On Wednesday, I was watching former special counsel John Durham testifying to the House Judiciary Committee. The hearing was proceeding as expected. Republicans were trying to weaponize the final report of his dud-of-an-inquiry into the FBI’s investigation of the Trump-Russia scandal. Durham had failed in his task to unearth evidence to buttress Donald Trump’s false claim that a Deep State cabal had cooked up a phony Russia probe to tarnish Trump. In fact, Durham had concluded the FBI had been right to open its Russia investigation, only he believed that probe should have been a preliminary investigation instead of a full investigation. His report, though, focused mostly on a matter already scrutinized by the Justice Department’s inspector general—the FBI’s improper conduct in obtaining a surveillance warrant for one former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser—and it insinuated (without at all proving) that the Clinton campaign had tried to gin up the Russia scandal by concocting lies to hoodwink the FBI. This was enough ammo for Republicans to thump their chests and misleadingly charge that the whole Russia business was indeed a hoax and a witch hunt.
One Republican after another attempted to turn Durham’s nothing-burger report into conclusive proof of a massive conspiracy against Trump. Ho-hum. Once again, they were lost in their paranoid Trumpian alternative reality. Democrats on the committee repeatedly noted that other investigations had confirmed that Russia attacked the 2016 election to help Trump and that the Trump campaign had secretly interacted with Russian representatives. But no Republican seemed to care about these basic, undeniable, and damning facts.
Trying to score a few points on this front, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), the former chair of the House Intelligence Committee, who the next day would be censured by House Republicans for his previous involvement in the investigation of the Trump-Russia scandal, asked Durham a simple question about the infamous meeting held in Trump Tower on June 9, 2016. That was when Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort—three of Trump’s top campaign advisers—sat down with a Kremlin emissary whom they were promised would slip them dirt on Hillary Clinton. An email sent to Trump Jr. from the business associate who set up this session said that the meeting was tied to a secret Russian effort to help Trump win the election. Though the Trump team’s acceptance of this meeting signaled to Moscow that it was receptive to Russian endeavors to intervene in the election, Durham dismissed the gathering, commenting, “People get phone calls all the time from individuals who claim to have information like that.”
Schiff was surprised that Durham was so nonplussed about this confab. “Are you really trying to diminish the importance of what happened here?” he asked. Durham replied, “The more complete story is that they met, and it was a ruse, and they didn’t talk about Mrs. Clinton.”
My ears perked up. The final report of special counsel Robert Mueller cited several participants in the meeting who had testified that the Trump crew had discussed Clinton with the Russian emissary. (The Trump aides left the meeting disappointed that the Russian had only shared convoluted information about American investors in Russia and their purported ties to Clinton—material they didn’t consider useful.) To testify that the conversation did not cover Clinton was wrong. Durham had just made a false statement to Congress. As we all know, doing so can be a crime.
This is a big deal, I thought. It was inconceivable that a man who had spent four years investigating the Russia investigation would not know this basic fact. Why had Durham presented misinformation to Congress that backed up the Trump crowd’s bogus claim that the Trump Tower meeting was insignificant? I began working on a write-up of this whopper.
Within minutes, it happened again.
When Rep. Tom McClintock (R-Calif.) observed that the “central charge in the Russia collusion hoax was that Trump campaign operatives were in contact with Russian intelligence sources,” Durham responded, “There was no such evidence.”
Hold on there, pal. It’s a matter of public record that Paul Manafort, when he was head of the Trump campaign in 2016, secretly met with a former business associate named Konstantin Kilimnik, and Mueller, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and the US Treasury each have identified Kilimnik as a Russian intelligence agent. The intelligence committee, when it was chaired by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), went so far in its final report as to state that Manafort’s interactions with Kilimnik posed a “grave counterintelligence threat.”
Here was Durham again making a false statement to Congress—again on a subject he could be expected to know intimately. Once more, his remark backed up the deceitful assertion of the Trump gang that there had been no contact between the Trump campaign and Russia. In my mind, the story of Durham’s inaccurate (or dishonest) testimony got bigger.
I enlisted a colleague, Dan Friedman, to help me quickly produce an article on these false statements. I made this a rush job because I was certain that other outlets would jump on these remarks—or lies—and in this business being first counts. Our story was posted within hours. Success! No one else that I noticed had published an article highlighting Durham’s false testimony. I waited, sure that others would emerge. None came. We had won a race that no one else was running.
