The hosts of ABC’s “The View” are all-in for Joe Biden and won’t tolerate any criticisms of their dear leader. During a recent episode they all individually shared their reasons for supporting Biden, which ultimately come down to the fact that he isn’t terrible like that awful Trump character.

Jimmy and Americans’ Comedian Kurt Metzger discuss the women of The View’s eagerness to embrace even a “drooling” Joe Biden.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnFwSFYpuSU

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By Patrick Lawrence / Original to ScheerPost

There are certain things I do not quite get since Special Counsel John Durham’s report on the epically corrupt conduct of Donald Trump’s enemies during the 2016 election campaigns went to Congress last week. Many things, actually. For all the ground Durham covers in his 306–page report, I don’t get why he left a lot of things undone and unexamined, a lot of names unnamed and a lot of conclusions unconcluded after a four-year investigation into the very unfunny fiasco known as Russiagate. 

And then there are a few things I do get. Chief among these is that, with the already-evident burying of the Durham Report, we now witness the obliteration of a highly significant passage in our national history. To be deprived in this way of our past—of the facts of our time—is a kind of condemnation. This comes with consequences. I get these things. What our institutions of government and our corporate media perpetrate as we speak, this abuse of those alive now, of those who will follow us, altogether of the history that belongs to us, imposes a great responsibility upon us. This last is something I hope we all get. 

The Durham Report is at bottom a confirmation more than a revelation, as various commentators have noted. Those among us willing to look squarely at events and evidence without fear or favor in the true meaning of this phrase understood years ago that the Democratic Party and the Federal Bureau of Investigation—among others, I have to add—conspired to concoct the Russiagate ruse in the service of Hillary Clinton’s bid for the presidency. The Durham Report gives us a lot of detail as to just how this was done. We are now able to follow the bouncing ball once Clinton, personally so far as I understand it, got it rolling by way of what Durham calls the Clinton Intelligence Plan. 

This detail is important. Susan Schmidt, an experienced journalist with a good record to her credit, runs it down in a piece for Racket News that ScheerPost republished a day after Attorney–General Merrick Garland sent the Durham Report to Congress. Glenn Greenwald produced an excellent segment on the report in his System Update program. Matt Taibbi and Walter Kirn, the novelist and essayist, considered Durham, Russiagate, and the latter’s fate in their America This Week podcast. Chris Hedges weighed in Monday. 

I appreciate the Durham Report for the chronology of events it indicates. This is now easier to follow than it has been previously. In simple terms, Clinton authorized an operation to frame Trump within days of the leak of emails from Democratic Party servers in July 2016. The FBI’s leadership acted quickly to set this operation in motion. It first considered using the offhand remarks of George Papadopoulos, a minor Trump campaign volunteer, to obtain surveillance warrants against various of Trump’s advisers. When that proved too flimsy, the agency’s top officials turned to the Steele Dossier. The agency knew it was junk, but they punched it up sufficiently to get the warrants needed to proceed against Trump and his people. 

This was Crossfire Hurricane, the FBI’s anti–Trump op at the heart of the Russiagate hoax. 

“The truth is, we had almost all of the information a long time ago. What we didn’t have was the certification of the information by a government authority, by a legal authority,” Walter Kirn remarks in America This Week. “I think Durham did a job of showing reach to the highest levels of the government. Apparently everyone was briefed on the reality of this thing early on, very early on. All the highest authorities knew it was bullshit.” 

Perfectly fair comment, an astute summation. Then Kirn continues in a very curious way:

In a way, I guess it became necessary that the system vindicates itself by finding that which could not be found and asserting that which could not be proved, to the point that the moment where it mattered passed away. President Trump’s no longer president. All of the harms that were done by this thing have been done. They changed our history, they changed our media. They changed our sense of information and why it’s important.

Kirn is right to suggest that “the system” appears to figure that a report such as Durham’s can now be released because it is all water under the bridge—a little in the way the U.S. will acknowledge one or another of its coup operations long after the facts have ceased to matter. Similarly, it looks as if Garland found this an opportune moment to send the Durham Report to Capitol Hill, effectively to  remove the entire Russiagate affair from the common American consciousness. With a presidential election 18 months away, Biden’s attorney-general must dispose of Russiagate and Durham’s probe as hastily and as best he can. 

