What Bill Barr Actually Asked Durham to Investigate

FBI "Irregularities, Misstatements and “Omissions”

As the Danchenko trial gets underway and increasingly descends into microscopic details, it’s important to look back at what Bill Barr actually asked Durham to investigate, as, thus far, the Durham investigation seems to have totally lost its way.

On December 10, 2019, Barr did a lengthy interview with NBC News I’ve reproduced a key section of the transcript in the paragraph below (Full transcript here):

in January, after the election, the entire case collapsed when the principal source says, I never told -- I never told Steele this stuff. And -- and -- and -- and this was all speculation. And I have zero information to support this stuff. At that point, when their entire case collapsed, what do they do? They kept on investigating the president and the -- well into his administration, after the case collapsed.

But here, to me, is the damning thing. They not only didn't tell the court that what they had been relying on was -- was completely, you know, rubbish, they actually started putting in things to bolster this Steele report by saying, well, we talked to the sources and they appeared to be truthful. But they don't inform the court that what they're truthful about is that the dossier is -- is false.

So that's hard to explain. And I -- the core statement, in my opinion, by the IG, is that these irregularities, these misstatements, these omissions were not satisfactorily explained. And I think that leaves open the possibility to infer bad faith. I think it's premature now to reach a judgment on that, but I think that further work has to be done, and that's what Durham is doing.

Note that it was Danchenko’s information to the FBI in his January 2017 interview that was pivotal for Barr, who then asked the obvious question. The FBI irregularities, misstatements and omissions were not satisfactorily explained: did they result from bad faith? If not, how? Here’s the video:

Unfortunately, the Durham proceedings thus far have had little-to-nothing to do with Barr’s assignment to Durham. This includes - and especially includes - the current indictment of Danchenko.

Let’s briefly consider the five counts against Danchenko in the context of Barr’s questions.

The Dolan-related charge pertains to an alleged lie in June 2017 pertaining to an assertion in Report 105 (dated August 22, 2016.) Quite aside from issues raised by defense about whether Danchenko’s response was literally true, Barr’s question challenged the predication of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation itself in the aftermath of the first Danchenko interview (and thus the predicate for Mueller) - events that occurred well before the alleged lie in June 2017. Separately, none of the allegations from Report 105 were used in the ICA, the Carter Page FISA applications or FBI status reports to DOJ oversight or congressional leadership on the Crossfire Hurricane enterprise investigation into the Trump campaign. Net result is that this particular byway is not going to shed light on Barr’s original tasking to Durham.

The other counts pertain to Danchenko’s story to FBI agents about the existence/non-existence of an anonymous phone call or phone app to Danchenko in late July 2016 and whether Danchenko sincerely believed that the anonymous caller was Millian.

But the existence or non-existence of an anonymous caller is once again totally irrelevant to Barr’s original question. The FBI had repeatedly vouched for the credibility of Steele and his network. But, as of the January 24, 2017 interview, the FBI knew that the provenance of Steele report 95 was, at best, an anonymous phone call to Danchenko within the U.S., and not information from a validated sub-source whose information had been corroborated in the past. And, more likely, was simply fabricated by Steele and/or Danchenko in a farcical real-life version of Graham Greene’s classic Our Man in Havana. From the perspective of Barr’s original question, either alternative is equally bad. Nor will resolution of this question shed light on Barr’s question.

Barr has asked Durham to inquire into whether the then (and still) unexplained FBI “irregularities, mis-statements and omissions” were the result of bad faith.

Three years later, we don’t know. And, instead of carrying out the investigation that Barr had tasked, Durham is now preoccupied with prosecuting the very person whose evidence, when belatedly made public by Horowitz, had raised the very issues that concerned Barr. In effect, shooting the messenger.

Update 11:07 pm: News on day two of Danchenko trial beginning to appear on Twitter in late evening. A report here that Durham was ripping into his “own” witness, SIA Brian Auten. Maybe I’ve been too pessimistic about this proceeding. But thus far, it’s been impossible to be over-pessimistic.