Coming Into Focus: Hillary’s Secretive, Russiagate-Flogging Pair of Super-Lawyers

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by Aaron Maté

The indictment of Hillary Clinton lawyer Michael Sussmann for allegedly lying to the FBI sheds new light on the pivotal role of Democratic operatives in the Russiagate affair. The emerging picture shows Sussmann and his Perkins Coie colleague Marc Elias, the chief counsel for Clinton’s 2016 campaign, proceeding on parallel, coordinated tracks to solicit and spread disinformation tying Donald Trump to the Kremlin.
 
In a detailed charging document last month, Special Counsel John Durham accused Sussmann of concealing his work for the Clinton campaign while trying to sell the FBI on the false claim of a secret Trump backchannel to Russia’s Alfa Bank. But Sussmann’s alleged false statement to the FBI in September 2016 wasn’t all. Just months before, he helped generate an even more consequential Russia allegation that he also brought to the FBI. In April of that year, Sussmann hired CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity firm that publicly triggered the Russiagate saga by lodging the still unproven claim that Russia was behind the hack of Democratic National Committee emails released by WikiLeaks.
 
At the time, CrowdStrike was not the only Clinton campaign contractor focusing on Russia. Just days before Sussmann hired CrowdStrike in April, his partner Elias retained the opposition research firm Fusion GPS to dig up dirt on Trump and the Kremlin.
 
These two Clinton campaign contractors, working directly for two Clinton campaign attorneys, would go on to play highly consequential roles in the ensuing multi-year Russia investigation.
 

 
Working secretly for the Clinton campaign, Fusion GPS planted Trump-Russia conspiracy theories in the FBI and US media via its subcontractor, former British spy Christopher Steele. The FBI used the Fusion GPS’s now debunked “Steele dossier” for investigative leads and multiple surveillance applications putatively targeting Trump campaign volunteer Carter Page.
 
CrowdStrike, reporting to Sussmann, also proved critical to the FBI’s work. Rather than examine the DNC servers for itself, the FBI relied on CrowdStrike’s forensics as mediated by Sussmann.
 
The FBI’s odd relationship with the two Democratic Party contractors gave Sussmann and Elias unprecedented influence over a high-stakes national security scandal that upended U.S. politics and ensnared their political opponents. By hiring CrowdStrike and Fusion GPS, the Perkins Coie lawyers helped define the Trump-Russia narrative and impact the flow of information to the highest reaches of U.S. intelligence agencies.
 
The established Trump-Russia timeline and the public record, including overlooked sworn testimony, congressional and Justice Department reports, as well as news accounts from the principal recipients of government leaks in the affair, the Washington Post and the New York Times, help to fill in the picture.
 
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‘We Need to Tell the American Public’
 
In late April 2016, after being informed by Graham Wilson, a Perkins Coie colleague, that the DNC server had been breached, Michael Sussmann immediately turned to CrowdStrike. As Sussmann recalled in December 2017 testimony to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, the cyber firm was hired based on his “recommendation.”
 
Although it is widely believed that CrowdStrike worked for the DNC, the firm in fact was retained by Sussmann and his Clinton campaign law firm. As CrowdStrike CEO Shawn Henry told the House committee, his contract was not with the DNC, but instead “with Michael Sussmann from Perkins Coie.”
 
Credit TK
Dec. 2017: CrowdStrike CEO Henry testifies he worked for the now-indicted Clinton lawyer Sussmann. House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence
 
And it was Sussmann who controlled what the FBI was allowed to see. After bringing CrowdStrike on board, Sussmann pushed aggressively to publicize the firm’s conclusion that Russian government hackers had attacked the DNC server, according to a December 2016 account in the New York Times.
 
“Within a day, CrowdStrike confirmed that the intrusion had originated in Russia,” the Times reported, citing Sussmann’s recollection. Sussmann and DNC executives had their first formal meeting with senior FBI officials in June 2016, where they encouraged the bureau to publicly endorse CrowdStrike’s findings:

Among the early requests at that meeting, according to participants: that the federal government make a quick “attribution” formally blaming actors with ties to Russian government for the attack to make clear that it was not routine hacking but foreign espionage.
 
“You have a presidential election underway here and you know that the Russians have hacked into the D.N.C.,” Mr. Sussmann said, recalling the message to the F.B.I. “We need to tell the American public that. And soon.”

