posted May 17, 2023 12:27 AM            

http://www.mediaite.com/news/a-whole-big-nothing-cnn-legal-expert-destroys-durham-report-hours-after-tapper-claimed-partial-exoneration-for-trump/

CNN Legal Analyst and former federal prosecutor Jennifer Rodgers torpedoed the Durham Report as “a whole big nothing” hours after CNN anchor Jake Tapper called it a partial “exoneration” for ex-President Donald Trump.

John Durham, the special counsel appointed by Trump Attorney General Bill Barr to investigate the origins and conduct of the Trump/Russia investigation, released his report Monday to near-universal agreement that it did not live up to the hype it received on the political right.

That includes Tapper, who said as much on Monday afternoon’s edition of CNN’s The Lead, but also said the report was “devastating to the FBI, and to a degree it does exonerate Donald Trump.”

But on Tuesday morning’s edition of CNN News Central, Rodgers made no such qualification as she dismantled Durham’s report to anchor Sara Sidner, calling it “a whole big nothing” that did “nothing to undercut” the investigation of Trump:

SARA SIDNER: Republicans are running with this. They it’s all over their social media. It is all over some of the television sites. What is your big takeaway? Because you see this report and it’s 300 pages long. It cost millions of dollars to do. But there is any teeth to this. It doesn’t seem like it.

JENNIFER RODGERS: There’s nothing there, Sara. I mean, this is really a rehashing of what the DOJ inspector general found four years ago. I mean, there were some problems with the Crossfire Hurricane investigation. They were all documented by the DOJ inspector general. FBI changed policies in dozens of instances to account for those, and that’s it. But the core of the Mueller investigation, where they found that indeed Russia did interfere in the 2016 investigation, election, that Trump and his team welcomed that interference. And there were all sorts of connections involved between the campaign and Russia, multiple convictions coming out of the Mueller investigation. All of that still stands. This is nothing to undercut any of… This is a political opinion piece, effectively.

SARA SIDNER: That’s what I was going to ask you, because Durham did not recommend any new charges against individuals, which was the thing that was the drumbeat that you were hearing from Donald Trump, is that all these people are going to go to jail for conspiring against him. Not one?

JENNIFER RODGERS: Yes. So this is the deep state conspiracy, right? The FBI was out to get him. They wanted to help Hillary Clinton, although apparently didn’t do it very well, because, of course, she lost. This was the whole thing. Multiple people at the highest reaches of the FBI were going to go to prison. Right. Well, no one went to prison. Two people were charged as a result of Durham’s work. They were both acquitted at trial. This was a whole big nothing! They did not prove this deep state conspiracy because it never existed in the first place.

SARA SIDNER: All right. You’re calling this a nothing-burger. I do want to ask you about one specific part of this where Durham said, look, I don’t think there should have been a full-scale investigation, but a preliminary investigation. Would that have led to a full scale investigation? Because if you look at some of the connections that would have prompted the FBI to say, hey, we need to look into this fully.

JENNIFER RODGERS: Exactly. I mean, that’s a big admission on Durham’s part, the fact that he conceded that a preliminary investigation was appropriate to start. And by the way, you’re exactly right. It would have immediately converted into a full investigation anyway. It doesn’t take a lot to get there for the FBI. And they immediately started uncovering all of these questionable contacts between the Russians and the Trump folks. I mean, there was a lot of meat there. You can read about it in the Mueller report. So it would have quickly turned into that. That’s another reason why this whole report really discloses absolutely nothing new.

SARA SIDNER: The Mueller report, you know, to be clear, said, look, they couldn’t find a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia, that they were working together to try and do this. But it did say, look, we also couldn’t necessarily see that maybe there were some, I don’t know, some malfeasance there? And but there were 34 people plus that were indicted in the Mueller report. Nine of them either pled guilty or were convicted. In this case, no one has spent any jail time, correct?

JENNIFER RODGERS: Correct. Correct. There was one conviction. It came from the inspector general office investigation, which was handed over to the Durham team, was a mid-level lawyer at the FBI who had altered an email. He pled guilty, no jail time. The two cases they developed themselves were lost at trial.

SARA SIDNER: All right. It’s really interesting because it is being used very strongly by the Republican Party to say, hey, there was nothing there. This should never have happened. But that’s not exactly what the report said, is it?

JENNIFER RODGERS: People need to know the facts. I mean, you can get caught up in all of this disinformation. That’s what they’re continuing to try to do. That’s one of the reasons this dragged out for so long. So they could continue to use this as a drumbeat on the political trail.