Nicolle Wallace busts John Durham for playing dumb about the Mueller report he was investigating
MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace highlighted testimony from former special counsel John Durham in Congress Wednesday and accused him of playing politics to dodge answering questions that were unflattering to him and his probe.
Speaking to NBC News reporter Garrett Haake, Wallace pointed out that Durham did not know the answer to basic facts about things he was supposed to be investigating.
"Durham's mandate is to investigate not just any investigators, not just investigators who happen to investigate while [Donald] Trump was president, not investigators who may have had one of the pieces of paper that cross their desk that pertains Russia, Durham's mandate was to investigate the investigators who investigated interference by Russia in the 2016 election," Wallace said. "And what a lot of people talk about when they revisit the Mueller report is the Trump figures that were charged that like Paul Manafort, Rick Gates and George Papadopoulos. Mueller also indicted a whole lot of Russians. Durham was the man in charge of the investigation, and he doesn't know basic facts? He either misstates or erroneously recounts the conclusions of the Mueller report. What was that?"
Haake said that his sense is that Durham didn't want to go down that road, so he simply refused to answer questions about it, saying that it wasn't part of his report.
"You might have an issue with the bias Peter Strzok indicated in his text messages, but weren't these findings still findings?" Haake asked. "Were not Russians, in fact, trying to get involved in the Trump campaign or be involved in the 2016 election in a significant way? And nothing in the Durham report undercuts any of those findings by Mueller or the Crossfire Hurricane team that predated him under Jim Comey. I think that's why you would two wholly separate conversations, only tangentially dealing with that paper report in front of them going on in that hearing room for five hours today."
Wallace noted that the one somewhat legitimate finding from the Durham report is that there should have been a preliminary investigation into Russian involvement in the 2016 election before the larger investigation.
"At the end of the day, for both Charlie [Savage's] reporting and Garret's, he does not come out and refute the facts that predicated the opening of an investigation. It's simply this rather technical dispute about whether it should have been a preliminary instead of the full. But the wreckage, the blast radius, four years of Donald Trump and Sean Hannity, and everyone on the right building up the Durham report is coming!"
She recalled being in Washington with Trump-era DOJ officials ahead of the Mueller report dropping, and she said that all of them insisted that Durham would discount everything.
"They said, 'This is nothing, wait until you see what Durham's got.' And I said, 'Oh, yeah, what does Durham have?' Durham never had anything except a tip to open an investigation into Donald Trump," Wallace said. "And that was something he couldn't even answer for today."
See the full comments from Wallace and Haake below or at the link.
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