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Durham Probe's Failure Debunks 'Deep State' Mythology (And Barr's Reputation)

Durham Probe's Failure Debunks 'Deep State' Mythology (And Barr's Reputation)

The two most common themes of MAGA sorehead emails I received last year were the inevitability of an anti-Biden landslide in 2022, and the certainty of Hillary Clinton’s prosecution by “independent counsel” John Durham supposedly for falsifying evidence against Donald Trump during the “Russia, Russia, Russia hoax,” as Trump styles it.

Almost needless to say, neither happened. What has taken place instead is the total collapse of Durham’s ballyhooed probe along with his reputation for probity and competence. Along with that of former Attorney General Bill Barr, who comes off looking like…

Well, have these two jokers never heard of Kenneth Starr, another would-be Republican Torquemada, 15th century mastermind of the Spanish Inquisition? For a time, Starr managed to preserve the appearance of probity among his adoring fans among the Beltway media.

How many times did we see the soft-handed house-husband dutifully taking out the trash on TV and assuring reporters “our job is to do our job”?

Until, that is, the public reaction to his prurient, porn-accented report on the dalliance between Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. (Written by Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.) This unfortunate document sent the eminent Judge Starr off to Baylor University, where as college president he took to wearing cheerleader costumes and helping cover up sexual assaults by football players, resulting in his firing.

Lawyers who work for Donald Trump, of course, are rarely paid and often end up facing disbarment—Michael Cohen, Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, Sidney Powell, etc. William Barr, a veteran GOP operative, should have known better.

But then he and his running buddy Durham are True Believers, seemingly falling into the most seductive of traps: believing their own bullshit, to use one of Barr’s favorite words. This has long been Barr’s calling card; he’s the kind of idealogue who’s often in error, never in doubt. A blowhard who makes a great show of his Catholic piety.

Durham’s motives appear similar. A recent detailed New York Times expose depicts the pair as making a mockery of the “independent” part of “independent counsel,” drinking and dining together regularly, and jointly embarking to Europe on a futile quest to prove an imaginary “Deep State” conspiracy against Trump.

Instead, Italian authorities presented them with evidence of financial crimes by Trump himself, prompting a criminal investigation that should never have been entrusted to Durham. The Times and other news outlets erroneously reported that Durham’s review of the Trump-Russia probe had morphed into a criminal investigation. Fox News flogged it like the Second Coming. Neither Barr nor Durham did anything to correct the record. Hence the excitement among my MAGA correspondents.

What the Italian allegations consisted of or what Durham’s investigation concluded remains unknown. How current Attorney General Merrick Garland can allow Durham to persist in his role, given the revelations in the Times’s voluminous article is similarly mysterious.

Former Attorney General Barr, of course, has cunningly attempted to salvage his own reputation by turning against Trump—dismissing his claims of election fraud as “bullshit” and telling the January 6 committee and pretty much anybody who will listen about the former president’s intellectual, temperamental and moral unfitness for office. Geez, you think?

Would it surprise you to learn that Trump’s domineering Attorney General has never prosecuted a court case? Durham has, but appears to have succumbed entirely to partisan zeal.

After Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz issued a report concluding that FBI investigators had properly opened an probe of the Trump campaign after an Australian diplomat tipped them that a Trump aide revealed advance knowledge that Russian spies had Hillary Clinton’s emails, Barr and Durham did all they could to debunk it.

“But as Mr. Durham’s inquiry proceeded,” The Times reports “he never presented any evidence contradicting Mr. Horowitz’s factual findings about the basis on which F.B.I. officials opened the investigation.” Then, after independent counsel Robert Mueller’s report revealed “numerous links between the Russian government and the Trump campaign and detailed both how hard Moscow worked to elect Trump, and how eagerly wanted their help,” Barr composed a weasel-worded summary that distracted public attention.

Robert Mueller didn’t indict Trump but he convicted both his campaign manager Paul Manafort, who owed millions to close Putin ally Oleg Deripaska, and also his dirty tricks chieftain Roger Stone.

