As Americans, we live in a society we think is open, self-governing, and self-correcting. We grouse about leaders but are proud of our democratic institutions. We think some things cannot happen – but they do. That is what the recent filing by Special Counsel John Durham showed.
If Pearl Harbor and 9-11 were shocks from overseas, resetting security in an unsettled world, Durham’s findings are comparable. What he found should rock us all.
What did he find? After a plodding, multi-year, painfully thorough, patently non-partisan inquiry, he found rock-solid facts. They make believers in democracy shudder.
Whether you are a Reagan, Trump, or a never-Trump Republican, old Democrat or new socialist, you should pause to understand what has just come to light.
During and after the 2016 presidential election, in a country proud of our elections, a political campaign, apparently assisted by experts, penetrated the opposing candidate’s Internet communications, and then penetrated the winning candidate’s White House.
Incredibly, the penetrating party – like the Watergate break-in “plumbers” – claimed they had “no client.” Durham dug into that allegation, like former Watergate Judge John Sirica once did.
Sirica coined the phrase “follow the money,” which led to the Nixon campaign. That is what Durham did, and it appears to have led back to the Clinton Campaign. This time, it is worse.
As the Wall Street Journal reported, this Special Counsel – who Biden’s team will find hard to remove – discovered “startling information.” Mainstream media soft-shoe what is explosive.
According to the filing, “the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign effort to compile dirt on Donald Trump” went beyond Watergate, proceeded after Clinton lost. It “reached into protected White House communications,” that is, well beyond penetrating campaign computers.
As the Journal explains, “the filing relates to Mr. Durham’s September indictment of” someone “who represented the Clinton campaign.” He was “accused of lying to the FBI” in 2016, apparently presenting documents “claiming to show secret internet communications between the Trump Organization” and a Russian bank, but the plot thickens.
The Durham indictment suggests this party had a client, who was not revealed – even as he sought to “create an ‘inference’ and ‘narrative’ around Trump to benefit the Clinton campaign.
“The new shocker,” writes the Journal, relates to “data … mining.” “Exploited” was access to “non-public and/or proprietary Internet data,” including “Internet traffic pertaining to . . . the Executive Office of the President of the United States.” Whoa! Stop right there.
Implicated was “monitoring” of “internet traffic related to Trump Tower, and Mr. Trump’s apartment on Central Park West,” but also – after his election – White House communications.
Why did this happen? For a client? Who was the client? By inference, Clinton’s Campaign.
Questions raised by Durham’s findings are many, cascading, and important to our government’s survival. First, how could one candidate get access to another’s communications? How could that not be discovered, and swiftly prosecuted?
In an age obsessed with accountability, how could that ever happen? How could that not be the centerpiece of an inquiry into efficacy, integrity, and the openness of our electoral process?
Worse, how could this data be surfacing now, six years later, after helping start a false narrative that arguably put the country at risk, reduced public trust, almost removed a president?
How then could the offending penetration of an opposing candidate’s campaign computers follow the winner into the White House? How could a losing candidate’s agent infiltrate?
Deeper questions lurk, criminal and institutional – questions that deserve full answers, if we are to restore public trust. For example, who in the Justice Department, Intelligence Community, and Congress may have known about all this – and said nothing, or worse sought to cover it up?
If they did not know, how did that happen – a White House information system was penetrated, compromised by an opposing political campaign, and was not discovered until six years later?
In retrospect, how do we comfort ourselves that – given partisan hostility, a useless Russia-collusion investigation, two impeachments, and continuing vilification – it will not happen again?
These questions are before Durham now, since he has revealed our society is not immune to the sorts of sordid public corruption found elsewhere in the world.
This is not Pearl Harbor or 9-11, but it is a domestic earthquake that should – in historical perspective – make us stop and think hard about who we are and what we want. Far beyond Watergate, a bungled incursion by one campaign into another which brought down a president, this is a body-blow to faith in the electoral system.
If true, and followed to conclusion, we seem to have lived through a combination of paid infiltration by one presidential campaign into another, and then infiltration by that campaign of the winner’s White House – in pursuit of a false narrative to reverse or undermine a president.
How can such a thing happen in America? That is the question – one that needs answering. Whatever your political affinities, this goes beyond Watergate. It implicates our democracy, whether our republic can self-police, self-assess, and self-correct. The filing is earthshaking.