On Wednesday, America was treated to the incredible spectacle of House Republicans attacking John Durham. The peak moment of that event may have been when Rep. Matt Gaetz, whose own experience comes mainly in the form of being the subject of investigations, told the veteran prosecutor that he didn’t know how to conduct an investigation.
Durham has served as either a U.S. attorney or assistant U.S. attorney for longer than Gaetz has been alive. He spent nearly a decade chasing down mobsters at the head of the Justice Department’s Organized Crime and Racketeering Section. The whole reason Durham was picked by William Barr to find some dirt on the investigation into Donald Trump’s Russia connections was his long experience revealing corruption and extortion within the FBI and Department of Justice. It was Durham who caught the FBI using false information and the arm-twisting of a judge to gain convictions on a whole series of suspected Mafia hit men, leading to the families of those men winning a $101 million lawsuit against the government.
For more than three and a half years, Durham was the hero of the American right. He was held up by Republicans as the guy who was going to defend Trump, reveal the deep state, and get to the truth, damn it. Now Durham is a pariah among the same people who couldn’t stop cheering him just months ago. But he shouldn’t take it personally. No prosecutor is going to please Republicans like Gaetz. Not if that prosecutor relies on things like evidence and facts.