Yesterday morning, as the House Judiciary Committee prepared to hear from former special counsel John Durham, Republicans on the panel released a video showing a variety of prominent Democrats talking about Russia trying to help elect Donald Trump in 2016.
The online clip came alongside text that read, in reference to the featured Democrats, “They all lied to you.” The tweet added a “#Durham” hashtag.
There were a couple of obvious problems. The first is that Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee had the entire story backward: Every quote from their video was accurate, and none of the featured Democrats have been caught lying about the Trump/Russia scandal. When these GOP officials told the public that “they all lied to you,” they were, well, lying.
But let’s not brush past the hashtag. As these Republicans see it, the former special counsel, despite failing spectacularly in court, and failing to uncover any crimes after several years of relentless searching, successfully discredited the entire Trump/Russia scandal.
That never happened — and more importantly, Durham never made much of an effort to try to make it happen. Whether the House Judiciary Committee’s GOP members understand this or not, the former special counsel set out to investigate the investigation. The point was to uncover some kind of nefarious “deep state” plot — but Durham couldn’t find anything meaningful.
Republicans not only want to pretend the special counsel’s findings were dramatic, they also want to take the extra step of concluding that Durham also discredited the underlying scandal itself. On the surface, it’s a problem that the party doesn’t understand what the special counsel found, but just below the surface, it’s a bigger problem that the party also seems confused about the point of the special counsel’s work.
As a New York Times report explained last month, the GOP’s partisan reactions to Durham’s findings are becoming “Exhibit A in how the American right seems to be living in its own universe.”
But in an unexpected twist, while House Republicans looked rather ridiculous yesterday by flubbing the basics of Durham’s investigation, the former special counsel himself looked slightly worse.
Three years ago, when the Senate Intelligence Committee released its findings on the Trump/Russia scandal — the report was written in part by the panel’s then-Republican majority — the panel literally described a “direct tie between senior Trump Campaign officials and the Russian intelligence services.” As a Mother Jones report explained yesterday, this connection “is one of the most serious and still not fully explained components of the Trump-Russia scandal. It belies all the claims of Trump and his crowd that the Russia investigation was nothing but a hoax orchestrated by a nefarious den of anti-Trump vipers within the law enforcement and national security communities.”
And yet, when asked about this yesterday, Durham couldn’t answer questions about this key detail, and suggested he was unaware of it.
This was not an isolated incident. New York magazine’s Jon Chait added: [Durham] seems to have become so hopelessly brain-poisoned by Fox News he has lost all touch with facts outside the Republican information bubble. More specifically, Durham seemed to be unaware of the major factual elements of the alliance between the Trump campaign and Russia. This ignorance came through in several awkward exchanges with Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee panel.
Democrats specifically asked the former special counsel about details uncovered by the Mueller investigation — a probe Durham just spent several years scrutinizing. And yet, in response to multiple lines of inquiry, Durham freely admitted that he was clueless about the revelations. This didn’t do his partisan allies any favors: The man Republicans saw as a hero, discrediting the Trump/Russia scandal and the investigation of it, seemed wholly unaware of the controversy’s key elements. The man who ostensibly shredded the scandal wasn’t even familiar with the basics of the scandal. It’s why Chait concluded, it helps contextualize the larger problem: “If you’re not aware of the major evidence of the alliance between Trump and Russia that was unfolding largely in secret, then of course you would assume the FBI investigation into Trump’s ties to Russia was a witch hunt.”
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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