The Last Trusted Prosecutor in Washington
U.S. Attorney John Durham (United States Attorney's Office, District of Connecticut/Wikimedia)
John Durham is the legendary lawman digging into how the intelligence probe of Donald Trump started.
John Durham may be the most consequential and least known figure in Washington right now.
‘A Passion for Anonymity’
Former attorney general Michael Mukasey, who appointed Durham to investigate the destruction of videotapes of CIA waterboarding, says he was recently contacted by a reporter in Connecticut who wanted to write a profile on Durham, whom the reporter said he knew. “I called John to check the accuracy of that claim, and he confirmed that he knew the reporter but made it clear and specific that he had no use for personal profiles,” Mukasey said. “He thinks about the work, period — not about how it will be received in this or that quarter, or what caricatures people with a motive or a bias may draw of his work or of him. It is for that reason that I think he will be unaffected by the pressure of how his work will be received and how he will be portrayed — indeed, how some in the media have already started to portray him.” Mukasey said Durham reminded him of the title of Franklin Roosevelt adviser Louis Brownlow’s autobiography, A Passion for Anonymity.
“John is a consummate professional — he never discusses the particulars of a case with anyone who doesn’t need to know about it,” Sullivan said.
By 2000, Durham had built a reputation as one of the country’s best prosecutors, and he got the call from FBI director Louis Freeh and Attorney General Janet Reno to handle one of the Department of Justice’s most infamous cases: the claim that FBI agents had protected notorious Boston gangster Whitey Bulger, even as Bulger continued to commit violent crimes. This was a jaw-dropping tale of corruption that later inspired the film The Departed and was also dramatized in Black Mass.
Durham is a registered Republican, but there’s no indication that he even blinked at the prospect of taking down the most prominent GOP official in the state. His longtime colleague Sullivan said,
In his speech at University of St. Joseph, Durham did not discuss his investigation of the tapes, but he did discuss the prosecutor’s calculus of when charges are warranted, which likely applied in this decision. “You are only authorized to bring a prosecution if you believe, based upon the evidence that you have, that you are likely to be able to prove a case not to the probable cause standard, which is all that is required to arrest somebody, but if you believe you can prosecute the case and prove that case beyond a reasonable doubt, and beyond that, that you would be able to sustain that conviction on appeal,” Durham said. “And if you can’t say, in all honesty, that you would be able to do that, then prosecution is not warranted. When on the nightly news, you’re watching what Bob Mueller is doing, and so forth, however that investigation turns out, whatever Mr. Mueller and his colleague conclude, if it’s not satisfactory to the public, it may very well be because Bob Mueller is an honorable man who applies those principles of law as he’s been taught and as he’s taught to others.”
Asked whether he feels safe while prosecuting violent criminal originations, Durham replied, “I’m okay . . . personally, I don’t worry so much about like, the Mafia. I mean, there are some actual rules here. Speaking for myself, I’m not sure for a lot of other prosecutors, what you worry about is a person you don’t know about, somebody crazy. They’re not an obvious threat to you. One of my sons is a prosecutor, and he’s prosecuting these MS-13 people. That causes me some concern for him.”
John Durham’s career is full of big, high-stakes, politically charged cases, but this one is the biggest, highest-stakes, and most politically charged of all. Luckily, it seems like his whole life has prepared him for this moment.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/11/john-durham-last-trusted-prosecutor-in-washington/