Durham Draws Blood on Dirty Dossier, Arrests Steele Cohort

BUCK: The special counsel, John Durham. This has been dragging on for a long time. Everybody that I know — and I do know some former and current federal prosecutors — have told me this guy Durham is dogged. He is not partisan, but he moves methodically. He moves at the pace of the investigation, will not speed anything up or slow anything down based upon political considerations.

Now, that is frustrating for those of you who would have liked greater accountability particularly while Donald Trump was still in office. The vindication of the former president for the massive Russia collusion lie that I have to remind everybody was somewhat effective insofar as they got a special counsel.

I knew people who worked in that White House who were worried about going bankrupt from having to hire lawyers. I knew people who were freaked out about possibly getting ensnared by the clearly partisan prosecutors of a Mueller investigation. So, it did manage to slow down and hamstring that White House in really profound ways, which is just outrageous.

It was an attempted soft coup, really, of the government, trying to get rid of a president that they lost an election to, so they wanted to beat him with a special counsel. This is what Democrats do. Well, John Durham was appointed, and he’s now arrested Igor Danchenko, Russian-born analyst living in the U.S. facing five counts of lying to FBI agents about his work on the Steele dossier.

This is “1001,” something that I came across when I was at the NYPD intelligence division. You can get a lot of people in high-profile federal investigations, they get jammed up on this one, up to five years per count. There can even be enhancements, but five years is the standard that you can get here.

And this guy, Clay, basically was the original provider of the lies to Steele that were then laundered by Christopher Steele who was paid by the Perkins Coie law firm that Hillary’s campaign had hired to do this oppo research and pretend like it was real. This is the guy who’s the beginning of it. He’s a liar and a fabricator and is now facing prison time.

CLAY: The frustrating thing, I think, that’s going to drive everybody crazy here is, this story’s gonna get buried. The whole Durham investigation, everything that he brings charges on — unless potentially Hunter Biden ends up a part of the investigation, unless that ends up happening — it’s all going to get buried and we’re gonna totally end up with the huge percentage of the country that still believes, even now, in the Russia collusion lie.

They’re never going to become aware of what these stories actually are because many in the media are just going to ignore it. And the fact that the entire Steele dossier was a manufactured lies… Buck, the most frustrating thing about this to me is everyone should so understand — even at its inception — the idea that the limited amount, for instance, of Facebook ads that Russia was buying…

We agree that there shouldn’t be foreign companies investing in any kind of way in our campaigns, but we’re talking about a pinprick of the money that was actually spent. The idea that this swung the election in any way? It is gratifying, I think — and we just talked about this with Jim Jordan, who spent a lot of time arguing that the Russia collusion mess was all that: a lie — to see someone charged for the lies. What’s more frustrating, I think, Buck, is it’s just gonna get buried out there with everything else.

BUCK: I think the media doesn’t even care that they lied. I think that they think that they were serving their audience by slandering the former president, mostly. That was the plan.