By Brian Cates
On Monday, Dec. 14, Attorney General William Barr officially released a resignation letter he had written to President Trump.
In the letter, Barr had nothing but effusive praise for the President, and the President quickly tweeted out a public response in which he thanked Barr for his two years of service as the nation’s top law enforcement officer. Despite tensions being played up between the two men in the media, neither had a cross word to say about the other.
Rumors of a Barr resignation began swirling last week, but they were nothing new; every other month for the past year or so, corporate news stories based on anonymous officials familiar with the matter have appeared claiming Barr had finally had enough of the mercurial President and was looking for an exit.
Barr made it exceedingly clear in interviews that neither he nor Durham were rushing any of the current federal investigations to meet an election deadline. On Aug. 13, on the Sean Hannity program, in response to a question about the status of the Durham investigation, Barr said this:
". . . I have said there are going to be developments, significant developments, before the election. But we're not doing this on the election schedule. We're aware of the election. We're not going to do anything inappropriate before the election.
Now that it’s been confirmed that Hunter Biden is the subject of at least one federal investigation over tax records and purported money laundering, Barr was taking a lot of heat for not disclosing the investigation before the 2020 election was held.
How politically partisan would it have looked shortly before the election for the U.S. Attorney General to drop the bomb that the oldest surviving son of one of the candidates was the target of a federal criminal probe? For this reason, Barr waited until after the election.
Is Barr resigning because his biggest tasks have been accomplished?
It very well could be Barr’s biggest jobs were to end the Mueller Special Counsel while preparing to unveil the fact that the very public and very corrupt Mueller Special Counsel was being shadowed the entire time by a secret Special Counsel’s Office led by John Durham.
As I recently wrote for The Epoch Times, I strongly suspect Durham was leading a de facto Special Counsel’s Office in coordination with an extensive team of prosecutors and investigators that included the multiple attorneys from other states long before Barr publicly gave him the official designation.
And Barr’s official letter dated Oct. 19 made it crystal clear that a criminal investigation of the Mueller team of prosecutors is a big part of the Durham Special Counsel’s scope.
If that is indeed the case, now that those two main tasks are completed, Barr is making way for a new attorney general who will handle the prosecutions once Durham begins unsealing indictments.
Barr’s exit should also be looked at in the light of two stunning declassifications about Special Counsel John Durham and his Russiagate investigation that occurred back in October of this year. Unfortunately, the media instantly dismissed both important disclosures on both the Left and the Right. Within just a day or two, both explosive stories sank out of sight and out of mind.
The two declassifications dealt with when Durham actually began his Russiagate investigation, and the true origin of the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane probe of the Trump Presidential campaign during the 2016 election.
When did Durham really start investigating Spy-gate?
It’s assumed by many people that Durham rolled up his sleeves and began digging into the Spygate scandal in May of 2019 when Barr made the formal announcement that he was putting Durham in charge—nothing could be further from reality.
Initially, due to this scoop published by The Epoch Times’ Jeff Carlson, it was thought that Durham must have begun his Spygate investigations some time in 2018. It was as former FBI General Counsel James Baker was testifying to the House committees on the Judiciary and Oversight in October of 2018 that a question from the lawmakers about a Spygate leak involving Mother Jones reporter David Corn led to Baker’s lawyer Daniel Levin speaking up to stop that line of questioning.
Levin revealed to the panel that his client was currently under investigation by a U.S. Attorney named John Durham about that matter, and so he was instructing his client not to answer questions about that leak.
From May 2019 to October of 2020, the agreed-upon timeline was that Durham was assigned to investigate how the Russiagate hoax started sometime in 2018. But now we know, thanks to another declassification, the assumption that Durham started up sometime in 2018 is also wrong.
Documentary evidence has revealed Durham was already selected by then Attorney General Jeff Sessions to begin investigating Spygate-related leaks in April of 2017, less than three months after Trump was inaugurated as the nation’s 45th President.
