NYC Gazette

Goldman: “The Durham investigation is an embarrassment, and it should go down as one of the biggest abuses of power and waste of money in the Department of Justice’s history.”

“We need to be aggressively calling out the misinformation and disinformation that is coming from the Right Wing and that will unquestionably come from Donald Trump over the next 18 months as he uses this Durham Report as part of his campaign.”

“The Republicans and the far right are completely spinning off the planet, but this is much worse than just simply ‘he didn't find anything.’ The reporting... really demonstrated that John Durham had morphed from a prosecutor into a political animal.”

Washington, DC – Congressman Dan Goldman (NY-10) was today a guest on MSNBC’s Deadline: White House with Nicolle Wallace, where he set the record straight on right wing mis- and disinformation surrounding the Durham Report.

VIDEO of the interview is available here

A rush transcript of the interview is available below:

NICOLE WALLACE: It’s worse than that. Dan Goldman, I mean – Congressman Dan Goldman, I mean, people that were left just reading the report, I did on the air and I had the investigative reporting from the New York Times on the table and was able to fact check some of what came out. What is projected on to the facts and the reality of the Durham report is spin, Left Wing spin.

I mean we are so far down the rabbit hole that to just sort of stand at sea level and to say Durham found nothing new, his two prosecutions failed, and the projections and hopes and dreams that Trump and his allies had were an absolute dud and a flop is actually viewed as the partisan statement when this is what is actually hyperbole, the spin and the disinformation. Let me show you Fox's reaction.

[FOX NEWS CLIP PLAYS]

We are now so far around the circle that they're advocating for corruption. And for the record, Christopher Wray was Chris Christie's former defense attorney – private defense attorney – handpicked by Donald Trump. Now that he hasn't been loyal to Donald Trump, I suppose is the indictment, but he is Donald Trump's handpicked FBI Director.

CONGRESSMAN DAN GOLDMAN: Yeah, the Republicans and the far right are completely spinning off the planet, but this is much worse than just simply “he didn't find anything.” The reporting that Charlie and others did six months ago or so really demonstrated that John Durham had morphed from a prosecutor into a political animal.  

You don't get prosecutors who resign very frequently, especially not outside of the Trump administration. That is really unusual, especially his number two.

You don't get a special counsel going and trying to change an Inspector General's report. And ultimately, what he found is not only that there was nothing there, but it actually justified what the FBI did even though he completely, completely misconstrued the facts on the ground.

Now, he said that [that] a preliminary investigation would have been legitimate to start operation Crossfire Hurricane.

Let's remember how this started. This didn't start in April of 2016 when the Australian Diplomat heard from George Papadopoulos that Russia had emails and they were going to drop them. It started after Russia did it.

And, then all of a sudden, the Australian Diplomat was like, wait a minute, the Trump campaign had advance notice of that. I got information that this relates to Russia. The corroboration that John Durham says doesn't exist in the investigative files and intelligence files existed in plain sight, and yet he doesn't talk about that. That is a complete abdication of his responsibility.

The other thing is he goes on and on and on about the Steele Dossier. The Steele Dossier had nothing to do with the origination of the investigation, and it had nothing to do with the Mueller report or the numerous prosecutions and convictions brought by special counsel Mueller.

So, what this really is, it is a political hatchet job by a political animal dressed up in a prosecutor's clothes. And that is the most dangerous of all because he has a veneer of apoliticism even though he is clearly a political animal, and even with that the Republicans are off the reservation. Nothing that they are saying is included in his report, so this is disinformation beyond disinformation.

Even Republican Ben Cline said today that this was proof that the FBI interfered in the election in support of Hillary Clinton and against Donald Trump in 2016. How can that happen if it never went public? Nothing in public ever came out about that investigation, so how could it actually interfere? This is really, really scary stuff coming from the right wing.

WALLACE: Well and Dan Goldman, Congressman Goldman, I want to ask you, you know with Trump as a candidate for office in 2024, the investigation isn’t opened into Trump initially, it turns into an investigation also looking at Trump after he fires Comey. And the obstruction of the investigation question is on the table whether or not [Trump is] doing the work, work that would make Vladimir Putin happy, is also part of a national security question.

I mean, Trump, very prominently last week, toed Vladimir Putin’s line as someone largely seen to be a war criminal. I mean he’s a candidate for office in 2024 who still has a direct call and answer between Vladimir Putin. What happens to those questions when you have one of the country’s two political parties, in government and out, immune or unable to look at any questions about Trump’s affinity for Putin?

GOLDMAN: Right, I mean, let’s remember though, this didn’t even originate as an investigation into Trump. It originated as a counter-intelligence investigation into Russian efforts to interfere in the election.

It morphed into an investigation of the Trump campaign because evidence materialized that people like Paul Manafort were giving internal campaign data to a Russian intelligence agent who he had worked with.

