Prosecutor Quits Over Alleged Pressure to Produce Hurried Report for Trump

Bill Barr, officially the worst attorney general in history, steps off Air Force One after a nice long chat with his buddy, Donald Trump.Dominic Gwinn/ZUMA

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As you know, Donald Trump is still hellbent on proving that the Obama administration “spied” on him. To accomplish this, Attorney General William Barr asked John Durham, the US attorney in Connecticut, to begin an investigation. Durham has been plugging away for the past year, but apparently isn’t anywhere near finishing. This is unacceptable, of course, since there’s an election coming up and Trump wants some dirt to use. So apparently pressure is being applied:

Federal prosecutor Nora Dannehy, a top aide to U.S. Attorney John H. Durham in his Russia investigation, has quietly resigned from the U.S. Justice Department probe — at least partly out of concern that the investigative team is being pressed for political reasons to produce a report before its work is done, colleagues said.

Dannehy, a highly regarded prosecutor who has worked with or for Durham for decades, informed colleagues in the U.S. Attorney’s office in New Haven of her resignation from the Department of Justice by email Thursday evening….Colleagues said Dannehy is not a supporter of President Donald J. Trump and has been concerned in recent weeks by what she believed was pressure from Barr — who appointed Durham — to produce results before the election. They said she has been considering resignation for weeks, conflicted by loyalty to Durham and concern about politics.

Well, perhaps Trump will have to be satisfied with a “leak” of parts of the investigation. Or something.

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In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

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