George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley ripped into The Washington Post over a post-Durham defense of the Trump/Russia collusion narrative, accusing the author of reaching a “new level of denial.”
Turley referenced a new column from WaPo’s national correspondent Philip Bump – titled “There’s now even less reason to blame Clinton for the Russia probe” — and argued that it was one last attempt to spin away the conclusions laid out in Inspector General John Durham’s final report on the FBI’s investigation into former President Donald Trump’s alleged ties to Russia.
“With the release to the Durham report, the media went into total spin mode,” Turley tweeted. “However, the Washington Post (which won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting on the Russian collusion) set a new level of denial with a column by Philip Bump …”
…Bump not only quotes Hillary Clinton on how the allegations against her campaign is possible "Russian disinformation," Bump actually makes one last pitch that there might have been Russian collusion after all.
— Jonathan Turley (@JonathanTurley) May 18, 2023
“Bump not only quotes Hillary Clinton on how the allegations against her campaign is possible ‘Russian disinformation,’ Bump actually makes one last pitch that there might have been Russian collusion after all.”
The Durham report found a number of irregularities in the way that the FBI began the investigation into Trump — named Crossfire Hurricane — and concluded that the entire basis for the inquiry had been based on the Steele dossier, the contents of which the FBI had never independently verified.
“The matter was opened as a full investigation without ever having spoken to the persons who provided the information. Further, the FBI did so without (i) any significant review of its own intelligence databases, (ii) collection and examination of any relevant intelligence from other U.S. intelligence entities, (iii) interviews of witnesses essential to understand the raw information it had received or (iv) using any of the standard analytical tools typically employed by the FBI in evaluating raw intelligence,” the report stated.
Still, Bump’s overall conclusion in his Wednesday column was that Russian collusion on the part of Trump and his allies was not only possible, but likely.
“There’s an alternative way to consider the Russia probe: that Russia hoped Trump would win, that Trump was happy to have their help and that federal counterintelligence officials saw that as problematic,” he wrote. “This appears to be what actually happened.”