But I am not with Kirn when he asserts all the harm has been done. No, it has not. Russiagate changed history all right. And the destruction of this history is to my mind the greatest harm of all. This is the very oddest thing about the Durham Report: It purports to rip off the veil shielding the plot against Donald Trump from view, but it shapes up after a few days’ consideration as part of the effort to bury the Russiagate hoax the way the Warren Commission buried the facts of the Kennedy assassination for many years. 

It is this interment of so key a passage in American history we will live with for the rest of our lives, this we stand to pass on to generations to come. Deeper into the Republic of Pretend we will go—losing our capacity to understand events, to see straight, to know with confidence who we are. The alternative is vigilance, vigilant protection of the truth of the Russiagate years the way a few courageous souls kept the truth of the Cold War years alive so that we, now, can understand America’s responsibility for starting, prosecuting, and prolonging it. 

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It is fine that we know more now of the who-did-what-when-and-why of the Russiagate story. But let us remind ourselves of something Durham chose for whatever reason not to note. Russiagate was a criminal enterprise with many perpetrators and accomplices guilty of what would stand in a court of law as felonies. They corrupted the political process, tampered with an election and unlawfully undermined the Executive Branch. Abuses of office and public institutions were rampant during the Russiagate years—fatally, I would say, in the case of the FBI. 

We are left with various bitter realities. Our already troubled republic has sustained permanent damage at the hands of people pretending to protect it. We can no longer trust the nation’s dominant political party or those institutions charged with upholding the Constitution and the legal processes that derive from it.  

Let’s go larger. Many of those elected to govern this country display no respect for it. I do not see there is any longer any denying that a Deep State—a term that gained currency during the Russiagate years, not coincidentally—exercises a wholly unlawful degree of power over the American polity. “Apple pie authoritarianism” can no longer be taken as a distant, unlikely danger or the cry of Cassandras. It is our reality. 

I have been looking, since the Durham Report was made public, for historical comparisons to bring home the magnitude of what the report puts on paper, if incompletely. Nixon and Watergate? Not even close. Watergate was at bottom one man’s scandal; it had nothing to do with systemic decadence and institutional rot from within. The theft of the Gore–Bush election in 2000 is a worthier comparison. While it got a lot less press than Watergate, it put Americans on notice that their judiciary, supreme among our mediating institutions, was corroded at the very highest level. 

But for the breadth and depth of the decay, it seems to me, Russiagate has no match in American history going back who knows how long. It leaves us with the bitter realities just mentioned. 

I do not think Russiagate’s perpetrators, criminal as they were and remain, ever intended the anti–Trump operation to grow to the magnitude it did. No, when the Clinton Intelligence Plan and Crossfire Hurricane were set in motion they were intended to last only a few months. Clinton would win in November, and what may be the greatest subversion op in our history would take its place among the countless other cases of our republic’s political rambunctiousness, and so fade away.

A year after the July 2016 leak of the Democrats’ mail, Trump eight months in office, I wrote a column under the headline “Too Big to Fail.” That was the reality by then: The extravagant damage already done to America’s public institutions, the reckless overinvestment in Russiagate by all the liars on Capitol Hill, in the law-enforcement agencies, in the intelligence apparatus, in the Obama White House, and, let us not forget, in the media meant that the truth of the hoax could never come out. These people had put the stability of the republic at risk. What would be the dénouement, then? Out of what side door would all the Russiagaters weasel?   

Post–Durham, too big to fail is again the reality. And the way out for all those caught in their own web is now clear. Russiagate, the whole nine of it, is to be buried. 

This is too big a lump to be hidden under the carpet, too significant a chapter in American history to be written out of the national narrative. The mind goes back 60 years—60 years, can you believe it?—to the Kennedy assassination. How long did it take, due to the perspicacity of Oliver Stone, the filmmaker (JFK, 1991; JFK Revisited, 2021), David Talbot, the author (The Devil’s Chessboard, 2015), and a few honorable others to establish the CIA’s culpability beyond a reasonable doubt? And how much longer before the truth of Nov. 22, 1963, is disinterred and given its place in our history?

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https://scheerpost.com/2023/05/24/patrick-lawrence-john-durham-and-the-burying-of-american-history/

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