On MSNBC’s The Weeknight, Angelo Carusone explains how it’s in Sean Hannity’s best interest to ignore new Durham developments

MICHAEL STEELE (CO-HOST): For me, Angelo, you know, this is just an ongoing drip, drip, drip, drip story about another prosecutor who refuses to bend to Trump’s will or is fired for that. And, my question as the lawyers kind of jockey and try to figure out, will I or won’t I, how does this play in the orbits that you’re in? I mean, when you’re thinking about the array of storylines that are out there, my belief or at least my assessment is this doesn’t land the way some other stories land. And I’m very — but its — as Ankush can tell us — it’s a critically important part of the overarching story because as the lawyers go, so at this stage goes the country, right? So, how do you assess that piece — okay, the narrative around the inability to get a lawyer to sign on, and how do the American people and those in the spaces that you’re operating look at this?

ANGELO CARUSONE (GUEST): So, a couple of things about that. One, it’s worth considering and you mentioned Durham and I’m glad you did because it may not be common knowledge for most people in America, but for the right-wing media, the audience that you’re talking about, Durham is a name they know because he, you know, for him, he was heralded for two years as if he had won the war on Christmas for conservatives. I mean, he was going to be the guy that came in and put all these people in jail, from Barack Obama to Hillary Clinton to James Comey. They heard relentlessly, if you listen to talk radio or Fox News that it was coming, that his special prosecutor, he was going to do this investigation, it was all going to be exposed.

And at the end of the day, nothing happened, especially to the people they cared the most about. So, they’ve been down this road before and they don’t want to get excited and lose again. They’ve lost a lot of confidence. They still want spite and revenge against these figures, but there’s nothing new here for them. You know, this is the same old con. And I think the best example of that is that you don’t see people like Fox or Sean Hannity hyping this. You know who the biggest voices on this are? Gateway Pundit and a Twitter account called Pepe Lives Matter. They are the right-wing media influencers that are driving this. I mean, that’s nonsense. That shows you where it fits in the ecosystem. They want something different. Now, they’ll get excited about the indictment of Comey, right? Because there’s a small blip of schadenfreude, but they’re not following this as closely as the other developments are. And when he does these things, like demonstrate that he’s going after the New York Attorney General and there’s new reporting that there’s nothing there, it makes them feel like he’s just stringing them along.

And remember, this is taking place in the context where all this Epstein stuff is in the background. So, people say you’re doing all that, but you’re not doing anything about Epstein? So, in a weird way, every time he takes one of these efforts to use the justice system and he says it’s about getting revenge, they say, “Great, but what about this? Can you not use the same powers to get us this thing?” So, it’s not playing the way that he thinks it’s playing, and it’s not creating the excitement that I think they hope it’s going to create for him. It’s making Trump happy, right? But it’s not having the other effect.

The last thing I’ll just say though, and I think that the reporting that Alicia wrote at the beginning, it’s worth underscoring, any prosecutor, they couldn’t find any prosecutor. And one thing that seems clear is that these prosecutors seem to be the only people in the country, you know, that at least in many of these big, powerful positions that don’t seem to think Trump is going to be the president forever because they’re the ones acting like he’s the lame duck that he is. And I think we should all take a lesson from that, that they’re looking down the road too and saying, “Yeah, this is going to pass.” And there’s, you know, they’re going to follow the law because that’s going to ultimately be in their best interest. And that’s an important lesson.

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ALICIA MENENDEZ (CO-HOST): In the process what you get is a season one character like John Durham reappearing in season five where I need to go to like the index to try and figure out who this person is because it’s been so long since they were a main character. But this reporting today from ABC — so, you got John Durham, former special counsel who spent nearly four years examining the origins of the FBI investigation into Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and its alleged ties to Russia, get ready for this, told federal prosecutors investigating James Comey that he was unable to uncover evidence that would support false statements or obstruction charges against the former FBI director, sources familiar with the matter told ABC News. The fact that John Durham reappears and now may become, in some ways, a hero in Comey’s story tells you we are in the strangest and most disturbed timeline ever, and I just wonder how it lands with all the folks that you were referencing.

CARUSONE: Yeah, I mean, they’re going to ignore it. I mean, ultimately they’ll either ignore it now — that’s part of the benefit they have of not just having narrative dominance, but the bubbles that they’re in, they can ignore it for a while, but the few places where it does get through because it does is there’s this deeper idea that somehow the deep state is such incredible poison and toxicity that Durham just spent a little too long there. And as a result of that, he has now been infected by that deep state poison. And so he himself is now a villain in this story. They’ll flip it around just like a good, you know, WWE narrative. You know, you turn heel and he is now — now, he’s a bad guy and he’s a reflection, an avatar for the very battle that they’re having. 

And that’s how they spin it. And it is important, the deep state thing is very real. There is a large-scale lack of confidence in institutions, and that’s partly where the energy for the Epstein stuff comes from. It’s partly about child sex trafficking, but it’s also that everything is so corrupt. People in power get impunity, and that’s just a problem. And there’s no confidence in institutions. And so in some ways, Trump has tapped into that energy. And that narrative of the deep state is so powerful. So, that’s how they reconcile those two.

But it really is hard to to emphasize just how much coverage and heroism Durham held within the right-wing media, not just for a few months, but for two years. I mean, he was really — I mean, every day breathlessly covering the developments, his teams. He really was a hero that they built up. He was like their Paul Bunyan and, you know, and then when it didn’t happen, they really saw that as either evidence of the deep state or something. Something was broken, and that’s why Trump needed to get more power to come back around. But that’s how they’re reconciling it. And, you know, there would be a whole bunch of people that are listening to mainstream Hannity or Fox that when they hear this, they’re going to say, “Wait, he’s not a bad guy. He’s a good guy, and he’s saying this.” And that’s the real tension that they’re going to have. They’re going to probably ignore it as much as they can.