Monday, May 15, 2023

John Durham Lost His Informant

And yet in court: crickets.

Trial law is a particularly brutal game. You are judged entirely by outcomes, not by attempts. Think baseball v football. The former has a long, leisurely season: you win some, you lose some, and you try get more of the former than the latter, with time to catch up if you time it well. Attempts can lead to a decent season.

The football season, by contrast, is nasty, brutish and short. Attempts mean you’re a loser. Trying doesn’t matter. Victory matters. Go big, or go home. Start slipping and there won’t be time to recover, and suddenly it’s all over but the crying. Victory is all that matters, because the next game won’t make up for the last one, when there aren’t that many next games to play.

All that matters in trial law is victory. The winning lawyers know when to fight and when to fold. But if they go to court because the client insists, they are the losers; not the client. One such case can erase years of reputation.

Government lawyers don’t have that problem, and have the power of government behind them. That advantage is magnified in criminal court, despite the protections of individual liberty in the Constitution. When they do lose a big case? Well, what happened to the OJ Simpson prosecutors? Losing a high profile case is not a resume builder.

So government lawyers usually settle weak cases, and prosecute the hell out of strong ones, the better to never look like a loser.

Which is what happened to John Durham. Except now comes his report, which insists he would have won if not for those meddling kids. Or the Deep State. Or something

Granted, investigating the investigators was always a crap idea. It’s the Starr investigation all over again, just without oral sex in the Oval Office (where the nation first decided sex between adults was no longer a deal breaker for the Presidency). Starr couldn’t find out anything worth a damn in Arkansas, but once he got the blue dress, the game was afoot. Durham took the same line (Starr and Durham each playing the role of the man with a hammer seeing nails everywhere), but he never had a blue dress. So he never won in court.

In trial practice success is measured by victory in court. Claiming you coulda-woulda-shoulda is like crying in baseball. There’s no crying in baseball; there’s no crying over the spilled milk of losing a jury trial.

This report is Durham crying over his lost milk. 🥛  And there’s a reason he never took his claims to court (aside from the two lesser charges he prosecuted and lost):
Sworn testimony makes any case a “he said/she said.” But who did Durham have to say anything? The same witnesses that cost him two cases in court? I suspect the answers make as much sense as this does: First, the clarification on which whistleblower is being discussed doesn’t clarify anything. All of Comer’s comments were in the context of the 1023 form; and Comer said the whistleblower knows the informant. Except now the whistleblower is the informant? Because the terms are interchangeable? And the whistleblower knows the informant in the same way I know me?

Huh? Did I just walk into a bad parody of an Abbott and Costello routine?

Comer would have the goods on Biden…if he had the goods on Biden. And Durham would have the goods on the FBI…if he had the goods on the FBI.

Damned meddling kids.
Sand. Definitely sand.
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1 comment:

  1. The Thought Criminal9:15 AM

    The last figure I heard that the Republicans wasted taxpayer money on pursuing Hillary Clinton was 40 million and that was somewhere near the beginning of the century. I think he was planning to make this his retirement career.

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