The FBI and official Washington were all-in on pretending that Donald Trump was a super-secret Russian spy when Hillary Clinton’s campaign poisoned the D.C. swamp with her 2016 campaign opposition research. The swamp was so invested in the narrative and besotted with Democratic politics that the FBI, DOJ, and even Obama’s CIA chief freely disseminated the poison to everyone. But in a Washington, D.C. courtroom, Special Counsel John Durham’s team of prosecutors seems to be giving the FBI a pass.
On the first day of the trial of Hillary’s lawyer, Michael Sussmann, the Durham team’s opening statement and its first witnesses attempted to walk a fine line to show that the Democratic National Committee lawyer used his unique position to get the FBI to investigate Trump for secretly communicating with a Russian bank to get to Putin.
Durham’s team argues that the FBI was duped into treating seriously the Trump-is-a-Russian-secret-agent-with-super-secret-ties-to-a-Moscow-bank story that the Hillary Clinton campaign lawyer brought to it. They will argue in court that if the FBI had known it was Hillary’s oppo-research, they would have dismissed it out of hand.
In September of 2016, Sussmann set up a meeting with his old friend, James Baker, then the FBI general counsel. The Hillary- and DNC-paid representative came armed with “research” and a “white paper” he wrote spinning a yarn that Russian secret agent Trump possessed a secret server or some other way to communicate via the internet with Alfa Bank in Moscow. He used DNS data points provided by another one of his well-connected clients, Rodney Joffe, a well-to-do cybersecurity specialist, who used his government contracts and connections to sweep up White House and Trump Tower communications. Joffe hasn’t been charged with a crime. According to reports, Joffe said he’d been promised a cybersecurity gig with a Hillary Clinton administration, which friends write off as a joke.
Sussmann told Baker, who’s moved on to become Twitter’s deputy general counsel (which explains a lot), that he came as a civic-minded American rather than as a representative of his well-known Democrat clients. The well-connected Perkins Coie lawyer wanted to give Baker a head’s up that the New York Times was going to break the Alfa Bank story, and he didn’t want the FBI to get blindsided by questions of what the feds were doing about it. He was just doing them a favor. But Durham’s team says Sussmann materially lied to Baker twice, once in writing, about not coming on behalf of a client. And this is the crux of the prosecution.
But as we now know — after the impeachment, the Robert Mueller investigation, spying on the President of the United States of America, countless tube-fed bogus stories, and even more bogus self-congratulatory “journalism” awards — it was all a lie.
On Tuesday in opening statements, Durham team attorney Brittain Shaw told the anonymous jury of twelve and four alternates that this meeting was “all part of a bigger plan” to plant this story in the media in order to create an “October surprise on the eve of the presidential election” which, she said, “largely succeeded.”
Related: Trump Haters Are on the Jury for Trial of Hillary’s Lawyer in ‘Russia Collusion’ Case
The story touched off a firestorm in the Leftist media, including the gullible Rachel Maddow, who couldn’t get enough of it.
Flashback: In 2018, MSNBC’s @maddow promotes false the Alfa Bank story, alleging "unusual communication" between Trump camp & a Russian bank. Both Congress & the FBI later determined the communication was normal. pic.twitter.com/yjpPJ5pwUV
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) September 17, 2021
In court, Shaw said, “The evidence will show this is a case of privilege …The privilege of a lawyer who thought that for the powerful, the normal rules didn’t apply. That he could use the FBI as a political tool.”
On Tuesday, one of several FBI investigators expected to take the stand in this trial testified that he thought the purported Alfa Bank connection to Trump was fishy, to say the least. Technofog reports on this exchange with Special Agent Scott Hellman.
Hellman was involved in investigating the Alfa Bank allegations. He testified that the evidence (data and white papers explaining the data) provided to then-FBI general counsel James Baker from Sussmann was passed off to none other than the infamous Peter Strzok. One of these white papers stated:
“The only plausible explanation for this server configuration is that it shows the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank to be using multiple sophisticated layers of protection in order to obfuscate their considerable recent email traffic.”
Hellman disagreed with that finding, and the general Trump/Alfa allegations presented by Joffe/Sussmann, stating they “were not supported by the technical data.” Their methodology was “questionable” and the purported secret communications “just didn’t ring true at all.” He further questioned the timing of the data, stating he found it suspicious that these researchers “started looking, and they found that the activity had just started three weeks prior.”
“Three weeks prior”? Indeed, Durham has included in his speaking indictment and subsequent documents the story behind the charge and of “Tech Executive-1” and how Joffe used his U.S. government contract connections (DARPA) and his connection with Georgia Tech researchers to find Trump-Russia connections in the flow of internet traffic.
In court Tuesday, both sides revealed that the FBI had used Joffe as a source. But in 2021, well after this Alfa Bank intel was conjured, Joffe was cut off as an FBI source. The judge on Wednesday denied Durham’s team the ability to bring into court the reason why he was cut off.
Things could get more interesting in this case, which is expected to last about two weeks.
We could see Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager and right-hand man, Robby Mook, called as a witness.
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