John Ratcliffe, director of national intelligence for President Trump, released evidence in 2020 that the Trump-Russia “collusion” scandal was a disinformation hoax. Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign perpetrated the hoax with the knowledge of the Obama White House.
Last week, a court filing from Special Counsel John Durham, who is investigating the hoax, reiterated parts of his indictment of Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann, who lied to the FBI, Durham alleges, about his role in the hoax. Indicted in September, Sussmann told the FBI that he was not working for Clinton’s campaign.
Not much is new in the filing, but it does show just how blatantly the leftist media are ignoring it to cover up the truth. The purpose: Protect President Biden and the Democrats and continue smearing Trump.
Smear Trump
Durham’s filing in the case says that Sussmann’s attorney, Latham & Watkins, has potential conflicts of interest for myriad complex legal reasons that the court must address.
More importantly, in detailing the facts of the case, the filing reinforced former DNI Ratcliffe’s claim that the Clinton campaign conceived the “Russia collusion” hoax to wreck first Trump’s campaign, and then his presidency.
Sussmann was a Clinton campaign button man who flat-out lied to the FBI, the filing alleges in reprising key facts in the original indictment. He “knowingly and intentionally lied when he stated to the FBI General Counsel in September 2016 that he was not acting on behalf of ‘any client,’” the filing says.
The filing also says prosecutors might “seek to establish that the defendant’s Congressional testimony itself was knowingly and intentionally misleading insofar as it failed to disclose that the defendant billed work … to the Clinton Campaign.”
Noting that Sussmann is charged with providing “a materially false statement to the FBI,” the filing alleges that he “provided the FBI General Counsel with purported data and ‘white papers’ that allegedly demonstrated a covert communications channel between the Trump Organization and a Russia-based bank (‘Russian Bank-1’).”
Sussmann lied to the general counsel by stating that he “was not providing the allegations to the FBI on behalf of any client,” the filing alleges:
In fact, the defendant had assembled and conveyed the allegations to the FBI on behalf of at least two specific clients, including (i) a technology executive (“Tech Executive-1”) at a U.S.-based Internet company (“Internet Company-1”), and (ii) the Clinton Campaign.
Sussmann’s records, the filing alleges, show that he “repeatedly billed” the campaign “for his work on the Russian Bank-1 allegations.” And “in compiling and disseminating these allegations, the defendant and Tech Executive-1 also had met and communicated with another law partner at Law Firm-1 who was then serving as General Counsel to the Clinton Campaign (‘Campaign Lawyer-1’).”
The filing also recalls that Tech Executive-1 worked with Sussmann, “a U.S. investigative firm retained by Law Firm-1 on behalf of the Clinton Campaign, numerous cyber researchers, and employees at multiple Internet companies to assemble the purported data and white papers.”
Tech Executive-1 also worked with “researchers at a U.S.-based university who were receiving and analyzing large amounts of Internet data in connection with a pending federal government cybersecurity research contract.”
Their mission, the filing says in reprising the Sussmann indictment, was to smear Trump:
Tech Executive-1 tasked these researchers to mine Internet data to establish “an inference” and “narrative” tying then-candidate Trump to Russia. In doing so, Tech Executive-1 indicated that he was seeking to please certain “VIPs,” referring to individuals at Law Firm-1 and the Clinton Campaign.
Unsupported Allegations
Tech Executive-1 and his “associates” mined domain name system internet traffic linked to Trump Tower, Trump’s Central Park West apartment building, the executive office of the president, and a healthcare provider, the filing alleges.
The purpose: Again, dig up dirt on Trump:
Tech Executive-1’s employer, Internet Company-1, had come to access and maintain dedicated servers for the EOP as part of a sensitive arrangement whereby it provided DNS resolution services to the EOP. Tech Executive-1 and his associates exploited this arrangement by mining the EOP’s DNS traffic and other data for the purpose of gathering derogatory information about Donald Trump.
A few weeks after Trump took office, on February 9, 2017, Sussmann was still at it, trying to cripple the new administration.
He “provided an updated set of allegations — including the Russian Bank-1 data and additional allegations relating to Trump — to a second agency of the U.S. government (‘Agency-2’),” the filing says, citing the original indictment:
The Government’s evidence at trial will establish that these additional allegations relied, in part, on the purported DNS traffic that Tech Executive-1 and others had assembled pertaining to Trump Tower, Donald Trump’s New York City apartment building, the EOP, and the aforementioned healthcare provider. In his meeting with Agency-2, the defendant provided data which he claimed reflected purportedly suspicious DNS lookups by these entities of internet protocol (“IP”) addresses affiliated with a Russian mobile phone provider (“Russian Phone Provider-1”). The defendant further claimed that these lookups demonstrated that Trump and/or his associates were using supposedly rare, Russian-made wireless phones in the vicinity of the White House and other locations. The Special Counsel’s Office has identified no support for these allegations.
Those lookups began in 2014 during the Obama administration, the filing alleges.
In his meeting with Agency-2 employees, Sussmann again said “he was not representing a particular client in conveying the above allegations. In truth and in fact, the defendant was representing Tech Executive-1 — a fact the defendant subsequently acknowledged under oath in December 2017 testimony before Congress (without identifying the client by name).”
Biden National Security Advisor Involved?
Independent investigative reporter Glenn Greenwald explained why the leftist media have ignored the new filing, and the story of Sussmann’s indictment in general.
“The Clinton 2016 official at the heart of it is now Biden’s National Security Advisor in charge of Ukraine,” he tweeted. That official is Jake Sullivan.
A tweet from Hillary Clinton herself shows that Sullivan, senior policy advisor for her failed campaign, was a major player in the hoax and conspiracy to sink Trump.
“Computer scientists have apparently uncovered a covert server linking the Trump Organization to a Russian-based bank,” Clinton tweeted in reprising a statement from Sullivan on October 31, 2016.
“This could be the most direct link yet between Donald Trump and Moscow,” Sullivan said. “This secret hotline might be the key to unlocking the mystery of Trump’s ties to Russia.”
There was, of course, no “secret hotline.”
In its report on the filing, which they say “started a furor in right-wing outlets” that are peddling a “narrative” that is “off track,” the New York Times claimed that the filing was old news.
Indeed, the details of Sussmann and his associates involved in trying to smear Trump are in the original indictment.
And as The New American reported in September 2020, Ratcliffe explained in a letter to GOP Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina that Clinton hoked up the collusion story to divert attention from a scandal threatening her presidential bid. As secretary of state, she used a private e-mail server to send and receive classified e-mails.
Clinton wasn’t charged with a crime because she didn’t intend to break the law, then-FBI chieftain James Comey said.
“In late July 2016, U.S. intelligence agencies obtained insight into Russian intelligence analysis alleging that U.S. Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton had approved a campaign plan to stir up a scandal against U.S. Presidential candidate Donald Trump by tying him to Putin and the Russians’ hacking of the Democratic National Committee,” Ratcliffe wrote.
Ratcliffe also explained that handwritten notes from former CIA chief John Brennan showed that the Obama administration knew about it:
According to his handwritten notes, former Central Intelligence Agency Director Brennan subsequently briefed President Obama and other senior national security officials on the intelligence, including the “alleged approval by Hillary Clinton on July 26, 2016 of a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisors to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by Russian security services.”
On September 7, 2016, Ratcliffe told Graham, intelligence officials “forwarded an investigative referral” to Comey and his deputy Peter Strzok. That referral detailed “Clinton’s approval of a plan concerning U.S. Presidential candidate Donald Trump and Russian hackers hampering U.S. elections as a means of distracting the public from her use of a private mail server.”
The obvious question, given those briefings, is what Biden knew about it.
In October, President Trump declassified Brennan’s notes and a CIA memorandum. The collusion hoax included the infamous Steele Dossier, a collection of ridiculous claims about Trump, including some involving kinky sex, that came from a Russian national, Igor Danchenko.
The FBI used those false claims to justify surveillance of Trump campaign official Carter Page.
Durham has also indicted Danchecko on five counts of lying to the FBI about the dossier.
But, as Greenwald observed, the leftist media are not interested.
“The NYT/CNN/NBC axis flooded the zone every time Robert Mueller scratched his nose,” he wrote of Mueller’s probe into Trump that turned up nothing on the “collusion”:
They spent hours and hours deciphering his every sneeze. Actual criminal indictments from Durham of Hillary’s lawyer or FBI operatives — crimes that created Russiagate — barely merit an article.
Having cooperated in pushing the collusion hoax on behalf of the Clinton campaign and Deep State subversives, the media are now trying to protect Biden, Clinton, and other Democrats.
