...TOLD BY AN IDIOT:

My biggest "wow" from the Times story was how closely Barr followed the minute details of what Durham was doing.

This paragraph in particular:

While attorneys general overseeing politically sensitive inquiries tend to keep their distance from the investigators, Mr. Durham visited Mr. Barr in his office for at times weekly updates and consultations about his day-to-day work. They also sometimes dined and sipped Scotch together, people familiar with their work said.

And this one too:

Mr. Barr and Mr. Durham traveled abroad together to press British and Italian officials to reveal everything their agencies had gleaned about the Trump campaign and relayed to the United States, but both allied governments denied they had done any such thing. Top British intelligence officials expressed indignation to their U.S. counterparts about the accusation, three former U.S. officials said.

This seems to go against the whole notion of a special counsel. The whole point of the attorney general naming one -- as Merrick Garland has in both the Donald Trump and Joe Biden classified documents investigations -- is to provide a level of independence from the Justice Department, to avoid the appearance of impropriety or bias.

But in Barr's case, he appeared to be directly leaning on Durham -- pressuring him to find what turned out to be a nonexistent conspiracy theory about the origins of the 2016 Russian meddling.

Then there's this: During one of their trips to Europe together, Barr and Durham were told by Italian officials of possible financial crimes committed by Trump. Rather than hand that off to another investigator, Barr had Durham look into it -- even though it was nowhere close to the remit of his special counsel appointment.

As the Times wrote:

Mr. Durham never filed charges, and it remains unclear what level of an investigation it was, what steps he took, what he learned and whether anyone at the White House ever found out. The extraordinary fact that Mr. Durham opened a criminal investigation that included scrutinizing Mr. Trump has remained secret.

In fact, it was worse than that. The news that Durham's probe now included a criminal component wound up leaking out. But, the assumption was -- again because Durham was tasked with investigating the origins of the 2016 FBI probe into Russia not looking into Trump-- that the criminal probe was tied to wrongdoing on that front. Neither Barr nor Durham saw fit to correct the record that the criminal investigation had to do with Trump.

Like, what?

There's more in the story -- including how Durham came to rely on Russian-produced memos of alleged hacks of Americans that made claims about, among other things, how then Attorney General Loretta Lynch was going to shut down the investigation into Hillary Clinton's emails.

You really should read the whole story. It is a stunner -- exposing just how off the rails the Durham probe has gone, with a major assist from Barr.

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