Donald Trump and his allies are throwing every bucket of chum they can at their base in their ongoing efforts to distract from the administration’s bungling of the Jeffrey Epstein case, and this time they may have caught a fish that’s too big to fry.
Following a request from Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), the FBI and DOJ agreed to declassify the so-called “Durham Annex,” a 29-page appendix to the Durham Report. The annex was made public on Thursday, with FBI Director Kash Patel claiming it was part of a hidden trove of documents “buried in a back room at the FBI” that contained classified “evidence that the Clinton campaign plotted to frame President Trump and fabricate the Russia collusion hoax.”
It contained no such evidence, but that didn’t matter to the Trump allies desperate to cast prominent Democratic figures as anti-American criminals.
The original Durham Report was released by Trump-appointed Special Council John Durham in 2023, and examined the evidence underlying the federal investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Durham was unable to find proof that the FBI or other government entities engaged in prosecutable misconduct targeting Trump. The president and his allies have nevertheless continued to try (and fail) to prove Democratic misconduct related to the investigation, while alleging Barack Obama and others should be indicted for treason over the “hoax.”
MAGA Republicans immediately seized on the newly released annex as a smoking gun that proved their allegations.
Following the release of the annex on Thursday, the New York Post ran with the headline: “Read the documents that prove Hillary Clinton OK’d plan to ‘smear’ Trump with Russia collusion.”
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters that the documents were “further evidence that Hillary Clinton approved the Russia Hoax against POTUS … and the FBI and the CIA were both weaponized to accelerate this hoax.”
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John Solomon, another longtime Trump ally, wrote on X that there is “smoking gun evidence inside Durham annex. If it is authenticated by further investigation it means liberal mega donor George Soros’ team knew the whole Clinton plan for Russiagate hoax.”
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) wrote in a statement that “these intelligence reports and related records, whether true or false, were buried for years,” and in his view contained proof that “the Obama FBI failed to adequately review and investigate intelligence reports showing the Clinton campaign may have been ginning up the fake Trump-Russia narrative for Clinton’s political gain, which was ultimately done through the Steele Dossier and other means.”
In reality, the previously classified documents seem to suggest that some of the supposed “evidence” Patel and others are touting as proof of their conspiracies was actually fabricated by Russian intelligence.
Amid heavy redactions, the annex states that two emails — supposedly written by individuals working for billionaire George Soros’ Open Society Foundation — suggesting that Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign was interested in carrying out plans “to demonize Putin and Trump” were “ultimately a composite of several emails that were obtained through Russian intelligence hacking of the U.S.-based think tanks, including the Open Society Foundations, the Carnegie Endowment and others.”
Durham’s assessment is that the emails were likely Frankenstein fabrications, and thus not authentic.
The misguided right-wing reaction to the annex tracks with the ultimate idea behind the Durham investigation. As previously reported by The New York Times, the more than three years that Durham — at the direction of Trump’s Justice Department — spent trying to find evidence of criminal wrongdoing against the president eventually turned into a fishing expedition against the Clinton campaign.
In the face of growing scandal over his relationship with Epstein, and his administration’s refusal to release evidence and documents related to the dead sex offender’s case, Trump is trying to redirect his base’s attention to the nearly decade-old Russia investigation. Bringing up Obama, Clinton, and supposed deep-state plots is usually a reliable method to bury stories he’d rather not have under public scrutiny, even if nothing ever comes of it.
“It’s another ticking time bomb for himself,” a Trump adviser recently told Rolling Stone of Trump’s recent push to have Obama and other prominent Democrats prosecuted “We are promising them [the base] that these people committed the crime of the century, and that Dems are going down for this. What if we don’t … take them down? It’d be a broken promise.”
From Rolling Stone US
