ALWAYS BET ON THE dEEP sTATE:

A new, detailed exposé by the New York Times's Charlie Savage, Adam Goldman, and Katie Benner digs into what exactly happened with the nearly four-year Durham investigation, which is purportedly about to conclude, and it isn't pretty. Anecdote after anecdote portrays Durham and Barr as believing in conspiracy theories without evidence but with clear political motives to bolster one of Trump's favorite arguments: that he was the victim of a nefarious plot.

Basically, Durham and Barr wanted to prove that the Trump-Russia investigation was manufactured in bad faith by either "deep state" officials or the Clinton campaign (or both), with the goal of hurting Trump politically. Again and again, Durham pursued various versions of this theory, and again and again, he fell short of proving his case.

If Barr and Durham started off with suspicions but found upon investigation that they were baseless, that's not necessarily so terrible. Yet both men kept on saying or implying publicly that the "'deep state'/Clinton campaign hit job" theory was true -- Barr in public statements where he said this outright and Durham in court filings and trial questioning that seemed designed to advance a narrative he couldn't actually prove.

Bizarrely enough, when checking out one of these theories -- that Italian officials were somehow involved in launching the Trump-Russia investigation -- Durham and Barr were instead presented with evidence linking Trump himself to potential financial crimes. "Mr. Barr and Mr. Durham decided that the tip was too serious and credible to ignore," the Times reporters write. Barr kept this new investigation of Trump in Durham's hands, and it's unclear what became of it.

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