John Durham, the special counsel appointed by Trump Attorney General Bill Barr to investigate the origins and conduct of the Trump/Russia investigation, released his report Monday to near-universal agreement that it did not live up to the hype it received on the political right.
But on Tuesday morning’s edition of CNN News Central, Rodgers made no such qualification as she dismantled Durham’s report to anchor Sara Sidner, calling it “a whole big nothing” that did “nothing to undercut” the investigation of Trump:
SARA SIDNER: Republicans are running with this. They it’s all over their social media. It is all over some of the television sites. What is your big takeaway? Because you see this report and it’s 300 pages long. It cost millions of dollars to do. But there is any teeth to this. It doesn’t seem like it.
JENNIFER RODGERS: There’s nothing there, Sara. I mean, this is really a rehashing of what the DOJ inspector general found four years ago. I mean, there were some problems with the Crossfire Hurricane investigation. They were all documented by the DOJ inspector general. FBI changed policies in dozens of instances to account for those, and that’s it. But the core of the Mueller investigation, where they found that indeed Russia did interfere in the 2016 investigation, election, that Trump and his team welcomed that interference. And there were all sorts of connections involved between the campaign and Russia, multiple convictions coming out of the Mueller investigation. All of that still stands. This is nothing to undercut any of… This is a political opinion piece, effectively.