Sometimes I think, to conjure the old spiritual, that special counsel John Durham has “the whole world in his hands.” By that, I obviously don’t mean Mahalia Jackson’s transcendent version that could make the most adamant atheist drop to his knees.
In Durham’s case, it’s considerably more secular. Nevertheless, the special counsel is dealing with something extraordinarily significant.
He holds in his hands the future of democratic government under the law, republican (small r) or otherwise, as we know it—if not forever, for the foreseeable future.
Although he’s been accused of going slowly—how could it have been otherwise, really, with COVID lockdowns, even though unjustified—so far he is doing a remarkable job. He has demonstrated how the colossal and pernicious lie that Donald Trump was in collusion with Russia originated with people working for the Hillary Clinton campaign (via a made-up connection to a Russian bank) that was approved and later promulgated by Hillary herself.
Some of this renewed clarity is because of Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook actually telling the truth in court about what happened, whether for fear of perjury or some iota of basic morality.
When you look in the eyes of Michael Sussmann, the onetime Perkins Coie law partner, whose charge of having lied to the FBI has instigated this serial unmasking, you see something far worse than the proverbial deer in the headlights. I see an individual clinging to some semblance of he did this for a “greater good,” that his ends did justify whatever bending of the means he found necessary.
While this all may not be treason in the technical/legal sense, it’s certainly as treasonous as any behavior that has come from the political class of either party in any of our lifetimes and, though completely ignored by the legacy media whose culpability in it was nearly total, vastly more serious than Watergate that they still obsess about.
In this case, the attention of the country—indeed the world, including our adversaries—was riveted and the presidency of newly elected President Trump tarnished and nearly upended for a supposed crime that never occurred. Indeed, it’s the Clinton people and their myriad accomplices that committed the real crime—the real Russian collusion—in this ultimate case of projection.
In other words, the whole world watched a massively public display in the USA of something that anyone with a modicum of intelligence would have realized almost immediately was a complete miscarriage of justice. Whether or not you believe in American Exceptionalism, the country that has been almost since its inception the envy of the world was busy stomping on its own institutions and itself to the edge of being unrecognizable. Could our enemies have asked for more?
What will happen now? It may be, even though there is clear email evidence in which the defendant assured then-FBI General Counsel James Baker that he was working as an independent and not a Hillary campaign operative, that given the deep-blue DC jury, Sussman will be acquitted. All he needs is one juror. Having witnessed the O.J. Simpson trial, it’s easy to see how such forms of jury nullification occur. (Have you noticed that no one has come forward in the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman—not even from the “world of Faye Resnick,” as Johnny Cochran put it?)
