It didn’t matter how bad the Durham report would make the Russia-collusion hoaxers look. The same people who spent years peddling the conspiracy of Trump-Russia collusion were always going to dismiss the findings.
On Monday, Special Counsel John Durham released the findings of a two-and-a-half-year investigation into the origins of the scandal wherein deep-state FBI officials sought to frame President Donald Trump as an agent of the Kremlin. Then-Attorney General William Barr ordered the probe in December 2020.
The report found “neither U.S. law enforcement nor the Intelligence Community appears to have possessed any actual evidence of collusion in their holdings at the commencement of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation.”
The New York Times, however, which itself was indicted by the report as a culprit of fake news, immediately brushed off the findings as a nothingburger.
“Mr. Durham’s 306-page report appeared to show little substantial new information about the F.B.I.’s handling of the Russia investigation, known as Crossfire Hurricane, and it failed to produce the kinds of blockbuster revelations impugning the bureau that former President Donald J. Trump and his allies had once suggested that Mr. Durham would find,” the Times reported.
[READ: Durham Report Finds New York Times Peddled Fake News Claiming Trump-Russia Collusion]
Network television hosts were also quick to dismiss the special counsel’s conclusions.
MSNBC’s Andrew Weissman claimed Durham published a “big fat nothing.”
“There’s no there, there,” Weissman said.
MSNBC host Nicole Wallace, meanwhile, called not the Russia-collusion hoax itself a “conspiracy” but instead gave the label to Durham.
Former FBI assistant director for counterintelligence and current MSNBC contributor Frank Figliuzzi told Wallace that Attorney General Barr “weaponized” Durham to produce a “tainted document.”
MSNBC’s Ari Melber described the Durham report as “a lengthy op-ed.”
Over at CNN, the network’s lead cheerleaders for the years-long Russia-collusion hoax, Jim Sciutto and Brianna Keilar, sought to outline weaknesses in the Durham investigation. Sciutto described the time that Trump was attacked as a Russian agent as one of a “great deal of excitement.”
Other network guests were quick to follow suit.
The Washington Post’s Philip Bump claimed the report underdelivered for critics of the collusion conspiracy.