Redacted text messages exchanged between former FBI officials (and lovers) Peter Strzok and Lisa Page were declassified by Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe last October so General Michael Flynn’s counsel, Sidney Powell, could use them in a court filing. The unredacted text messages clearly show Strzok and Page uneasily discussing Durham.
In one message, from April 12, 2017, Strzok informs Page that despite their hopes, a certain leak investigation would stay “in house” and be handled by the FBI’s National Security Division (NSD), and he had to deliver some “bad news.” Attorney General Jeff Sessions had given that investigation to John Durham instead.
The very next month, Strzok and Page again are seen in a text message exchange dated May 17, 2017 where Strzok first asks if he should continue to put off sitting down with “John D” for an interview.
Strzok followed up that message by sending another to Page where he stated his intention to continue delaying his interview with Durham.
Silent professionals
The entire time many conservative reporters, pundits, and personalities were loudly and angrily calling for the criminal leaks used to launch the Spygate scandal to be investigated by the DOJ, it had already happened.
And the name of the person in charge of investigating those leaks never became public until January of 2019. Beyond a few general remarks about ongoing leak investigations, Sessions never said one word about Durham having already started. This is amazing if you stop to think about how long Durham’s name was kept out of the public view.
Think about the rogues' gallery of professional leakers involved in Spygate. You have James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Peter Stzrok, John Brennan, and James Clapper, all of whom have a long history of coordinating leaks with corporate news allies. Factor in the Mueller Special Counsel team, which also leaked early and often, and yet somehow, they, too, never managed to leak Durham’s name.
How did the DOJ manage to keep a lid on when Durham began his leak investigations into Spygate for four years, even when there was a transition from Sessions to temporary AG Matthew Whitaker to William Barr?
This amazing feat, however was accomplished.
Now, likely years after the fact, Barr has publicly revealed that Durham has been running a new Special Counsel’s Office that has a widely expanded scope that includes targeting the Mueller Special Counsel.
Appointing a new Special Counsel’s Office to investigate the last Special Counsel’s Office is exactly the kind of plot twist we needed in the Spygate scandal.
Representative Devin Nunes of CA has made two specific claims for several years now:
- Crossfire Hurricane did not begin with a real intelligence predicate.
- The date given for the beginning of the FBI’s investigation of the Trump campaign for possible Russian collusion is not accurate. Nunes claims the targeting of the Trump campaign for a federal investigation started earlier than July 31, 2016, Crossfire’s official launch date.
The official story for going on four years, is that a conversation between low-level Trump campaign advisor George Papadopoulos and Australian diplomat Alexander Downer in a wine room in the United Kingdom was the trigger event for Crossfire.
This is not true, as it is now abundantly clear that the fake Steele dossier was utilized as the predicate, and the FBI was using Steele’s fabricated allegations well before July of 2016. But later on, the DOJ and FBI officials involved didn’t want to admit they’d based their unprecedented targeting of a presidential campaign on manufactured allegations being given to them by a political operative working for another campaign in the race.
So all the major players involved agreed on a cover story that Papadopoulos’ chat with Downer was the trigger for Crossfire, and that before July 31, 2016, there were no active investigations of the Trump campaign in progress.
A new declassification just dropped that proves there were multiple federal investigations of Trump and his campaign and his associates already underway before July 31, 2016.
The Spygate plotters have been proved yet again to be lying.
In these previously unseen text messages, Strzok discusses multiple counterintelligence investigations that had already been opened targeting “Trump/Russia” on July 28, 2016, which is three days before Crossfire officially launched. That leads to another important question: What other counterintelligence investigations were being run targeting the Trump campaign that we don’t know about yet?
Stay tuned, I have a gut feeling we’ll be finding out before long.
Brian Cates entered the political arena in March 2012, following the death of Andrew Breitbart. He is currently a political writer for The Epoch Times and UncoverDC. Brian is based in South Texas and is the author of: Nobody Asked For My Opinion . . . But Here it is Anyway!
Twitter: @drawandstrike
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