Off and on today, I’ve been going through Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report on the FBI’s investigation into members of the Trump campaign in 2016 and beyond. It’s 434-pages long and I’m a slow reader, so it’ll be a day or two before I’m done. But the reactions I’ve seen so far confirm what I’ve seen in the first 150-or-so-pages: There was really bad stuff happening at the FBI under President Obama’s Department of Justice. But that’s not even the biggest takeaway of the day.
What many journalists noted but few expanded on was in U.S. Attorney John Durham’s statement regarding the IG report. If there’s a truly important piece of information to glean from today’s events, this is it.
In my humble opinion, the most important thing I've read so far today, is not from the IG report, but from Durham's statement here.
'Developing' pic.twitter.com/RwV3ZN58yT
— In Pursuit of Truth (@IPOT1776) December 10, 2019
This, folks, is huge. I’ll admit, I missed it on my first read of Durham’s statement because I was busy noticing the passive-aggressive knock on the Inspector General in the first sentence. He respected the mission and the work, not the report nor the IG himself. Cute. But the next sentence is the bombshell.
“However, our investigation is not limited to developing information from within component parts of the Justice Department. Our investigation has included developing information from other persons and entities, both in the U.S. and outside of the U.S.,” the statement read.
The scope and scale of Durham’s investigation has always been assumed as being larger than the IG’s. Durham is looking for wrongdoings, corruption, and actual crimes that may have been committed by people in and out of the DoJ while the IG’s investigation was more about process and making sure proper procedures were followed.
But until today, we didn’t know how wide of a net Durham was casting. Now we know it’s very likely a huge one that potentially reaches into other departments, agencies, and branches of government. We knew he was investigating abroad, but the reiteration that he’s “developing” information from a vast array of sources is heartening.
In other words, Durham is going beyond directly investigating the investigators. He’s looking into connections that could reach into Ukraine and other European countries. He’s likely also looking at how Congress interacted in the investigation.
He may even be looking into the past administration itself. Many have questioned how President Obama and his team could have remained completely obliviously and hands-off in letting his DoJ run amok in this investigation. Perhaps now, we’ll find out.
The IG report wasn’t the letdown that mainstream media played it up to be for conservatives last week. There was real meat to it. But that meat may be scraps compared to what John Durham is finding. How deep does this rabbit hole go?
