According to longtime Washington, D.C. observer Margaret Carlson, any hope that House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan (R-OH) might have had that the long-awaited special counsel John Durham report would bail out his flailing "weaponization" hearings has gone down in flames.
In her column for Washington Monthly, Carlson wrote that "Durham used to be somebody" before caustically adding that, after his latest endeavor, he has become "Ken Starr but without the charm."
Noting that the Durham report provided no evidence of a conspiracy within the FBI to undercut Donald Trump, the columnist compared his work to similar investigations conducted by Patrick Fitzgerald, who investigated CIA leaks, and the indictments that came out of Robert Mueller's work and indictments linked to Russians colluding with Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign.
As Carlson put it, "Unlike Mueller or Fitzgerald, the Barr-Durham duo got nothing. Their world tour did not unearth a sleeper cell of FBI liberals with NPR tote bags hounding a defenseless Trump. The bureau remains a bastion of conservative white males, heavy on the nice Fordham grads with bad haircuts I grew up with."
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As for where Jordan goes next, she suggested he has painted himself into a corner and will now be forced to bluster his way out of it.
"It will take a lot for Jordan to give Durham’s story a happy ending by adding a House GOP hearing to a dud of a report. Immediately after Durham’s issued his report on May 15, Jordan, the former assistant Ohio State wrestling coach who somehow missed the sexual harassment of dozens of players by the team physician, was bellowing from the dais that Durham found 'no evidence whatsoever' to justify an investigation into Trump," she wrote.
She continued, "Jordan has asked Durham to testify this week, but the special counsel will have to chew the scenery to dig out of his hole," before adding that Jordan's bending of the rules has made his task almost impossible.
"It might be harder for Congress’s best-known wrestler since Denny Hastert to share power, especially in a high-profile case like the Durham report," she wrote. "In Jordan’s fiefdom, the more partisanship, the better. He provides all subpoenaed information to the majority and pointedly keeps it from the minority, something not done before. If he’d only start sharing, that would be a bombshell."
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