INCOMPETENCE IS NOT CORRUPTION PER SE:

Durham's twin trials also revealed how much deceit it takes to sustain the fairy tales the Barr-appointed special counsel was spinning for Fox News's audiences. Durham got an FBI agent to testify incorrectly that Danchenko believed he had received a phone call from Sergei Millian on a cell phone; when Danchenko's lawyer instructed the agent simply to turn the page of a trial exhibit and keep reading, the agent corrected his testimony to note that Danchenko had said the call may have come on a mobile app. The agent agreed with Danchenko's attorney that "we all know that [the testimony Durham elicited is] false."

Prosecutor Brittain Shaw elicited false testimony about whether an FBI analyst had used information Danchenko provided to pitch an investigation into one of his associates. "I was absolutely not trying to lie," Amy Anderson insisted, when shown a document that proved Danchenko had in fact provided information Shaw claimed he had hidden. Durham even tried to elicit false testimony to suggest that Danchenko had been asked--ever!--about a report at the core of one charge against him. He did so by pointing to a different, earlier Christopher Steele project, suggesting it was the Democratic-funded dossier.

Durham's boosters claim he has exposed the failures of the Crossfire Hurricane FBI team that was probing links between the Trump campaign and Russia. But the biggest 2016-related failure revealed at the trials showed that two cybersecurity agents who first analyzed anomalies associated with Russia's Alfa Bank misrepresented their timing and never reviewed key data. As a result, the FBI dismissed the anomalies without answering key questions about them. "The FBI didn't necessarily do everything right here," prosecutor Andrew DeFilippis said, admitting his own witnesses' investigative failures to the Sussmann jury. "They missed opportunities. They made mistakes." One of the agents who blew it accurately predicted that "any chance you get to work something like this that truly has [zero] repercussions if you mess it up." He is among the only FBI agents involved in a Russia investigation in 2016 that Barr's DOJ didn't punish for their involvement.

Besides, Durham's own investigative failures were far more stunning than anything described at trial. First, he never asked DOJ's inspector general for relevant evidence until after he indicted Michael Sussmann. That led Durham to rediscover something he had been told four years earlier but claimed to have forgotten: The inspector general had cell phones from his key witness. The inspector general also provided meeting notes by FBI witnesses disproving the case against Sussmann. And only in this same period months after the indictment did Durham ask his key witness to review what he had in his own iCloud account; along with one text that showed Durham had charged the wrong date, the witness found evidence that Sussmann helped the FBI kill a New York Times story about the Alfa Bank anomaly, something that undercut all Durham's claims about Sussmann's motive for sharing the tip with the FBI.

Even Durham's case against Danchenko showed investigative shortcomings. Durham proudly had his case agent describe the laborious work the team did to rule out that Danchenko had received a telephone call from Sergei Millian, but described nothing that would rule out a call using a mobile app--an egregious oversight for any prosecutor, especially one in such a high-profile case.

It took a June Roger Stone interview of George Papadopoulos to reveal that Durham never interviewed Trump's former campaign aide. Durham didn't interview Papadopoulos before he and the attorney general flew to Italy chasing some of Papadopoulos's baseless theories about the genesis of the investigation. Durham didn't interview Papadopoulos in conjunction with the Danchenko case, which would have shown that Millian was setting up meetings in New York City via an iPad during precisely the period Durham claimed such coordination was impossible. He didn't interview Papadopoulos to understand what Papadopoulos meant when he described Millian as "a very shady kind of person" in 2018 congressional testimony that Durham did rely on.

Durham doesn't need to do a report to show what an incompetent investigation looks like: His team modeled it.

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