Last September John Durham indicted Michael Sussman for lying to the FBI about his true intentions when bringing ‘dirt’ on Trump to the agency, claiming he wasn’t representing any client while he was in fact representing the Hillary Clinton campaign.
This week we’ve had a new court filing from Durham in the case against Sussman where he alleges that Hillary Clinton’s campaign was part of a ‘joint venture’ to smear Donald Trump in 2016:
NY POST – Hillary Clinton’s campaign, its lawyer and a tech executive took part in a “joint venture” to gather and spread dirt about Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign, Special Counsel John Durham charges in a new filing.
The bombshell claim was made in a 48-page motion filed late Monday arguing for the admission of additional evidence ahead of Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann’s pending trial for allegedly lying to the FBI.
At the heart of the case is a Sept. 18, 2016 text message Sussmann sent to then-FBI General Counsel James Baker, which was reproduced in Monday’s filing.
“Jim – it’s Michael Sussmann. I have something time-sensitive (and sensitive) I need to discuss,” the lawyer wrote. “Do you have availability for a short meeting tomorrow? I’m coming on my own – not on behalf of a client or company – want to help the Bureau. Thanks.”
In fact, prosecutors say, Sussmann — then a cybersecurity lawyer at powerhouse Democratic law firm Perkins Coie — had deceived Baker and was acting on behalf of the Clinton campaign when the two met the following day.
During that sitdown, Sussmann allegedly gave Baker information suggesting that servers at the Trump Organization were communicating with servers at Moscow-based Alfa-Bank. That claim was amplified by the Clinton campaign to suggest that Trump was colluding with the Kremlin.
As we’ve told you before, the server data being given to the FBI by Sussman was simply DNS information and the FBI determined at the time that it wasn’t important.
The Post explains what Durham alleges happened behind the scenes to get to this point:
According to Monday’s filing, preparation for Sussmann’s meeting with Baker began in “late July and early August,” when “Tech Executive-1,” who has since been identified as Rodney Joffe, began telling employees at Virginia-based Neustar — where he was a senior vice president — to “mine and assemble Internet data that would support an ‘inference’ or ‘narrative’ tying Trump to Russia.”
Joffe, who is not named in the filing, allegedly said the point of the effort “was to please these ‘VIPs,’” which Durham says refers to Sussmann, his Perkins Coie colleague Marc Elias — the Clinton campaign’s general counsel — and the campaign itself.
Prosecutors also allege that Joffe ordered an executive at two other companies he owned to do a data deep-dive into Trump, saying “he was working with a person at a firm in Washington, D.C. with close ties to Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic Party.”
The document adds that Joffe even emailed the executive the home addresses, email addresses, IP addresses and other personal information of “various Trump associates,” including spouses and other family members.
According to Durham, the CEO was “highly uncomfortable” with Joffe’s ask, but complied because he “was a powerful figure.”
The dive into Trump was given the code name “Crimson Rhino.”
Eventually, prosecutors say, Joffe and his associates “exploited” Internet traffic relating to a healthcare provider to assemble information from Trump Tower and Trump’s Central Park West apartment building. Among the allegations made by Sussmann were that Trump and his associates were using a type of Russian-made cell phone near the White House and other locations.
At the same time, Sussman and Perkins Coie allegedly connected Joffe to Fusion GPS, the opposition research firm that hired former MI-6 agent Christopher Steele to compile his now-infamous dossier of explosive, debunked allegations about Trump’s supposed links to Russia.
The most notorious of those claims was that Moscow security services possessed a tape of Trump in a Moscow hotel room with prostitutes who were supposedly urinating on a bed where the Obamas had previously stayed.
According to the filing, Sussmann even met with Steele himself (identified as “U.K. Person-1”) and Fusion GPS employees at Perkins Coie’s offices in the summer of 2016.
Prosecutors say that while Sussmann told Congress in 2017 that he only meant to “vet” Steele, the onetime British spy testified under oath in a UK legal proceeding that Sussmann shared the Alfa-Bank allegation with him and Fusion GPS ordered Steele to “research and produce intelligence reports” about Alfa-Bank.
Allegations about the Trump Organization and Alfa-Bank server ties also allegedly were shared by Steele with State Department officials, while Fusion GPS passed them on to at least one Department of Justice official.
After these introductions were made, Durham alleges, Sussmann and Fusion GPS employees shopped the Alfa-Bank allegations to the mainstream media. The claims about the server traffic between Trump Tower and Alfa-Bank were the subject of several contemporary reports ahead of Election Day 2016. The most notable story, by Franklin Foer, was published by Slate that October and bore the headline: “Was a Trump Server Communicating With Russia?”
Finally, the Alfa-Bank claims were allegedly compiled by Joffe and Sussmann into a “white paper” that Sussmann turned over to Baker when the two met. According to the indictment of Sussmann, the lawyer billed the Clinton for the time drafting the document.
On the same day the Slate story about the Trump Organization and Alfa-Bank came out, the New York Times reported that the FBI had looked into Sussmann’s allegations and concluded that “there could be an innocuous explanation, like a marketing email or spam, for the computer contacts.”
According to the indictment, Sussmann pursued the Alfa-Bank angle even after Clinton’s defeat by Trump in the 2016 election. In February 2017, he allegedly provided an “updated set of allegations” about the Russian bank and its relation to the Trump campaign to another US government agency that has since been identified as the CIA.
Sussmann was indicted in September 2021 and has pleaded not guilty to the charge of making false statements.
Durham’s motion seeks the admission of documents including notes of conversations two other FBI officials had with Baker about his Sept. 19, 2016 meeting with Sussmann; emails involving Sussmann, Joffe, Elias, Clinton campaign officials and Fusion GPS employees; and a deposition by Sussmann before the House Intelligence Committee in December 2017.
In that testimony, Sussmann was asked if he was acting on his “own volition” when he contacted Baker and the CIA about the Alfa-Bank allegations. He answered: “No.”
“So did your client direct you to have those conversations?” he was asked.
“Yes,” he replied, before attempting to backtrack moments later.
“[W]hen you say my client directed me, we had a conversation, as lawyers do with their clients, about client needs and objectives and the best course to take for a client,” he said. “And so it may have been a decision that we came to together. I mean, I don’t want to imply that I was sort of directed to do something against my better judgment, or that we were in any sort of conflict.”
Hillary Clinton was in on all of this from the beginning as you can see from her tweet about this before the 2016 election, which hasn’t been deleted yet:
Computer scientists have apparently uncovered a covert server linking the Trump Organization to a Russian-based bank. pic.twitter.com/8f8n9xMzUU
— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) November 1, 2016
Hillary Clinton shopped this fraudulent dirt around to the MSM which gladly ran with it, and then Hillary retweets the MSM’s report on it to smear Trump. What a horribly corrupt bunch of people.
According to Fox News, John Durham sought to enter this tweet from Hillary Clinton as evidence in his case against Sussman.
You can watch last night’s report on all of this from Special Report: