The administrative review into Russia’s 2016 election meddling, helmed by prosecutor John H. Durham, is now a criminal investigation. The New York Times is quite unhappy about this.

The article immediately leads off with the overt inference that this will allow Trump to weaponize the DOJ even more than he already has.

“”Justice Department officials have shifted an administrative review of the Russia investigation closely overseen by Attorney General William P. Barr to a criminal inquiry, according to two people familiar with the matter. The move gives the prosecutor running it, John H. Durham, the power to subpoena for witness testimony and documents, to impanel a grand jury and to file criminal charges.

The opening of a criminal investigation is likely to raise alarms that Mr. Trump is using the Justice Department to go after his perceived enemies. Mr. Trump fired James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director under whose watch agents opened the Russia inquiry, and has long assailed other top former law enforcement and intelligence officials as partisans who sought to block his election.””

Did you catch that? The NY Times is here to tell you that this absolutely means Trump will go after James Comey, John Brennan, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, Nellie & Bruce Ohr, and others. Heck, maybe that means Trump will go after those NY Times reporters who willingly and happily wrote stories sourced from those vast “unnamed sources” they’ve used repeatedly since November 10, 2016.

I really had to laugh at the NY Time’s claim that the DOJ has always been independent until Trump came along. It was FINE when Obama weaponized the DOJ to go after reporters, enable and sweep under the rug their role in ‘Fast and Furious,’ and Loretta Lynch with her shenanigans that included a problematic meeting on the tarmac with Bill Clinton.

But turning a somewhat toothless administrative probe into Russia election meddling and the Steele Dossier into a criminal probe? THIS MUST NOT STAND BECAUSE ORANGE MAN BAD!!

First of all, Hillary’s issues with emails and her issues with her credibility WERE a factor in her losing the election. Secondly, she lost because she was a hideously awful candidate.

But hey!! Russia is still doing stuff here in the US because and for Trump! Which means, according to Rachel Maddow and the NY Times last night, Russia is still interfering and the Steele Dossier was right ..somehow!

Maybe what they are afraid of is finding out that the Crossfire Hurricane probe wasn’t the start of the DOJ and FBI being weaponized against Trump. 

“So, if Crossfire Hurricane was the only investigation launched by FBI headquarters, who initiated the earlier investigation? There must have been one if the FBI used Halper as confidential human source to obtain information in mid-July from Carter Page, because that reach-out occurred before the launch of Crossfire Hurricane. The guide only allows limited pre-assessment activities, such as: accessing public information, records or information, online services or resources; conducting a voluntary clarifying interview; or accepting information already known from an existing confidential human source.

Here, Page’s testimony proves informative: When asked how the FBI headquarters obtained a copy of the dossier, Page stated the dossier “came from Christopher Steele through his [FBI] handler” to the FBI headquarters. We know from Bruce Ohr’s testimony that Steele handed his memos to Mike Gaeta, an FBI agent out of the New York field office, then stationed in Rome. Ohr also suggested Gaeta may have served as Steele’s handler.”

The NY Times isn’t the only one who is less than thrilled with this.

https://twitter.com/Amy_Siskind/status/1187523423930638337?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1187523423930638337&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Flegalinsurrection.com%2F2019%2F10%2Fdoj-reportedly-opens-criminal-inquiry-into-doj-russia-collusion-investigation-of-trump%2F

The gaslighting begins… https://t.co/tGLsJxYLoc

— Ben Rhodes (@brhodes) October 25, 2019

Gaslighting?? Wow. Meanwhile everything is ‘alleged’ thus we should believe this new investigation is a nothing burger.

NBC News confirms: John Durham’s investigation into the origins of the Russia probe has become a criminal investigation. It’s unclear when it changed from an administrative review or what alleged crimes they are investigating. @JuliaEAinsley

— Ken Dilanian (@KenDilanianNBC) October 25, 2019

Problem is, all the usual suspects including NY times, Ken Dilanian, Ben Rhodes, etc were 100% sure and certain that the Mueller Investigation would be the supreme GOTCHA against Trump. When it didn’t happen they inferred that Trump somehow bought off Mueller.

Now that there is an official criminal probe into the DOJ/FBI Russia investigation and the Steele Dossier, watch the media and Obama era political wonks work overtime figuring out how to spin this into Trump being obsessed with the Obama officials who didn’t like him. Oh wait… the spin has already started. Will Spin step B involve invoking Putin as Trump’s puppet? It could happen.

You know the old saying, where there is smoke there is fire? The new one is, the more they spin, the more they have to hide.

Feature Photo Credit: Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead via Flickr, cropped and modified