By any reasonable standard, it should be one of the biggest news stories in American journalism: In her power-mad attempt to win the White House, Hillary Clinton accused Donald Trump of being a blackmailed Russian agent. She did so by hiring a firm, Fusion GPS, to create a questionable intelligence report on him. That report, the public now knows, was treated like a credible document by people who knew better, including President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, and the U.S. Department of Justice.
When more and more people learned of the plot, the few with the integrity to disagree were punished.
“The FBI failed to uphold their mission of strict fidelity to the law in connection with certain events and activities described in this report,” Durham judiciously summarized.
In his syndicated column this week, Ben Shapiro said the scandal is worse than the Watergate scandal that brought down President Nixon. He explains:
It involves the former secretary of state and Democratic candidate for president laundering false intelligence information to the FBI; and the FBI, overseen by the candidate's political allies in the Obama administration, using that information as the predicate to open a full-scale investigation knowing full well that the Clinton campaign could well be behind the allegations in the first place.
During that time, the Deep State also attacked Rep. Devin Nunes, who was among one of the first lawmakers to sniff out a backroom plot to discredit Trump. For that, MSNBC correspondent John Heilemann called Nunes a Russian traitor, too. An article by the New York Times complained Nunes "displayed a deep mistrust of the expert consensus on reality."
Yet the mainstream media that spent hours and hours warning Trump was a "Russian asset" is pretending to yawn at Durham’s conclusion to a four-year investigation.
“There's really not a lot of steak to show for the sizzle here,” Barbara McQuade, a former U.S. Attorney under Obama, told MSNBC. “I think the good news about this is that it's over, it's done."
Curtis Houck of Media Research Center says the media’s reaction “would be comical if it weren’t tragic,” because the talking points are falling into one of two categories. Either the media is claiming Durham failed to deliver a damning report or, alternatively, the report is really bad for Trump and we were right all along.
In a related story he wrote for MRC, Houck recalls a CNN anchor used a different tactic: The final report didn’t live up to Trump’s own predictions for what would be revealed in Durham’s final analysis. That claim came from Boris Sanchez, co-host of CNN News Central.
In the same story, Houck pointed out CNN correspondent Evan Perez was allowed on-air to dismiss the Durham report even though it is known he has close personal ties to Fusion GPS and its co-founders.
In one example of honesty, CNN host Jack Tapper told his liberal audience the Durham report is "devastating to the FBI and, to a degree, it does exonerate Donald Trump"
Even for that fence-walking statement, Tapper disrupted the left-wing talking points.
"Jack Tapper needs to resign," Keith Olbermann, the unhinged MSBNBC anchor, tweeted in response.
