John Durham, the special counsel investigating aspects of the 2016 election, made a court filing on Friday with the ho-hum title of "Government's motion to inquire into potential conflicts of interest." The Washington Examiner has some coverage, headlined "Durham says Democrat-allied tech executive spied on Trump's White House office," that gets at the key point in the case. The Examiner article also has embedded the pdf of the Durham filing.
The case is a prosecution against the general counsel to Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign, Michael A. Sussman. The Examiner article explains:
The Alfa Bank allegations began to emerge publicly in the closing weeks of the 2016 election. On Oct. 31 of that year, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton tweeted: "Computer scientists have apparently uncovered a covert server linking the Trump Organization to a Russian-based bank." Clinton also shared a lengthy statement from Clinton campaign adviser Jake Sullivan, now President Joe Biden's national security adviser, who claimed that "this secret hotline may be the key to unlocking the mystery of Trump's ties to Russia."
The staffs of the New York Times and Washington Post won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for "deeply sourced, relentlessly reported coverage in the public interest that dramatically furthered the nation's understanding of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and its connections to the Trump campaign, the President-elect's transition team and his eventual administration." This reflects the Democratic and mainstream media narrative about the 2016 election.
What Durham's filing suggests is that the real story of the 2016 election may be less Russian interference and more a Clinton campaign effort groundlessly to smear the Trump campaign, an effort that continued into the Trump presidency and involved somehow monitoring the White House phone system.
My view of it is that Republicans and Independents should focus on the 2022 and 2024 elections, not the 2020 or 2016 ones. The "crime" with which Sussman is charged, making a false statement to the FBI, is one that is easy for prosecutors to abuse.
Even so, though, it's a good reminder that the time-span for judging Pulitzer entries is often too short to measure how well the coverage represents the truth. I've often thought there should be a journalism prize awarded a decade later, to see how the coverage holds up long term. It's similar, in investing, to looking at a fund or index or manager's one-year performance versus their ten-year or lifetime or since-inception performance.
