Will Durham go after the conspirators behind the Russia hoax?

 Andrew McCarthy:

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I am not saying there will be no more indictments. There could be. But if there are, they will likely be similar to the indictments of Sussmann and Danchenko — who, you no doubt noticed, were separately charged, and are not alleged to have conspired with each other or anyone else. Those indictments imply that Durham has uncovered a Clinton-campaign scheme to leverage the Obama/Biden administration’s investigative powers against Clinton’s political opponent, Trump. Yet, Durham has charged the two defendants only with lying to the FBI. And tellingly, he did not file charges against people with whom Danchenko and Sussmann collaborated in supplying specious information to investigators, much less accuse the investigators themselves of misconduct.

At work here is the same phenomenon I addressed during the Mueller probe when predicting that there would be no “Trump-Russia collusion” conspiracy charges. If Mueller had had such a case, he would have brought it against the first defendants he charged — especially the ones who’d agreed to cooperate with his investigators. The way a prosecutor builds a big conspiracy case is by getting the suspects to admit the existence of the conspiracy and the roles they played in it. Charging the small fish with comparatively minor crimes doesn’t get you there. And you don’t develop effective cooperating witnesses by having them plead guilty only to being liars — which, were they later to testify, would be the first thing the jury learned about them.

Let’s think about Durham’s investigation. If there were a grand conspiracy to prosecute, it would have to center on some scheme to defraud the court and obstruct judicial proceedings. Furthermore, for it to have been as heinous as the most outraged Trump supporter believes it was, Obama-administration officials — or at the very least, FBI agents — would have to be implicated.

Now, consider Danchenko. If anyone were to have been instrumental in such a scheme, he would be the guy. He is the principal source of the scurrilous information in the dossier compiled by his associate Christopher Steele. There is reason to suspect he knew that Steele was sharing information with the U.S. government, which, in turn, was using it as a predicate to investigate Trump — perhaps even to seek eavesdropping warrants from federal judges.

But what does Durham charge Danchenko with? Lying to the FBI. And not even lying about the all-important substance of the information he communicated to Steele, but just about the sources from whom he heard it.

To be sure, there is abundant reason to believe Danchenko knew that what he told Steele was nonsense, and that Steele had to have known it was at least highly suspect. But Durham doesn’t allege that; he goes for two charges that should be much easier to prove. He alleges that Danchenko knowingly lied when claiming some of the dossier information came from Trump associate Sergey Millian, and when claiming none of it came from Clinton crony Charles Dolan.

And lied, it must be emphasized, to the FBI.

For those of us who’ve closely followed it, the most dismaying part of the collusion caper (as we observed in our editorial over the weekend) has been the FBI’s abuse of its investigative authorities. Durham is not saying, in his indictments, that there was no such abuse — as in recklessness, incompetence, and failure to be as forthright with the court as the law and agency procedures require. But he is also not alleging that the FBI — either as an institution, or in a conspiracy among individual agents — defrauded the court or otherwise obstructed justice.
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It is not unusual for a prosecutor to limit his case to irrefutable elements of the crime and not try to build a death star type case that allows the crooks to nit-pick facts to argue about in order to create doubt.  That being said, I think he could build a case against those who paid these people to lie to the FBI and push the fraud through the media.  This was one of the biggest political frauds in history and those responsible for it should be brought to justice.  If lying to the FBI is a crime, then paying someone to lie to the FBI is also a crime.

See, also:

Durham wins over toughest critic with revelations of Dem scheme behind Trump-Russia probe