Speaking of corruption

Adam Goldman was part of a team of New York Times journalists that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for national reporting on the Russia hoax. Goldman and his Times colleagues promoted the hoax. They and their sources seemed not to notice that the Steele Dossier was a farce on its face and the FBI’s Russia collusion investigation something worse. The Times was itself a key player in the hoax. Following the release of the Durham report last week, Brian Flood looked back at the Times’s Pulitzer winning Russia hoax coverage for Fox News.

In what must be the single worst story on the Durham report, the Times’s Charlie Savage reported “After Years of Political Hype, the Durham Inquiry Failed to Deliver.” Goldman’s story reflects a certain level of detachment from reality that is a fitting companion to the Russia hoax. Suffice it to say that Goldman and his Times colleagues are not inclined to introspection.

Since promoting the Russia hoax Goldman has moved on to help his friends at the FBI humiliate James O’Keefe in the matter of Ashley Biden’s diary. See my series of posts on “The O’Keefe Project.” Goldman has proved himself instrumental to the FBI in its persecution of O’Keefe. The FBI’s leaking to Goldman makes for another point in favor of tearing the institution down and starting over, but that’s not what Goldman makes of it.

Goldman now reports that the “Justice Dept. Investigated Clinton Foundation Until Trump’s Final Days.” The story is little more than a sidebar to the Times’s shoddy story on the Durham report. Durham contrasted the FBI’s kid-glove treatment of Hillary Clinton with its efforts to compromise Donald Trump in the Russia hoax.

Goldman pushes back. Here are the opening paragraphs of his story (note that the linked FBI documents are heavily redacted):

The Justice Department kept open the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s family foundation for nearly all of President Donald J. Trump’s administration, with prosecutors closing the case without charges just days before he left office.

Newly released documents and interviews with former department officials show that the investigation stretched long past when F.B.I. agents and prosecutors knew it was a dead end. The conclusion of the case, which centered on the Clinton Foundation’s dealings with foreign donors when Mrs. Clinton served as secretary of state under President Barack Obama, has not previously been reported.

Mr. Trump, who campaigned on a promise to “lock her up,” spent much of his four-year term pressuring the F.B.I. and the Justice Department to target political rivals. After being accused by the president’s allies of serving as part of a deep-state cabal working against him, F.B.I. officials insisted that the department acknowledge in writing that there was no case to bring.

The closing documents, which were obtained by The New York Times as part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, spelled the end to an investigation that top prosecutors had expressed doubts about from the beginning. Still, it became a rallying cry for Republicans who believed the F.B.I. would ultimately turn up evidence of corruption and damage Mrs. Clinton’s political fortunes.

Goldman’s story fastens on Peter Schweizer ‘s Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich. With a proclivity to the MSM’s preferred cliché in cases of apparent wrongdoing by figures it favors, Goldman writes: “Republicans seized on the accusations in Mr. Schweizer’s book, accusing Mrs. Clinton of supporting the interests of foundation donors as part of a quid pro quo.”

Goldman’s story is virtually devoid of facts. Who gave what and how much goes missing, as does the basis of Mrs. Clinton’s absolution.

And then there is this, some translation required:

Andrew G. McCabe, then the F.B.I.’s deputy director, was accused of leaking information about the case to a Wall Street Journal reporter and later lying about it to the Justice Department’s inspector general. The episode helped prompt his dismissal in 2018 and a failed effort by the department to prosecute him.

Translation: McCabe leaked information about the case to the Wall Street Journal and lied about it. McCabe ultimately “apologized for lying to agents who spent weeks investigating the source of a leak to the Wall Street Journal that actually came from him, new documents reveal.” By the way, lying to the FBI is a crime. Nevertheless, McCabe was not prosecuted for his misconduct. The Department of Justice declined to prosecute. In Goldman’s telling, that is “a failed effort.”

Goldman’s story does not relate a single fact that Peter Schweizer got wrong. As I read Peter’s books, the point is that much of the corruption he has uncovered is legal, as may be the case with foreign payments to the Bidens in the Biden family business — also uncovered by Peter. Given the vacuity of Goldman’s story today, this seems to be his tacit point.

Goldman’s story concludes on this note:

“All of the evidence obtained during the course of this investigation has been returned or otherwise destroyed,” according to the F.B.I.

Goldman doesn’t state whether this is standard operating procedure. According to the FBI’s response to frequently asked questions, the answer is negative.