.@marcthiessen wrote a shoddy Washington Post column using as a foil the headline of my piece yesterday assessing how the Durham inquiry fell flat after years of political hype. (He didn’t engage with its substance, of course.) A dissection follows. /1
washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/…
As an initial matter, Thiessen got his start at a lobbying firm that included two named partners – Paul Manafort and Roger Stone – who were convicted of felonies in the Russia investigation & pardoned by Trump. He does not disclose that conflict to the WP’s readers. /2
Thiessen opens by insinuating that I am downplaying Durham bc I'm implicated in (his tendentious portrayal of) the media’s Trump-Russia coverage. Aside from whether he is accurately describing Mueller's complex findings, I wasn't part of the NYT’s Trump-Russia coverage team./3
He links a screenshot, not the piece nyti.ms/3pSTil6, then moves goalposts. The hype was that Durham would deliver proof of a deep state conspiracy & prosecute people like Comey, Brennan & Clinton-not just find flaws/abuses like an inspector general already did./4
Kudos for not pretending the FBI opened the inquiry based on the Steele dossier. Still, in cherrypicking some agents portraying the info as thin, he omits Durham’s concession that “there is no question that the FBI had an affirmative obligation to closely examine” it. /5
2x bait & switch. To criticize the FBI decision to open a "full"-level inquiry, he takes out of context passages actually discussing how the FBI later botched FISA applications. Using that to laud the Durham inquiry, he omits that it was instead found by the inspector general./6
Continuing to implicitly credit Durham for the IG's findings, Thiessen also here goes beyond being misleading and makes a factual error that the WP should correct. The doctored e-mail was bad, but used in internal discussions--not presented as evidence to the FISA court. /7
This is true -- though, again, derived from the 2019 inspector general report and so not the Durham investigation delivering on the hype. /8
As he keeps going, notice how a column about the Russia investigation is turning into a critique of the Steele dossier--a common slight of hand. The dossier's investigative role was limited to the Page FISA warrants. /9
Thiessen says the FBI relied on Danchenko as a paid source to investigate Trump. As the trial showed, while the FBI 1st approached him when vetting the dossier, it found his contact network unique and he evolved into an ongoing source about Russia stuff unrelated to Trump./10
He’s now all in on conflating the Russia investigation with the Steele dossier. The FBI used the dossier for its botched Carter Page FISA warrants, which was bad in myriad ways the IG documented. But the scrutiny of Page was a small part of the overall Russia investigation. /11
Another error-the 2nd poll's #s come from a subset, not all respondents. Anyway, a single # for views about “the media” means little. Lumps together too many different kinds of outlets & different types of people with mutually inconsistent views about what they’re mad about. /12
No comment necessary. /end
My assessment of the Durham investigation: nytimes.com/2023/05/17/us/…
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