As if the heat hasn’t been turned up enough on Donald Trump lately, things are about to heat up even more. It’s difficult to imagine the thermometer rising any higher than it already has, but somehow, some way, someone is causing havoc behind the scenes that threatens to put Mr. Trump from the fire pan directly into the fire.
As per Esquire, Remember the Durham Investigation? It was attempting to prove that the former president Trump was more lied against than he was lying, and more abused than the abuser. It was the Grail Quest for Trumplings, large and small. It was going to be an icepick to the eye of the Deep State. It was going to make the crooked places straight, break in pieces the gates of brass, and sunder the bars of iron.
It was going to be Big Casino, is what it was going to be.
It has turned out to be a striptease by a phantasm. In the end there seems to have been nothing there. However! We now learn that the investigation contains an episode that found Durham comically on the verge of turning his mandate on its head. From The New York Times:
Mr. Barr and Mr. Durham never disclosed that their inquiry expanded in the fall of 2019, based on a tip from Italian officials, to include a criminal investigation into suspicious financial dealings related to Mr. Trump. The specifics of the tip and how they handled the investigation remain unclear, but Mr. Durham brought no charges over it[…]On one of Mr. Barr and Mr. Durham’s trips to Europe, according to people familiar with the matter, Italian officials — while denying any role in setting off the Russia investigation — unexpectedly offered a potentially explosive tip linking Mr. Trump to certain suspected financial crimes. Mr. Barr and Mr. Durham decided that the tip was too serious and credible to ignore. But rather than assign it to another prosecutor, Mr. Barr had Mr. Durham investigate the matter himself — giving him criminal prosecution powers for the first time — even though the possible wrongdoing by Mr. Trump did not fall squarely within Mr. Durham’s assignment to scrutinize the origins of the Russia inquiry, the people said.
