This is what professionals do!
Nora Dannehy, top aide to John Durham’s Trump-Russia investigation, quietly resigns amid concern about pressure from Attorney General William Barr https://t.co/uablnX5lS1
— Bradley P. Moss (@BradMossEsq) September 11, 2020
From The Hartford Courant (emphasis mine):
Federal prosecutor Nora Dannehy, a top aide to U.S. Attorney John H. Durham in his Russia investigation, has quietly resigned – at least partly out of concern that the investigative team is being pressed for political reasons to produce a report before its work is done, colleagues said.
Dannehy, a highly regarded prosecutor who has worked with or for Durham for decades, informed colleagues in the U.S. Attorney’s office in New Haven of her resignation from the Department of Justice by email Thursday evening. The short email was a brief farewell message and said nothing about political pressure, her work for Durham or what the Durham team has produced, according to people who received it.
Durham, who has never even acknowledged that Dannehy was in Washington working for him, had no immediate comment on the resignation.
Durham recruited Dannehy to join his team after he was appointed by Attorney General William Barr more than a year and a half ago to examine the the FBI’s legal justification for a disputed counterintelligence investigation that looked for ties between President Donald J. Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russian efforts to meddle in the election.
Dannehy is a career prosecutor who worked closely with Durham before leaving the U.S. Attorney’s office about a decade ago for a corporate position in the defense industry. Durham persuaded her to return to the justice department and, within weeks, join his team in Washington in the spring of 2019.
Colleagues said Dannehy is not a supporter of President Donald J. Trump and has been concerned in recent weeks by what she believed was pressure from Barr – who appointed Durham – to produce results before the election. They said she has been considering resignation for weeks, conflicted by loyalty to Durham and concern about politics.
Durham is notoriously circumspect and neither he nor members of his team have revealed anything about the direction of their work. But Durham associates, none of whom have specific knowledge of the investigation, have said recently that it is their belief he is under pressure to produce something – perhaps some sort of report – before the presidential election in November.
The thinking of the associates, all Durham allies, is that the Russia investigation group will be disbanded and its work lost if Trump loses.
More at the link.
We already know, from the findings in the fifth and final volume of the Republican majority Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s (SSCI) investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election that the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which shares oversight of the US Intelligence Community (IC) with the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI), has concluded that the US Intelligence Community, the DOJ, and the FBI acted reasonably and responsibly and that there was sufficient predicate to open the investigations into what Russia was doing and whether the President, his campaign, his campaign manager Paul Manafort, his business, members of his family involved in both the campaign and the business, and several outside senior advisors to the President during the campaign were somehow compromised by Russia during the 2016 campaign.
The SSCI’s conclusions tells us, if anyone had a question about it, that AG Barr is on a snipe hunt to try to produce an October Surprise to help the President get reelected. We also know that the conspiracy theory that AG Barr’s basis, his predicate for creating Durham’s investigation, is partially rooted in the debunked conspiracy theory that Secretary Clinton and her campaign, in conjunction with the Obama administration and senior Obama administration officials – VP Biden, APNSA Rice, AG Lynch, FBI Director Comey, DNI Clapper, DCI Brennan, and others – were conspiring with the Ukrainian government to interfere in the election to harm the President and his campaign and to blame it on Russia by creating a hoax that Putin was interfering on behalf of the President’s campaign. The fifth volume of the SSCI’s investigation report into Russian active measures and the 2016 election states unequivocally that this conspiracy was created by the Russian Intelligence Services and provided to Paul Manafort by his GRU handler, Konstantin Kilimnik, and that Manafort than provided it to the President and many of his senior appointees, aides, and surrogates. Moreover, we now know that the person responsible for pushing this conspiracy theory right now has been designated as a Russian intelligence officer who has been running the President’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, as usefully idiotic asset!
Now we wait to see what the effect of Deputy US Attorney Dannehy’s resignation has. This is definitely a brush back pitch. Whether it actually changes AG Barr’s behavior is something we’ll have to wait to see. AG Barr has made it clear that he doesn’t feel that the DOJ’s rules regarding releasing information that could affect an election within 60 days of an election. Dannehy’s resignation is a warning shot. Now we have to wait and see if Barr receives the message.
Open thread!
