Four years and $6.5 million has brought us the long-awaited Durham Report, a withering critique of how the FBI went about its investigation into the Trump campaign's extensive contacts with Russian sources, and the Clinton campaign's efforts to sow suspicion of collusion. At least, that was its intention.

Right-wing media exploded in euphoria, warping the report's conclusions behind recognition. The first words on the lead-off primetime show on Fox that night had host Will Cain saying, "It's confirmed that the FBI worked to rig the outcome of an American presidential election". Truth has not won out at Fox after the Dominion debacle.

The left pretended a yawn with its hosts saying there is "nothing new" in 306 pages
Special Counsel John Durham

never seen before and repeating the vacuous "there's no there, there".

Durham's report is devoted to criticizing the FBI. Other than storytelling, it deals with little else. This plays perfectly into the Republican narrative that the Justice Department and its Federal Bureau of Investigation have been "weaponized" against the Right. On his Fox show when the report was released, Sean Hannity's first words were, "The Left's Russia hysteria has officially come to an end". Durham's narrow focus on the FBI has given the Right the false ability to claim that is all there was in 2016. We can expect them to cite the report reflexively from this moment forward, especially in response to every indictment of Donald Trump, as proof of a corrupt "deep state", even though the report says nothing of the sort.

John Durham, the U.S. attorney for the district of Connecticut, was tapped by Attorney General William Barr to look for criminality in the 2016 campaign, election, and beyond. Barr believes in a "unitary" theory of… Read More »

With respect for the Supreme court already at an all-time low, one would have thought the exposé by ProPublica cataloguing the extravagant gifts bestowed upon Clarence Thomas and wife Virginia would have silenced even the Court's most ardent conservative supporters.

Not so. Conservative media immediately took to the ramparts to defend the justice.
Clarence Thomas and wife Virginia
The Wall Street Journal fired off an editorial titled, "The Smearing of Clarence Thomas" with the incendiary subtitle, "The left gins up another phony ethics assault to tarnish the Supreme Court." The paper's editorial board wrote,

"Justice Clarence Thomas has a rich friend who has hosted the Justice on his private plane, his yacht, and his vacation resort. That’s it. That’s the story."

The story goes well beyond that, of course, for beyond the peculiarly suspicious flow of gifts from Texas billionaire Harlan Crow over a long stretch of years, Justice Thomas failed to report any of them in accordance with the ethics law enacted after Richard Nixon's presidency.

The secret acceptance of gifts — "lavish" was the media's most frequent adjective — has prompted questions of whether others of the justices have similarly been enjoying the largesse of those hopeful of influencing the Court. Three weeks after the first ProPublica story, The New York Times burst forth with a 5,000 word piece that spanned two full pages of the broadsheet's print edition about George Mason University's law school cozying up to a number of the justices by paying for their travel and accommodations abroad.

But before a closer look at that, ProPublica followed up with a second story that a Harlan Crow company had in 2014 bought a house and two nearby empty lots … Read More »

A few items accumulated that we thought worth the telling as a reprieve from the usual long-form single subject tract:

There's no end of print about Tucker Carlson's removal but let's go back to the $787,500 settlement that helped send him on his way.

Many had hoped for the day-by-day combat of a trial, for the schadenfreude of watching media titan Rupert Murdoch and the network's stars humbled as they took their turns in the dock.

MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell disabused his viewers of thinking
Dominion Voting Systems could have done better with a savvy disquisition on the practicalities of civil suits that we believe few are aware of, not this writer anyway.

First, in civil suits no one goes to jail. Accountability can be meted out only in the form of money.

"The jury would only have a form to fill in the amount that Fox would have to pay...And if that jury awarded an amount that a judge or an appeals court considers excessive, they can simply reduce that amount of money, and reduce it dramatically."

Judges reduce jury verdicts in civil cases all the time because the damages awarded by the jury have to make some economic sense. "The jury can't just pick a huge number to make themselves feel good."

Moreover, the judge ordered no cameras and no recording devices in the courtroom, "You were never going to hear Tucker Carlson's or Rupert Murdoch's voice answering questions under oath. All the public would get would be a recitation by television hosts reading from a transcript. "It is extremely rare to have any surprises in civil litigation like this", said O'Donnell. The prosecution lawyers would be asking the same questions they had already asked in the under-oath depositions,… Read More »