So that is also a very important predicate to this entire conversation. But we’ve known of Donald Trump’s favoritism towards Vladimir Putin since 2016, and thereafter. We’ve seen it in Helsinki, in 2018, when he publicly chose to side with Vladimir Putin, who has openly expressed his antagonism towards the United States, over our own intelligence community.

This is very much baked in, and what I think we all need to be focused on and calling out and, that includes Charlie and the New York Times and other journalists, is we need to be aggressively calling out the misinformation and disinformation that is coming from the Right Wing and that will unquestionably come from Donald Trump over the next 18 months as he uses this Durham Report as part of his campaign.

It needs to be called out by independent journalists, objective journalists, certainly we will be banging the drum on Capitol Hill, but this is something that needs to be really aggressively attacked.

WALLACE: I mean, and I guess if you step back Congressman, I mean Manafort, Flynn, Stone, Gates, and Papadopoulos were all found guilty in a court of law. What is Durham saying, that they weren’t really guilty of the crimes they confessed, pleaded to, or were convicted of?

GOLDMAN: I have no idea what confirmation bias he’s talking about when you have either guilty pleas or jury verdicts convicting all of these people in connection with the Russia investigation, and yet you have acquittals essentially across the board in the piddly cases John Durham brought.

You want to talk about a waste of time, of money. The Durham investigation is an embarrassment, and it should go down as one of the biggest abuses of power and waste of money in the Department of Justice’s history.

But there’s no confirmation bias here. Special Counsel Mueller did an investigation and convicted people. They plead guilty or they were convicted at trial. He established, as did the Inspector General, that the initial investigation was opened justifiably. Durham doesn’t even really quibble with that. He says it should have been preliminary, not a full investigation, which is, for the majority of laypeople outside of the Department of Justice, a distinction without a difference.

And so, it is a real abomination, and the fact that he wastes 300 pages on this, including so much about the Steele Dossier, which the Inspector General had also addressed, it just goes to show how political this is. And it’s almost as if the Republicans had their talking points written before the report came out and they ever saw it. They were going to say the same things no matter what was in the report, and it’s a real shame that we have to deal with this.

WALLACE: Congressman, you sit on the “Politicization Committee.” Would you like to see John Durham called, and what would you ask him?

GOLDMAN: I would love to see John Durham called. I would love to ask John Durham about why his prosecutors quit. I would love to ask John Durham about his trips to Italy with Bill Barr to chase some phantom information that proved not to be true, but what came out of that was an additional tip about potential fraud by Donald Trump that of course John Durham did not investigate.

I would love for John Durham to come in and ask him about his efforts to convince the independent Inspector General to change his report. I’d love to ask John Durham about the politicization of his investigation. So yes, I’m on the Weaponization of the Federal Government Subcommittee that Jim Jordan is the chairman of, so let’s bring John Durham because he is the number one example of the weaponization of federal government.

WALLACE: As a former prosecutor, Congressman, let me ask you about Barr’s embrace of Durham and how they traveled together and seemed to have engaged in some groupthink.

Barr writes this in his memoir: “In the Spring and early Summer of 2019, when John and I discussed the international dimensions of his work, we agreed to engage with three countries we felt would be most helpful to the investigation: the U.K. Australia, and Italy... I traveled to both Italy and the U.K. to explain Durham’s investigation and ask for any assistance or information they could provide. I alerted the President, Trump, that we would be making these contacts and asked him to mention Durham’s investigation to the prime ministers of the three countries, stressing the importance of their help.”

Is that normal?

GOLDMAN: That is unbelievable, to have an Attorney General spending so much time on unverified tips with foreign countries, traveling to the foreign countries. Doesn’t he have better things to do? Aren’t there real, important issues that the Department of Justice needs to address rather than some fanciful tips that he wants to chase down with a Special Prosecutor whose investigation he should not even be involved with?

It is truly a great example, Nicole, of the abuse of power that was littered through the Trump Administration, of cabinet officials trying to do the political bidding of Donald Trump.

And the irony, of course, is that we have to sit through these subcommittee hearings on the “weaponization of the federal government” that are being run by Republicans, when the Trump Administration weaponized the federal government more than any administration in the history of our country. And so, it is really a gross abuse of power. It’s a shame, but I look forward to asking Mr. Durham all about that – those conversations and those trips with Bill Barr.

WALLACE: Do you know if your Republican colleagues plan to call him and if anything is scheduled? And if not, would you like to see Senate Democrats call Mr. Durham and Ms. Dannehy or any of the prosecutors who fled his 4-year probe before the Senate Judiciary Committee? 

GOLDMAN: Well, I know the request has been made by Chairman Jordan for Mr. Durham to appear. I don’t know where that stands right now but they’ve certainly made the request.

But no, I honestly don’t think that the Senate Democrats should be wasting their time with a political hack like John Durham. It is a waste of the American people’s time, it is a waste of money, and there are far more important things for the Senate Judiciary Committee to do, including to investigate all of the ethical lapses and violations of Clarence Thomas and the Supreme Court among many other issues.

Original source can be found here.