around to indicate the third strike, to the crowd’s great appreciation. Never mind that the pitch was inside. Drebin knew what the crowd wanted to hear, and he was not going to let the actual pitch get in the way of providing that to them.
I offer that this is a fitting analogy for the release of special counsel John Durham’s final summation of his lengthy investigation. Even as the report was slowly traveling toward public release, Donald Trump and his allies knew what their response was going to be; after all, that response was the central reason Durham was appointed in the first place. And so, on Monday afternoon: peacocking.
“THE CRIME OF THE CENTURY!” Trump declared on the social media platform he owns. “TREASON!!!” A bit later he added: “CONGRESS MUST DO SOMETHING ABOUT THIS. MUST NEVER HAPPEN AGAIN!”
But let’s back up. Durham’s appointment four years ago this month was meant to evaluate the federal investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election that had concluded a few weeks prior. That probe, concluded by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III but initiated in 2016 by the FBI, uncovered a wide-ranging effort by the Russian government and Russian nationals to influence the election and Trump’s presidential campaign. Multiple members of Trump’s campaign, including his campaign manager, were linked to the effort. Mueller didn’t show criminal coordination between Trump’s team and the Russians, however, so Trump and his allies insisted that the whole thing was a setup, a hoax.
Well, in fairness, Trump began framing it that way even before he took office as president. So for Mueller, too, the pitch was called while it was still traveling to the plate.
William P. Barr, confirmed as attorney general just in time to shut down the Mueller investigation, appointed Durham to bolster the hoax/setup argument. When the Justice Department inspector general released a report in December 2019 articulating ways in which the FBI’s initial probe was flawed — and uncovering significant problems with how a surveillance warrant was obtained on a former campaign adviser — Barr and Durham publicly suggested that Durham’s probe would uncover far more nefarious stuff.
It didn’t. Durham’s report was assertive that the FBI was acting improperly in launching the initial Russia investigation, but his argument heavily centered on downplaying the solidity of initial information provided by the Australian government — and on ignoring the broader context in which that information arrived in Washington.
Durham did bring charges against three individuals over the course of his probe. One, downstream from the inspector general’s report, pleaded guilty. The other two were acquitted by juries.
That’s important to remember when considering how Trumpworld immediately seized upon Durham’s report as validating their skepticism. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) offered a good example.
“Democrats attempted a coup against President Trump with their ‘Russia Russia Russia’ hoax,” she claimed on Twitter. “The democrats don’t care about ‘saving democracy.’ Who should go to jail for this?”
Apparently no one, given that Durham failed to prove his case against two of his targets and the one who pleaded guilty avoided a prison sentence.
Which is the point! It was Durham’s investigation that was supposed to be the moment at which accountability was brought against those nefarious actors who ginned up the whole Russia probe. But, despite four years of looking, Durham was left only nibbling at the edges. But the visceral thrill of having a strike declared means an interest in having a fourth strike to be called. A fifth one! More and more strikes!
This idea that now is the point at which accountability should occur — a retconning of Durham’s entire effort from prosecutor to evidence-collector — was rampant on the right. Inevitably, of course: Since the entire shtick since December 2016 has been that the Russia probe was dishonest and unwarranted (rather than valid but flawed), there is an insatiable need for some sort of punitive resolution. Durham went from being the guy who’d put people in jail to the guy who provided the rationale for people to be put in jail, as though that rationale hadn’t previously been ginned up by numerous others in various ways. It’s all just a jumping-off point.
House Republican Conference chair Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) released a statement that amounted to a more formal version of Greene’s tweet.
“I am more committed than ever to ensuring that those involved are held accountable and face criminal prosecution,” it concluded. How? Durham admitted in his report that “not every injustice or transgression amounts to a criminal offense” as a way of explaining his limited ability to get convictions. But Stefanik will somehow do better?
“The Durham Report reveals that Obama’s FBI had zero actual evidence of collusion when they kicked off the political witch hunt of Donald Trump,” House Republican Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) wrote on Truth Social. “We have said this all along. Now there must be consequences.”
Setting aside the idea that “evidence of collusion” was lacking or necessary before the Russia investigation began, we have Scalise echoing Trump (“CONGRESS MUST DO SOMETHING”), if not Stefanik. The Republicans have a majority in the House, and Durham has already been called to offer testimony before the select committee created this year to investigate precisely the sort of investigatory overreach that Durham was unable to demonstrate.
Scalise’s “We have said this all along” is important in its own right, of course. A wide range of Trump allies declared that this incremental presentation from Durham, focused heavily on ancillary aspects of the Russia probe like the wildly overheated idea that Hillary Clinton triggered the investigation, proved them right all along.
It’s a very Trumpian response; the former president is very adept at reframing specific things in broad terms and, should some component of that broad rhetoric be validated, he claims that his entire response was warranted. Remember when he said they tapped the phones at Trump Tower? That then became a vague assertion about how maybe his campaign had been spied on that was then briefly “proven” by Durham.
Fox News host Maria Bartiromo, no stranger to elevating false claims embraced by Trump, insisted that Durham “confirmed everything we have reported on this program to a T.” (She also hosted Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) who claimed, predictably, that the whole thing was Clinton’s fault.) Sean Hannity, also of Fox, told viewers that “every single thing that we reported to you on this program, we were correct. We’ve been vindicated time and again, especially today.”
It’s simply not true. The FBI launched an investigation in late July 2016, after various reports about interactions between Trump’s team and Russian actors and after WikiLeaks began dumping material understood to have been stolen from the Democratic Party’s network by Russian hackers. It wasn’t about the dossier of reports or about Clinton deciding that “collusion” was her ticket to victory; in fact, as was already known but reiterated by Durham, her team’s effort to elevate a dubious connection between Trump and a Russian bank failed to gain traction in mainstream outlets.
The federal probe is what it always was: an investigation, handled poorly at times but operating without the benefit of hindsight, attempting to figure out the scope of Russia’s efforts and the extent to which Trump’s team might have been aiding them.
And the response to Durham’s report was what it was always going to be: proof positive, yet again, that the deep state was Up To No Good and that Trump Was Right All Along.
Now the hometown MAGAland crowd simply sits back and waits for the next pitch.