Hillary Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook is expected to testify Friday in the trial of the 2016 presidential candidate’s attorney, Michael Sussmann, who collected, helped author, and disseminated the fake Donald Trump-Russia Collusion story, which led to investigations, spying on candidate Trump, and the attempted destruction of President Trump’s tenure in office.
Mook presided over Hillary’s 2016 campaign and harbored “a deep sense of responsibility” for her loss to Donald Trump. He chose not to send Clinton to Midwestern states in the Democratic primary because of her negative comparison with Bernie Sanders and her basic unlikeability. In the general election, with Trump flying all over the country and holding massive rallies, Mook again kept Hillary out of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania for the same reasons. Trump won all of them and won the White House.
But Mook had another powerful secret weapon to propel the unlikeable Hillary to office: a huge disinformation campaign linking Donald Trump and Russia and creating the lie that Trump was a Russian secret agent for Putin. If they couldn’t make Hillary any more appealing, they’d make Donald Trump a traitor to America. Worth a shot, right?
The hoax, which began as a connection between Trump and the Russian Alfa-Bank, was called an October surprise by Durham team prosecutors. The story was wholly made up by Sussmann and his team from Fusion GPS, who hired a former MI6 spy, Christopher Steele. Steele was the author of the collection of baseless, reckless, and defamatory memos referred to as the Steele dossier.
Steele and a Russian contact conjured up the tale of what has indelicately come to be known as “the pee-pee tape.” Hookers were practically swinging from chandeliers in the Moscow Ritz Carlton presidential suite as Trump looked on. Uh-huh. The media bought it. The FBI did too, using it to get a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (FISA) warrant to spy on the Trump campaign.
Attorney Marc Elias testified this week that Mook was in on the scam and had sent Elias an email basking in the glory of The New York Times picking up the fake Alfa-Bank story.
Sussmann, his colleague Elias, and other officials were frequently briefed on the success of the hoax, according to a Fusion GPS liaison to the campaign who testified this week. Technofog provides some direct quotes from her testimony:
[Former Fusion GPS employee Laura Seago] stated she was present at a summer 2016 meeting with “Mr. Elias, my colleague Peter Fritsch from Fusion GPS, Mr. Sussmann, and Mr. Sussmann’s client Rodney Joffe.” As to the nature of that meeting:
“The general purpose, to the best of my recollection, was to discuss allegations of communications between the Trump organization and Alfa-Bank.”
Once the Alfa-Bank allegations were developed, Seago met with journalist Franklin Foer (who would write the October 31, 2016, Alfa-Bank article in Slate). The purpose of that meeting was to discuss “the allegations of communication between the Trump Organization and Alfa-Bank.”
One of Steele’s contacts was Igor Danchenko, a researcher at the Democrat-supporting Brookings Institute, who was investigated for being a Russian spy. Who paid them? Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
Mook’s testimony had to be moved up to Friday of this week because he has planned a vacation to Spain.
Bill Priestap, former FBI counterintelligence executive, is also scheduled to testify for the Special Counsel prosecutors, along with a CIA agent known only as “Kevin B.”
The defense says it may call Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz, New York Times reporter Eric Lichtblau, and former acting Assistant Attorney General Mary McCord.
Notable for his absence from the witness list is the most notorious one: Christopher Steele.
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