Today marks the trial of lawyer Michael Sussman began in Federal District Court in DC. It's alleged he made a false statement to the government, in the form of General Counsel of the FBI, regarding Donald Trump's links to Alfa Bank. I am not following the trial because my interest is not in whether Sussman made a false statement in the course of raising the issue - he is alleged to have said he was not representing a client when, in fact, he was representing the Clinton campaign. My interest is in coming to a better understanding of the two threads of the Russia collusion scandal.
The first is the one Sussman was involved with and that originated with the Clinton campaign in 2016. Built upon scraps of figments of possible scenarios and abetted by Donald Trump's own reckless statements during the campaign, the campaign wove a story believed credulously by the FBI, at least initially (1), and swallowed whole by a media ready to believe anything that would help defeat Trump and then, after his election, anything that would bring him down.
That it was all a mirage is now evident. Apart from the failure to verify the allegations in the Steele Dossier, a document promoted by FusionGPS, an outfit working at the same time for a Putin connected Russian oligarch to overturn American sanctions, a failure we've known about since 2019, it now turns out that much of the dossier was the product of gossip between a couple of Russians, one in Cyprus, one in America, and of an American lobbyist and Clinton supporter! And what wasn't the product of gossip was fed by FusionGPS to Christopher Steele who put it into the dossier. There was no there there.(2)
But there was a second, parallel, thread that has gotten little attention recently; the efforts of the Intelligence Community to derail the Trump candidacy and then his presidency. This goes all the way back to a character I've written about before, Josef Mifsud, and his mysterious visit to, and conversation with, George Papadopolous in March 2016. We need to know why Mifsud made his approach - was it on his own initiative, or at the request of one of the Western intelligence agencies he was so entwined with? And why did the senior Australian diplomat and intelligence official, Alexander Downer, who also had connections with the Clinton Foundation, initiate a meeting with Papadopolous in May 2016 to allegedly extract the information Mifsud had passed on? For more on Mifsud and Downer, read Footnote 2 of this post.
It was no secret at the time that DNI Clapper, CIA Director Brennan, and FBI Director Comey, along with several Western intelligence agencies were alarmed by Trump. How far did they take this alarm?(3) It's also now evident that the taking out of NSA Michael Flynn in late January 2017 was planned because he both understood the intelligence community bureaucracy, wanted to reform it, had Trump's confidence and, if he had remained in the role, would have triggered the legal requirement to be briefed by the intelligence agencies on their Russia collusion investigation, which would have revealed the plot. Their only interest was in getting Flynn out of the administration, once that was done they had no further agenda with him. It was only when the Muller gang got going and decided to try to squeeze Flynn that the criminal investigation began.
In January 2017, Senator Chuck Schumer warned President-elect Trump that, “Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.”(4) That is a frightening statement about where a senior U.S. senator thinks power resides in the federal government. The intelligence community thread needs to be thoroughly investigated or Schumer will be proven correct about who our real rulers are. Is Durham willing to do it?
Let's also not forget the lives and reputations ruined along the way by the reprehensible actions of the Clinton campaign, the intelligence community, and its willing accomplices in the media; Svetlana Lokhova, Serge Millian, Jeffrey Gordon, Michael Caputo, and Carter "The Most Innocent Man in America" Page, among others. They deserve justice.(5)
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(1) Filings by Sussman's lawyers in this case indicate that one of his defenses is that the FBI knew all along he was representing the campaign!
(2) The revelations of the past year have also led me to question some assumptions I'd made during 2018 and 2019 about Russia collusion. For instance, my inclination had been to believe the official conclusion that the Russians carried out the three hacks of Democrat IT systems in 2016 (see 53 Transcripts: The Hacks). Given that the involvement of the Clinton campaign in creating the Russia collusion hoax was even more complex that I thought then, I simply don't know what to think about the hacks now.
(3) Along with Mifsud and Downer, Stefan Halper was also used in this effort, managing to smear Flynn, destroy the career of Svetlana Lokhova, and serving as a Confidential Human Source for the FBI regarding Carter Page.
(4) Schumer made his pronouncement on the MSNBC show of Rachel Maddow, who went on to spout all kinds of ridiculous nonsense about Russia and Trump for the next three years.
(5) And speaking of justice, every time I go back and reread my 53 Transcripts posts, I grow more outraged about Rep. Adam Schiff. For three years, Schiff emerged from these hearing room sessions and lied repeatedly about what was being said, and what was being learned. He always lied, as became evident when Acting DNI Grenell forced his hand and made him release the actual transcripts in the spring of 2020. Should the GOP regain control of the House, I hope its leadership has the guts to bar Schiff from serving on any House Committee.
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