By Donald Jeffries
The recent indictment of former Hillary Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann is just another confirmation of how the elite pushed a knowingly ridiculous “Russia fantasy” regarding the 2016 election. Sussman’s indictment by special counsel John Durham comes at a curious time. If it had transpired during Donald Trump’s administration, the impact would have been much more powerful.
We already know, from former CIA Director John Brennan himself, that it was Hillary Clinton’s idea to concoct a false narrative tying her 2016 residential opponent to “collusion” with Russia. In this new indictment, the entire fiasco is thoroughly documented. While Richard Nixon’s name has come to be associated with political “dirty tricks,” in reality, the Clintons have long engaged in far “dirtier” behavior against their political opponents. Clinton’s campaign lawyers at the firm of Perkins Coie seem to have participated directly in the spreading of false information about the so-called “Russian collusion.”
Durham believes Sussmann lied to the FBI’s general counsel in September 2016, when he delivered documents to the bureau, which claimed that Russia’s Alfa Bank was used as a direct conduit between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. Sussman allegedly told the FBI general counsel that he wasn’t delivering the information on behalf of any client. The indictment reveals multiple billings to the Clinton campaign for various expenses. It also documents that Sussman billed the campaign for the actual meeting with the FBI. The indictment shows how an unnamed “tech executive” exploited his connections with multiple internet companies to push the laughable “Russiagate” fantasy. This executive would also say that he was promised a high ranking job in Hillary’s administration.
“University researchers” working on the fantasy continually argued that there was no evidence for it, but were counseled not to look for proof, but merely something to “give the base of a very useful narrative.”
Someone identified as “Researcher-1” asked:
How do we plan to defend against the criticism that this is not spoofed traffic we are observing? There is no answer to that. Let’s assume again that they are not smart enough to refute our “best case scenario.” You do realize that we will have to expose every trick we have in our bag to even make a very weak association. We cannot technically make any claims that would [pass] public scrutiny. The only thing that drives us at this point is that we just do not like [Trump]. This will not fly in [the] eyes of public scrutiny. Folks, I am afraid we have tunnel vision. Time to regroup?
An abundance of evidence demonstrates that the Russian “collusion” story was a dishonest attempt to discredit the Trump presidency in its initial stages. While Hillary was portrayed by her CIA crony Brennan as devising the scheme to distract from the issues with her emails, at the same time she was tweeting out complete fiction like, “Computer scientists have apparently uncovered a covert server linking the Trump organization to a Russian-based bank.”
While vigorously denying any association with the dossier from former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele, expenses for the dossier led directly to the Clinton campaign’s legal counsel Marc Elias. None other than The New York Times exposed this, although Elias “pushed back vigorously, saying ‘You (or your sources) are wrong’.” Times reporter Maggie Haberman would write “folks involved in funding this lied about it, and with sanctimony, for a year.”
The indictment shows that Sussmann contradicted what he’d originally told the FBI general counsel, when he was questioned by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence in December 2017. Another Clinton associate—and current Biden senior policy adviser Jake Sullivan—pushed the fake connection between Russia’s Alfa Bank and Trump. Sullivan said, in an official campaign statement, that the Alfa Bank allegation “could be the most direct link yet between Donald Trump and Moscow.” Like Hillary, he credited independent investigators, declaring:
Computer scientists have apparently uncovered a covert server linking the Trump organization to a Russian-based bank. This secret hotline may be the key to unlocking the mystery of Trump’s ties to Russia. . . . This line of communication may help explain Trump’s bizarre adoration of Vladimir Putin.
Congressional leaders were up to their necks in this conspiracy as well, as they were briefed by intelligence officials in the months before the 2016 election about supposed financial connections between Trump and the Russians. Steele was simultaneously pushing the unfounded assertion of Trump’s association with Alfa Bank. Fusion GPS, meanwhile, was busy pushing the theme regarding a “special email server existing between Trump Tower and Moscow’s Alfa Bank” to Slate magazine. As The New York Times put it, “Law enforcement officials say that none of the investigations so far have found any conclusive or direct link between Mr. Trump and the Russian government.”