John Durham convicted nobody. Over the resignations of career prosecutors who objected to his bullying methods, he charged two Democratic operatives for allegedly lying to the FBI. “The two cases,” Josh Marshall writes “were mainly vehicles for airing tendentious conspiracy theories he couldn’t prove and had no real evidence for. The actual cases were laughed out of court with speedy acquittals.”

So now we have the GOP House’s so-called “weaponization” committee which will put on a great show of trying to prove what Durham and Barr could not about the mythical “Deep State.”

Look for it to blow up in Republican faces.

Mike Flynn, Crank Felon, Warns Vaccines Will Turn Us Into Zombies

Mike Flynn, Crank Felon, Warns Vaccines Will Turn Us Into Zombies

Retired Army Lieutenant General and disgraced ex-National Security Advisor Michael Flynn is a notorious peddler of outlandish conspiracy theories, especially those that originate inside QAnon or spew from the pouty lips of former President Donald Trump.

In particular, Flynn, a Trump-pardoned convicted felon, has focused much of his paranoia on ginning up opposition to COVID-19 vaccines and sowing doubts about the nature of SARS-COV-2. For example, Flynn has claimed that the inoculations were covertly added to salad dressings by the "Deep State" to secretly poison unsuspecting Americans. Flynn has also stated that a “global elite type of people” engineered the coronavirus pandemic to prepare the world for their next artificially-concocted outbreak, which Flynn believes "is potentially another type of virus that’s imposed on the public."

Part of that scheme, Flynn maintained, was that a shadowy cabal of international powerbrokers intended to exploit the crisis as a means of stealing the 2020 election away from Trump.

But on Sunday, Flynn endorsed yet another fringe – and absolutely looney – conservative delusion about COVID-19 vaccinations during an appearance on right-wing radio host Clay Clark's ReAwaken America Tour.

This latest ill-begotten contention was put forth on May 1st by disinformation podcaster Jeffrey Prather. Here are the basics:

  • Vaccines contain inactive "lipid nanoparticles" embedded with deadly "chimeric pathogens" which were genetically programmed to animate when properly triggered.
  • The germs supposedly lying dormant include E. Coli, Ebola, Marburg – a highly fatal viral hemorrhagic fever, and brewers yeast – an ingredient added to ferment beer and bake bread.
  • The "pathogens" will be activated when 5G towers thrice broadcast an 18 gigahertz signal for one minute.
  • The specified frequency subsequently causes "1P36 gene deletion," turning vaccine recipients into zombies. More on that one in a moment.
Clark summarized Prather's assertions and then asked Flynn to share his thoughts.

"This pathogen that you just talked about; I think that there's been some great articles written about how it relates to the 5G technology that is being input basically globally," Flynn said of thoroughly debunked "alterative" research. "But my statement is that because this is a good versus evil time. It is actually one of the most consequential periods in history to be alive."

Next, Clark aired a brief clip of Prather discussing his unfounded ideas, which disturbed him greatly.

"That would cause you to begin to have seizures, begin to bite people, and to have problems with your frontal lobe," he declared. "It's a lot. It's heavy."

Watch below via PatriotTakes:

Accumulating data on the safety of COVID-19 vaccination during pregnancy from the v-safe pregnancy registry adds to the growing body of evidence of the safety of COVID-19 vaccination during pregnancy.

  • No evidence of any increase in spontaneous abortion rate
  • No evidence of any disproportionate infant outcomes

The Twitterverse had a grand time mocking Flynn's misguided medical mania.









It takes some impressive careening off the rails to make Soviet-style propaganda seem legit. By golly, though, Flynn and his comrades are charging ahead at full speed. Perhaps somewhere down the line, a collapsed bridge awaits this hot mess express.







How Flynn managed to weasel his way into the uppermost echelons of American political power ignited some unsettling bewliderment.





Speaking of zombies...




Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Michael Caputo

Following Paranoid Facebook Rant, HHS Flack Caputo On Leave

The Trump administration health official embroiled in a furor over political meddling with the coronavirus response is taking a leave of absence, the government announced Wednesday.

The Department of Health and Human Services said in a statement that Michael Caputo was taking the time "to focus on his health and the well-being of his family."

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Gullible, Stupid, Perhaps Dangerous: QAnon's True Believers

Gullible, Stupid, Perhaps Dangerous: QAnon's True Believers

Whenever somebody assures me that everything happens for a reason, it's normally my practice to tiptoe quietly away.

