After four years and millions of taxpayer dollars, special counsel John Durham, appointed by former Attorney General Bill Barr, has released his report. To be precise, the current attorney general, Merrick Garland, released the report, unexpurgated, unredacted and without comment or commentary. Durham is (or was) the independent counsel Barr appointed to conduct the investigation into the investigation by Robert Mueller, himself an independent counsel appointed under Barr's predecessor Jeff Sessions, into Russian involvement in the 2016 presidential election, among other things. The report the Durham team issued amounts to more than 300 pages of … well, not much of anything. Some criticisms of the FBI, most of which, according to FBI sources, had already been addressed. But no smoking gun, no vast Hillary Clinton-led liberal plot to undermine the Trump presidency.
What it did do, however, was to return our gaze back to Bill Barr, the instigator of this apparent waste of time and money. Back in January of this year — a lifetime in the Trump universe — revelations about Barr and his conduct as attorney general of the United States, an office he has held under two presidents, were back in the news, interrupting Barr's latest attempts to rehabilitate himself and his image.
