Starting with Conclusions
Terry H. Schwadron
May 17, 2023
Maybe it doesn’t matter what the investigation finds, but rather — once again — the conclusion that the author of the story — or worse, the subject of the probe and his partisan political — simply announces was the conclusion.
Exhibit A this week is the finding by Special Counsel John Durham after four years of scratching for reasons to find that there was “crime of the century,” as Donald Trump calls it, even to launch an investigation of reported ties between his 2016 campaign and Russian operatives.
Set aside that Senate investigators, the Justice Department Inspector General and the Special Counsel investigation by Robert S. Mueller III all found that there were unwarranted and dangerous interference on Trump’s behalf by Russian operatives as well as criminal indictments and some convictions. Durham’s investigate-the-investigators probe now concludes that the FBI and Justice officials who looked into the original complaints should have been more skeptical.
That’s it. Over multiple years, two failed low-level trials, international inquiries guided by former Attorney General Bill Barr, there are no findings of wrong-doing, indictments, or even terribly embarrassing misbehavior by the government.
Just a lack of sufficient skepticism. No “crime of the century.” No clearing up of Russian election interference.
But the conclusion is stated in a way that makes it seem unwise — not unlawful — to have launched a full investigation of Trump campaign-Russia links in the first place.
Indeed, Durham seemed to outline that it was unconfirmed and apparently uninvestigated Russian intelligence that suggested it had been a goal of the opposing Hillary Clinton campaign to want disqualifying information found about Trump and Russians to deter criticism about her emails found on personal computers.
Um, even if in retrospect you don’t believe in the much-discredited Steele dossier cited at the outset, how do you find out if there was a problem if you don’t look?
Meeting Our Non-Expectations
But what we now have come to expect from these kind of probes was on full display.
Trump himself crowed that there were no Russian contacts, the well-established fact pattern laid out in at least three investigations notwithstanding. Trump’s supporters went further: Sen. Marsha Blackburn was able to twist things so that the conclusion showed that Hillary Clinton colluded with Russians towards her own defeat.
Those associated with the Mueller investigation or identifying as anti-Trump threw up their hands at what the Morning Joe political panel was calling a “dud” of an investigative report that showed no new information and a conclusion that did not match the facts.
“Durham assembled a molehill, which Trump and his supporters are desperately trying to claim is a mountain,” noted Washington Post columnist Paul Waldman.
And so, once again, we can expect that anyone with a job to do, children to watch, activities requiring focus will go on their way to avoid yet another politics-laden debate over what seems to be insider partisan baseball.
Though the Mueller report — and the other reports — laid out were many incidents of unwarranted cooperation between the Trump campaign and Russians, the conclusions there stopped short of recommending criminal charges, including obstruction of justice attempts outlined in the report. That was because it was Bill Barr at the time who interpreted the results as falling short of indictment material.
That prompted the probe of probers instead, and now we have, well, nothing other than the “interpretations” that match exactly with where one stands on a Trump return to the White House.
As The Washington Post summarized, Durham’s report criticized FBI reliance on raw intelligence in its investigation and made recommendations for how politically sensitive probes could be conducted in the future. Many of his findings echoed a similarly tasked 2019 report by the Justice Department inspector general, however. In addition, his four-year probe did not send anyone to jail and resulted in a single guilty plea.
According to Durham, no individual FBI agent did wrong, no money got misspent, but overall, federal officials should have been asking more questions before launching an investigation that never became public before the election, unlike Clinton’s email issues. Isn’t that what the investigation was doing?
Conclusions Without Fact
The issue isn’t the Durham investigation or even what looks like a waste of four years spent on investigating investigators rather than on addressing the problems they had pursued — problems that persist today in yet another election season.
Rather the issue is that we apparently want to be told what the conclusion means without looking at the problems themselves.
That’s what allows House Republicans daily to crow about a “Biden crime family” without coming up with any set of followable evidence that makes their case, or a “weaponization of Justice” subcommittee that starts with conclusions and may never work its way back to fact-gathering.
It’s what has proved the substance of the recently publicized settlements with Fox News, whose anchors have made their commercial success depending on announcing interpretations that defy actual fact-gathering and truth-telling. As a society, we’re in the conclusions business rather than the fact-verification business — and we only want to accept conclusions with which we agree.
It would have been totally reasonable for John Durham to have ended his four-year query with a set of discovered facts, timelines, communications, and documents that create the case for his conclusions. We’re left with an empty bag from which only the most highly affected political partisans feel comfortable finding a result.
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