People are only trying to be nice. The notion that every kind of personal misfortune—each terrible accident or harrowing diagnosis, every pious wide-receiver rehabbing a bad knee—are all part of God's plan to test our individual faith and resolve is most often a well-intentioned sentimental gesture.

Have faith, is all they're really saying. You're strong enough to handle it.

It's when people start getting specific about exactly what God's plan consists of and where fate and history are taking us that all that the trouble starts. Folly and madness invariably follow. Once they bring the unintelligible prophecies of the Book of Revelation into it, it's too often a one-way trip to Crazytown with no return ticket.

So it is with the burgeoning religio-political cult calling itself "QAnon," as described in an extraordinary piece of journalism in The Atlantic by Adrienne LaFrance. She correctly notes that "[t]he power of the internet was understood early on, but the full nature of that power—its ability to shatter any semblance of shared reality, undermining civil society and democratic governance in the process—was not."

Can I get an amen?

I would argue that the historically unprecedented capacity of Froot Loops and lone dementoes of every kind and description to wind each other up online constitutes as grave a threat to the republic as anything since the Confederate States of America. In his 1704 satire A Tale of a Tub, Jonathan Swift depicted the religious zealots of his day gathered in a big circle, each with a bellows inserted into the posterior of the fellow in front of him, first pumping each other full of hot air and then discharging it in each other's faces.

QAnon's exactly like that, except online.

Remember that sad sack from North Carolina who shot up a Washington, D.C. pizza joint in December 2016 because he'd convinced himself that Hillary Clinton was operating a child sex and torture ring in the basement of a building that didn't actually have a basement?

Well, it turns out that he was a prophet.

LaFrance quotes University of Miami political scientist Joseph Uscinski, who studies conspiracy theories. Whether of the left or right, what they all have in common, he says is "acceptance of the following propositions: Our lives are controlled by plots hatched in secret places. Although we ostensibly live in a democracy, a small group of people run everything, but we don't know who they are. When big events occur—pandemics, recessions, wars, terrorist attacks—it is because that secretive group is working against the rest of us."

In October 2017, somebody calling himself "Q," see, began posting cryptic comments on online sites where right-wing zealots gather. Posing as an intelligence professional embedded deep in the "deep state," he predicted the imminent arrest and conviction of Hillary Clinton in the aforementioned child molesting conspiracy.

Needless to say, this hasn't happened nor ever will. Also needless to say, however, millions of gullible nitwits obsessed with Hillary's multiple homicides began wetting themselves in anticipation. (It's occurred to me that the manufacturers of Depends adult diapers could be behind the whole thing.)

Supposedly, see, special counsel Robert Mueller and Boss Trump himself were secretly working together to destroy Hillary's evil cabal. Also participating is the late John F. Kennedy, Jr., who was either foully murdered by Hillary in 1999 or Q's secret identity. Initiates differ on this question.

Seriously, they do.

Others believe that Q is none other than Trump himself. I remain agnostic on the question. But either way, Q kept dropping online clues, and nothing kept happening. The cult grew steadily larger. Then came the worldwide Covid 19 pandemic, with its intimations of Apocalypse, and a whole new cast of international malefactors got added to the suspect list: George Soros, Bill Gates, Rep. Adam Schiff, and Dr. Anthony Fauci.

And now Joe Biden, recently accused of being a "child molester" by no less an authority than Donald Trump, Jr.

Two and a half years on, LaFrance summarizes, and the "QAnon belief system looks something like this: Q is an intelligence or military insider with proof that corrupt world leaders are secretly torturing children all over the world; the malefactors are embedded in the deep state; Donald Trump is working tirelessly to thwart them. ("These people need to ALL be ELIMINATED," Q wrote in one post.) The eventual destruction of the global cabal is imminent, Q prophesies, but can be accomplished only with the support of patriots who search for meaning in Q's clues. To believe Q requires rejecting mainstream institutions, ignoring government officials, battling apostates, and despising the press."

Well, I suppose everybody's got to have a hobby.

How seriously to take this particular threat to public sanity? Come November, we may find out.