Wall Street Journal weekend columnist Peggy Noonan checked in, May 20-21, with post-Durham Report commentary called “Unanswered Questions About Trump and Russia.”

The column started off by saying that the Report’s conclusions, including “partisan hostility” against Donald J. Trump “[s]ounds about right,” but immediately followed with this: “Yet I still don’t know what to think of Trump/Russia and I’m not satisfied we’ll ever fully understand it.”

The Trump-loathing Noonan follows that bit of inculpatory innuendo with more: “Certain aspects of the overall Trump story fed the Trump/Russia saga.” (And to make sure readers get the Trump-loathing message, the column is accompanied by a photo of President Trump and President Putin shaking hands.)

After several paragraphs suggesting that “experienced people in positions of authority” understand what Trump is all about. but not “normal America” -- a euphemism, obviously, for “deplorables” -- Noonan cites, for invidious purpose, the Steele dossier’s discussion of a perverted incident claimed to involve Trump in the presidential suite in Moscow’s Ritz Carlton hotel. Immediately following the recitation of the dossier’s account of the incident, Noonan’s next paragraph begins: “Anything is possible...”

This anti-truth bias here is typical of the kind of journalism practiced by the Trump-loathing crowd: In the aftermath of The Durham Report, they are, as Jack Nicholson once said in “A Few Good Men,” people who “can’t handle the truth.”

The falsity of the alleged presidential suite incident is explained at page 146 of the Durham report:

“[t]he [Durham Special Counsel] Office obtained records from the Ritz Carlton Moscow that reveal that Trump was a guest at the hotel in 2013, but did not stay in the Presidential Suite then or at any other time.” [Emphasis added.]

Why did Noonan refer to the alleged presidential suite incident and not acknowledge, per Durham, that Citizen Trump never stayed in that suite?

Perhaps she did not bother to wade through the online version of the Report. But could she not have googled to learn that Donald Trump never stayed in the presidential suite of Moscow’s Ritz Carlton?

See, for example, this May 16 story, from the U.K. Daily Mail:

Special Counsel John Durham’s report identifies Irish-born PR exec and Clinton ally Charles Dolan as the likely source of the infamous ‘golden showers’ rumor about Donald Trump in the discredited Steele dossier that ended up in the FBI director’s very awkward briefing on potential ‘kompromat’ days before he took office.

Durham’s 300-page report contains new information about the possible source of the discredited salacious claim – and puts together a detailed map of how the information may have come to light.

Noonan did not mention in her column that the presidential suite incident was baseless. More likely than not, that was because she prefers dangling a false accusation against Mr. Trump.

No-truth Noonan also mentioned the Buzzfeed January 2017 report on the Steele fabrication without acknowledging that the intrusively-partisan FBI knew, months before Buzzfeed issued its false report, that Steele was a purveyor of anti-Trump material assisting the Clinton campaign. The Buzzfeed story effectively lit the fuse to the Mueller probe that originated in hopes of ousting President Trump.

Noonan makes it clear that it is acceptable to raise “questions about Trump and Russia” because Trump has not denounced Vladimir Putin to her satisfaction.

“Diplomacy by denunciation?”

Noonan cannot handle the truth that it was not until Biden was installed in the White House that Russia attacked Ukraine.

And so she includes a John McCain insult at Trump for not being sufficiently anti-Putin.

Left unmentioned by Noonan was the late Arizona senator’s adventure in Kyiv in December 2013 where he stirred up the Maidan protests that succeeded in ousting duly-elected Ukraine President Viktor Yanukovych, leading to the present Ukraine-Russia war.

Before her column’s end, Noonan lambastes the former president for having had the temerity to imply, during his presidency, that the FBI “was incompetent or corrupt..”

But that, of course, has been established by the report Noonan strains to resist -- as she strained, like a good Never-Trump, to resist the Trump presidency.

The truth is, the FBI and intel leadership have become corrupt -- a very inconvenient truth for the Trump-loathing crowd. I would suggest that the words “extremely troublesome” at the end of this paragraph found at page 303 of the report are euphemism for “indicative of corruption.”

Throughout the duration of Crossfire Hurricane, facts and circumstances that were inconsistent with the premise that Trump and/or persons associated with the Trump campaign were involved in a collusive or conspiratorial relationship with the Russian government were ignored or simply assessed away. Indeed, as set forth in Sections IV A.2 and 3, from even before the opening of Crossfire Hurricane, some of those most directly involved in the subsequent investigation had (i) expressed their open disdain for Trump, (ii) asked about when they would open an investigation on Trump, and (iii) asserted that they would prevent Trump from becoming President. As discussed throughout this report, our investigation revealed that the stated basis for opening a full investigation “to determine whether individual(s) associated with the Trump campaign [were] witting of and/or coordinating activities with the Government of Russia” 1746 was seriously flawed. Again, the FBI’s failure to critically analyze information that ran counter to the narrative of a Trump/Russia collusive relationship exhibited throughout Crossfire Hurricane is extremely troublesome.

And Noonan’s failure “to critically analyze information that [runs] counter” to her anti-Trump bias questions her own standing as a serious journalist.

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