[finnbow]

Durham is a talented prosecutor who had built up a solid reputation and who in recent years has apparently sunk into the right-wing conspiratorial fever swamps. If anybody had both the inclination and the legal ability to find some crimes committed against Mr. Trump, it was Durham.

Durham indeed tried to bring charges against at least medium-profile targets, but he kept losing in court. The underlying cause of his failure was blindingly obvious to anybody who was in touch with reality. As the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee found, Trump’s campaign was deeply corrupted by ties to Russia. And as the Justice Department’s inspector general concluded, the FBI’s investigation into Trump’s ties to Russia was in fact adequately predicated.

Perhaps Trump’s loyalists would have a point if their suspicions of misconduct had gone uninvestigated. This is why I argued from the outset that Durham’s appointment was a good thing — he was always unlikely to discover any serious crimes because he was pursuing an imaginary conspiracy, and his failure would expose the delusions that produced it.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023...bi-russia.html