Last week, on Sept. 16, U.S. Special Counsel John Durham issued a 27-page indictment charging Hillary Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann with presenting knowingly false claims and documents to then-FBI general counsel James Baker, in a Sept. 19 meeting purporting to reveal nefarious relationships between the Trump organization and a Russia-based Alfa bank.
The allegations clearly indicate that that the real purpose of Sussmann’s misrepresentations was to bait the FBI into initiating a Trump investigation that would be leaked to influence the 2016 election.
This is evidenced by the first sentence of the Justice Department’s indictment discussing a suspicious New York Times FBI investigation story appearing just one week before Election Day.
According to the indictment, Sussmann’s lie "deprived the FBI" of crucial information which led the agency to initiate an investigation into the Trump-Alfa claim that was quickly leaked to reporters.
Contrast this with opposite behaviors when the FBI sat on Hunter Biden’s laptop materials for a year revealing foreign influence peddling kickbacks to "the big guy," a New York Post blockbuster story that mainstream and social media blocked immediately prior to the 2020 election.
Whether or not some well-known top anti-Trump FBI officials actively collaborated in perpetrating the media propaganda ruse is a separate matter.
After all, Sussmann was well-known to the agency as a former U.S. prosecutor specializing in cybercrime and as a lawyer for the Clinton campaign and Democratic Party.
In any case, Sussmann has denied the charges.
The indictment specifically states that Sussmann, an attorney at the Perkins Coie law firm, had falsely assured Baker he was not doing this work "'for any client,’ which led the FBI general counsel to understand that SUSSMANN was acting as a good citizen merely passing along information, not as a paid advocate or political operative."
The Durham investigation team turned up documents showing that Sussmann was being handsomely paid at the time by the 2016 Clinton Campaign.
Another Perkins Coie lawyer, Clinton Campaign General Counsel Mark Elias, was a key figure behind the infamously fake Steele "dirty dossier" which played into that Trump Russian collusion canard.
Elias and Perkins Coie had previously been outed for their role in hiring research firm Fusion GPS, who in turn hired former British spy Christopher Steele to conduct opposition research alleging since debunked Trump campaign ties to Russia.
A Justice Department Inspector General’s investigation found that the Steele dossier was instrumental in the FBI's falsified FISA court application for a warrant to conduct surveillance of Carter Page - a relatively inconsequential Trump administration adviser.
Kevin Clinesmith, a low-level FBI lawyer, copped a guilty plea of altering that FISA evidence in exchange for skating on serious federal prison time.
The Durham indictment against Sussmann appears timed to beat the clock on a five-year statute of limitations for prosecuting criminal conspiracy prevarications which are aiming a lot higher as the plot thickens.
The indictment says the Alfa bank allegations came via an unidentified tech executive ("Tech Executive-1") who owned internet companies with access to vast amounts of "public and nonpublic" data. According to one of his emails, that executive expected to get the "top [cybersecurity] job" in a Clinton administration.
Tech Executive-1 alerted Sussmann of purported traffic between Alfa bank and a Trump email domain had ordered his employees to "search and analyze their holdings of public and non- public internet data for derogatory information on Trump."
According to the Sussmann indictment, the unnamed executive also enlisted researchers at an unidentified U.S. university that was in line for a government cyber contract with a goal to "support an 'inference' and 'narrative' regarding Trump that would please certain 'VIPs.'"
Although these searches came up with little or nothing, the executive handed the innuendo to Sussman, who then wrote white papers he handed to the FBI and worked with Fusion GPS and Elias to feed it to a credulous press corps.
Sussmann’s meeting with the FBI’s Baker gave the media a desired hook to write that law enforcement was investigating the Trump-Russia ties, prompting a political collusion media feeding frenzy that succeeded in damaging the Trump presidency for more than two years.
As reported in The Wall Street Journal, the narrow Sussmann indictment opens the window on a far greater offense, one that looks at the Clinton team and the media’s dirty trick against U.S. democracy.
Here, the indictment alleges that Elias kept Clinton campaign officials informed about the scam, including the "campaign manager, communications director, and foreign policy advisor."
Also recall that the hoax that Donald Trump was Vladimir Putin's puppet is now known to have been fabricated by the Obama-Biden administration and rogue top-level intelligence officials in cooperation with operatives tied to the Clinton campaign and DNC to distract attention away from Hillary's 30,000 deleted emails.
Included were some exchanges containing highly classified information.
Let's also be reminded again that the costly 22-month-long Mueller investigation found no evidence either of a Trump Russian collusion or obstruction of justice.
There is evidence, however, that the Obama-Biden White House authorized a 2016 FBI "Crossfire Hurricane" investigation premised upon that bogusly fabricated Steele report.
January 7, 2017 Oval Office discussions among then-President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, National Security Adviser Susan Rice, and FBI Director James Comey reportedly addressed how to continue the FBI's Crossfire Hurricane investigation going forward.
Biden is noted having suggested justifying investigations of incoming Trump Security Adviser Lt. General Michael Flynn based upon an obscure "Logan Act."
In May 2019, U.S. Attorney General William "Bill" Barr tapped Connecticut's U.S. Attorney John Durham to look into issues related to the origins of the FBI's 2016 Trump-Russia investigation, including alleged Obama-Biden administration influence.
Those long-awaited conclusions were reportedly disrupted by the intervention of new evidentiary discoveries and COVID-19 related investigatory delays.
Now that at long last, the Sussmann indictment suggests more to come.
Durham still faces an obvious uphill battle with predictable resistance from Biden’s Attorney General Merrick Garland to proceed.
Nevertheless, let’s give Durham’s team credit for finally combatting an entrenched hyper-partisan institutional and media establishment that share equal culpability.
Larry Bell is an endowed professor of space architecture at the University of Houston where he founded Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture and the graduate space architecture program. His latest of 10 books, "What Makes Humans Truly Exceptional," (2021) is available on Amazon along with all others. Read Larry Bell's Reports — More Here.
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