Bullshit Durham

The Clinton rules never die. After an extremely partisan prosecutor was given essentially unlimited resources to prove that the collusion of the Trump campaign and Russian ratfuckers in 2016 was a hoax perpetrated by the Clinton campaign, and came up with absolutely jack shit, dead-end Trump supporters have just gone ahead and pretended that the thoroughly disproven-by-omission premise of Durham’s investigation was actually vindicated:

This is a popular argument, as it has been in right-wing circles for months. But the report released this week by special counsel John Durham actually makes the already baseless claim even less plausible.

That New York Post story was written by attorney Jonathan Turley, who, for inexplicable reasons, has become an unfailing booster of the idea that Trump was unfairly wronged by his opponents, particularly in regards to the Russia probe. Like so many others on the right, Turley seized on the Durham report as confirming their skepticism about the Russia probe, even though — obviously despite Durham’s wishes — the report’s broad failure to do so.

“The report details how the Russian collusion conspiracy was invented by Clinton operatives and put into the now-infamous Steele dossier, funded by the Clinton campaign,” Turley writes, incorrectly. At another point, he writes that “President Barack Obama and his national security team were briefed on how ‘a trusted foreign source’ revealed ‘a Clinton campaign plan to vilify Trump by tying him to Vladimir Putin so as to divert attention from her own concerns relating to her use of a private email server.’ It then happened a few days later.”

That is also incorrect.

In case you are not a frequent viewer of Fox News, it’s worth explaining the two claims here. The first is that the dossier of reports compiled by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele was the genesis of the Russia probe. The second is that the idea to link Trump to Russia was itself a political tactic by Clinton’s campaign.

Neither of those things is true, and a quick timeline will make clear why.

Bump’s timeline is valuable if you haven’t been following the story closely. And the bottom line remains true:

There’s an alternative way to consider the Russia probe: that Russia hoped Trump would win, that Trump was happy to have their help and that federal counterintelligence officials saw that as problematic.

This appears to be what actually happened.

The REAL Russia hoax is that Russia pulled off a quite effective pro-Trump ratfucking racket in the 2016 campaign with the support of the Trump campaign, and the facts that the Clinton campaign made mistakes and that the political press were all too willing ratfuckees doesn’t change that fact.