Rachel Maddow took on the Republican Party’s “long-awaited” release of the so-called Durham Report — a Trump-era special counsel appointment meant to dismantle the FBI’s investigation into the 2016 presidential campaign’s links to Russia.
Finally released on Monday, Maddow (and most other non-conservative media) reported that its findings were ultimately a letdown.
“The long-awaited what? Well, the reason we’re watching for the Right and their reaction to this is because the Durham Report is only really ‘long-awaited’ by them. And they really, really have been awaiting this report,” Maddow said in her intro to the topic Monday night, later adding that the GOP finds itself in a ceaseless “hype-letdown cycle” and the report was just “a rehash of stuff we already knew.”
Durham was appointed as a special counsel by Trump attorney general Bill Barr, given the assignment to, after Russia launched its operation to intervene in the U.S. presidential election in 2016 to try and help Trump win, “prove in this investigation that the FBI was wrong to have investigated whether the Trump campaign itself was connected to what Russia was doing,” Maddow said.
For four years, the “supposed bombshell findings were always tantalizingly close,” she continued. “The damning evidence was going to come any day. It has really never worked out the way they hoped.”
Even the AP’s coverage of the report Monday concluded the results were “underwhelming.”
“The report Monday from special counsel John Durham represents the long-awaited culmination of an investigation that Trump and allies had claimed would expose massive wrongdoing by law enforcement and intelligence officials. Instead, Durham’s investigation delivered underwhelming results, with prosecutors securing a guilty plea from a little-known FBI employee but losing the only two criminal cases they took to trial,” the AP wrote.
Maddow pulled up said coverage before emphasizing that there is “no new evidence that they actually did anything wrong,” despite the years-long buildup, striking it as just the latest example of how Trump allies’ efforts to prove left-wing and institutional wrongdoing fall flat.
“And so it is worth keeping an eye on the reaction to this report today on the Right because who knows how they’re going to react,” Maddow said. “They do seem kind of trapped in this hype-letdown, hype-letdown cycle.”
Watch Maddow’s full Monday night report in the video above.