It seemed that few other publications, if any, considered this news. The New York Times reported that Durham “told lawmakers…that F.B.I. officials had exhibited confirmation bias — even as he defended his work against Democratic accusations that he became a partisan tool.” The Associated Press described the hearing this way: Durham was “at the center of a heated political fight…with Democrats denouncing his inquiry and Republicans arguing that its findings helped prove an anti-Trump bias within law enforcement.” Their stories made no mention of Durham’s false statements. But our piece went viral on Twitter, quickly drawing more than a million impressions.
In the ensuing days, I spotted no significant coverage of Durham’s inaccurate testimony. Boy, I had misjudged the situation. Only us folks at Mother Jones saw this as newsworthy. That reminded me of why I am happy to work there. But it also caused me to reflect on why some false statements (or lies) make headlines and others do not.
The conventional media has long been skittish about calling lies “lies.” I discovered this two decades ago when I published a book titled The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception. I considered the book a somber examination of Bush II’s many dishonest statements about climate change, his tax plan, Social Security, the US invasion of Iraq, and much more. In this book, I contended that while past presidents had lied in office—especially Bill Clinton about you-know-what—Bush had amped up the prevarication on policy issues, moving far beyond the usual mix of spin, exaggeration, and half-truths routinely doled out in politics. It was a legitimate and crucial task of the media, I asserted, to candidly identify the lies of Bush and other politicians.
The reception for the book within mainstream media circles was not positive. The consensus was that it contributed to the coarsening of US public discourse to dub a politician a liar. My book and others detailing the lies of the right, including Al Franken’s Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, were cited as evidence the national debate was becoming even more uncivil. Few MSMers made the effort to consider my argument. This led to one (non-physical) altercation.
A few months after the publication of the book, I and a gazillion reporters were in New Hampshire for the 2004 presidential primary. At the watering hole where journos gathered at the end of the day, I encountered Matt Bai, then of the New York Times, who had in those august pages snippily dismissed my book. I asked him if he had actually read it. He replied with a much-used dodge: I looked at it. With a crowd of fellow ink-stained wretches surrounding us, I retorted, “We all know what that means.” Trying to diffuse the situation, Bai offered to buy me a drink. I turned him down with some clever line that I no longer recall. And that was it.
No hard feelings. But my experience with The Lies of George W. Bush demonstrated how averse the major outlets were to use the L-word. The Iraq war and the revelation the invasion had been launched based on numerous false representations (and lies) did prompt more direct challenging of official statements. But it was not until Trump that the barrier was truly broken.
Trump had consistently lied through the 2016 campaign, and finally, on September 24, 2016, perhaps too late, the New York Times, in a piece by Maggie Haberman and Alexander Burns, called Trump an outright liar:
All politicians bend the truth to fit their purposes, including Hillary Clinton. But Donald J. Trump has unleashed a blizzard of falsehoods, exaggerations and outright lies in the general election, peppering his speeches, interviews and Twitter posts with untruths so frequent that they can seem flighty or random — even compulsive.
Of course, that was known a year (or more!) earlier, but it took a while for the NYT, which had long been wed to the fallacious we-don’t-take-sides objectivity, to become comfortable with stating such a fact.
Once the dam broke for the Times, other major news operations felt permitted to cover Trump’s lies as lies. And in the past two years, we’ve seen these outlets routinely describe Trump’s statements about the 2020 election as baseless and false.
I suspect, though, that Trump, in these circles, may be viewed as a special case, and that these media organizations do not fancy characterizing others as blatant liars. I don’t know if that explains why Durham’s false statements received practically no other attention. The Democrats, for their part, did not make a stink about them. Maybe they believed that the hearing largely failed for the Republicans and it was not in their political interest to keep the Durham story alive.
For now, it looks as if Durham got away with it. This is quite a denouement to his chapter of the Trump-Russia saga. Durham, handpicked by Trump’s second attorney general, Bill Barr, to bolster Trump’s lies, prosecuted two tangential figures in the Russia scandal for lying to the FBI. (He lost both cases.) After he produced a report that was misleading in many ways, he trekked to Capitol Hill, where he was used by Republicans to boost those Trump lies, and...he made false statements. The prosecutor engaged in conduct for which he had prosecuted others. Were these remarks lies? You be the judge. Because no one else will be. It’s damn certain the Durham will not be cited by House Republicans for lying to Congress. Like the proverbial unobserved tree falling in the forest, falsehoods not covered by the press or highlighted by officials create little noise.
Got anything to say about this item—or anything else? Email me at ourland@motherjones.com.