It’s kinda funny to read ShadowFacts’s linked article in tandem with the OP’s various assertions in this thread. Bonus points for switching to “Narrator Voice:” to read the article clips in.
Btw, I’m impressed with how several posters in this thread tracked the key legal analyses as the events were unfolding in real time. If I had read everything posted or linked in this thread carefully enough and had the legal background to understand it, I could practically have written that NYT article myself. [hat tip]
There’s a bunch of posts in this thread that are hilarious in retrospect.
The Trump team did take those (obviously false) things that Durham was implying and sued Joffe along with a bunch of other people. As we covered in this thread, that lawsuit was dismissed harshly, and trump’s lawyers are now paying for Joffe’s legal fees due to sanctions ordered in blistering terms.
I’ll quote Judge Middlebrooks one more time because it’s hilarious.
This case should never have been brought. Its inadequacy as a legal claim was evident from the start. No reasonable lawyer would have filed it. Intended for a political purpose, none of the counts of the amended complaint stated a cognizable legal claim.
If I were the judge, I would have ordered that Trump’s lawyers must put this phrase directly on their CV’s when applying for jobs or meeting new clients.
There is an OPINION piece in the NY Times today that discusses and contextualizes the findings from the Times’ reporting on Barr and Durham. I’ll gift link it here for those interested. Some choice moments:
Regarding his supposed “turnaround” on Trump:
Former Attorney General William Barr has spent the last year in a desperate salvage operation for what’s left of his legal and ethical reputation. During his 22 months in office, he allowed his Justice Department to become a personal protection racket for his boss, Donald Trump, and left prosecutors, the F.B.I. and other law enforcement officials subject to the worst impulses of the president. But then, in his 2022 memoir, Mr. Barr did an about-face, bashing Mr. Trump for lacking a presidential temperament and singling out his “self-indulgence and lack of self-control.”
The hollow and self-serving nature of this turnabout was always apparent. Mr. Barr never made these concerns public at a time when his dissent would have made a difference. Instead, he left office in 2020 showering compliments on his boss, praising Mr. Trump’s “unprecedented achievements” and promising that Justice would continue to pursue claims of voter fraud that he must have known were baseless.
Regarding the Durham investigation specifically:
Attorneys general are not supposed to interfere in a special counsel’s investigation. The whole point of the system is to isolate the prosecution of sensitive cases from the appearance of political meddling. But the new Times reporting shows that Mr. Barr did the opposite, regularly meeting with Mr. Durham to discuss his progress and advocating on his behalf with intelligence officials when they were unable to come up with the nonexistent proof Mr. Barr wanted to see.
The Durham investigation, of course, has never presented any evidence that the F.B.I. or intelligence agencies committed any misconduct in the course of the Russia investigation, bitterly disappointing Mr. Barr and especially his patron, Mr. Trump, who had assured his supporters for months that it would produce something big.
At least under Mueller’s appointment, he was clearly directed to regularly update the Attorney General (or Rosenstein, since the AG had recused). It’s not unusual for the two to meet, at regularly scheduled intervals. Whether that should be or not, I couldn’t say, but it isn’t unusual.
Likewise, if Durham needs something from the CIA and the CIA is being non-cooperative, then it would not be strange for him to request that the AG intercede on his behalf.
It may be that Barr and Durham were being overly chummy and viewing their mission with rose-tinted goggles, but that’s a separate matter from a special counsel meeting with his boss for various reasons.
No, this was a hugely exceptional situation between Barr and Durham. It’s not a misleading quote. Please point to any other special counsel who met regularly with their AG or their designee during their investigation(s). I’ll save you some time: They never did.
And while AG Garland has reserved the right – as Barr did, for the first time ever, so far as I know – to make any final charging decisions, that’s a far cry from meeting “at regularly scheduled intervals” with Jack Smith.
If you’ve got a cite to the contrary, I’d love to see it.
Not only is not an issue for me, he’s one of the few YouTube commentators that speaks quickly enough for me. Most videos are slow and draw things out. Devin gets out the info in a quick and punchy way that doesn’t make me want to stop watching.
Note… I know I’m weird. My brain processes things in an odd way. I have trouble with videos that explain things because my mind needs it faster. I also struggle heavily with instructor-led training (and suffered in school because of it). That’s why I usually like reading; my brain can input as fast as it needs to. To me, Devin is normal speed and everything else is slo mo.
I dunno if we’re weird, but I’m one who regularly speeds up any video that’s trying to explain something to me (thankfully most training videos at work have this option). I’m also someone who thinks “Oh yeah, so I can listen to you wander around while you figure out what the meat of the problem actually is!” when my co-worker wants to have a call about something, Sometimes the process of having a call is actually a benefit, but it often would have been better served by the other party actually thinking through what their question was and sending me a chat message about it.
We used to have a position designated as Programmer of the Day (POD) who would do nothing but help people with problems during that day (the senior level programmers rotated through it). I told one of them once that I liked to go to them because if I started explaining my problem, halfway through the explanation I’d figure out the solution. Sometimes you just need an ear.
Many programmers have had the experience of explaining a problem to someone else, possibly even to someone who knows nothing about programming, and then hitting upon the solution in the process of explaining the problem. In describing what the code is supposed to do and observing what it actually does, any incongruity between these two becomes apparent.