But the FBI was not ready to point the finger at Russia. As the Senate Intelligence Committee later reported, “CrowdStrike still had not provided the FBI with forensic images nor an unredacted copy of their [CrowdStrike’s] report.”
 

 
Instead of waiting for the FBI, the DNC went public with the Russian hacking allegation on its own. On June 14, 2016, the Washington Post broke the news that CrowdStrike was accusing Russian hackers of infiltrating the DNC’s computer network and stealing data. Sussmann and Henry were quoted as sources. According to the Times’ account, the DNC approached the Post “on Mr. Sussmann’s advice.”
 
‘We Just Don’t Have the Evidence’
 
The Washington Post’s June 2016 story, generated by Sussmann, was the opening public salvo in the Russiagate saga.
 
But it was not until nearly four years later that the public learned that CrowdStrike was not as confident about the Russian hacking allegation that it had publicly lodged. In December 2017 testimony that was declassified only in May 2020, Henry admitted that his firm was akin to a bank examiner who believes the vault has been robbed – but has no proof of how. CrowdStrike, Henry disclosed, “did not have concrete evidence” that alleged Russian hackers removed any data from the DNC servers.

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This is what my former boss referred to a “muddying the waters.” If anyone gets caught lying about other departments holding up production, it forever damages their credibility. Getting caught lying about Russians hacking the DNC servers elicited the inevitable Russian response that they didn’t do it. It turns out, the Russians were right and the Americans (if we can give the DNC that much credit) were lying. Now, every accusation made against Russians can be met with, “Remember the DNC lies about us hacking the servers, along with all the corrupt business with lies about Trump? We didn’t do it; you are lying.” And it has to be taken seriously, until proven otherwise.

DNC and Comey make accusations against each other. Both have been caught lying on numerous occasions. Who, if anyone, do we believe?

Democrats are liars. Hillary is a liar. Idiot Biden is a liar. Schumer, Pelosi, Schiff, Nadler and Swalwell are liars. MSNBC, CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, NYT, WaPo, the Atlantic, Huffpo, LA Times, etc are liars. It was the damned RUSSIANS that told the truth. Absolutely disgusting.

It all brings us back to Seth Rich.

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Who put the hit out on Seth Rich?

Was it Sussman or Elias?

My bet it was hitlery

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Lock…her…up…

…along with Biden and the other globalist-installed posers we didn’t vote for.

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Will Jake Sullivan Be Indicted?

For most people, the whole RussiaGate issue has probably become so tangled and complex that it almost defies comprehension. That’s largely because the mainstream press has deliberately done everything it can to obfuscate the issue and make it impenetrable. In point of fact, the basic outlines of what happened now seem pretty clear.

Going into the 2016 election Hillary Clinton and her key advisors were very worried about the impact of her “homebrew” server controversy. Clinton had pretty clearly violated a whole raft of regulations and laws, at a minimum mishandled classified data and deliberately evaded rules designed to ensure that official communications are properly preserved. It was a bad look for a lady already under fire for any number of other “shady” dealings.

So, the Clinton campaign ginned up a story about collusion between the Trump campaign and Vladimir Putin, supported it with dubious, poorly sourced assertions and outright lies, and then peddled it to its friends in the intelligence and law enforcement communities. RussiaGate was born. Amplified by lapdog media outlets and pundits it became ubiquitous.

At the heart of this effort was Jake Sullivan. Sullivan is now the National Security Advisor to Joe Biden. In 2016 he was a foreign policy advisor to Hillary Clinton. Sullivan spent huge amounts of time making the circuit in D.C., pushing the RussiaGate narrative and lending his supposed “credibility” to support the idea that Donald Trump was somehow colluding with Putin and that Moscow was about to take control of the White House.

To understand just how patently absurd that assertion always was, perhaps it’s best to hone in on one of the key elements of the narrative that was being pushed. This concerns the idea that there was some sort of secret hotline between the Trump campaign and Moscow. The idea being peddled was that via some highly compartmented, super-secure communications mechanism, Putin and Trump were in direct communication and were conspiring to bring down the republic.

There never was any credible evidence to support this assertion. What the FBI established when it dug into the matter was the supposed Trump email server used for the “hotline” to Moscow was, in fact, not even under the control of the Trump campaign. It belonged to a marketing firm called Cendyn and was located in Lititz, Pennsylvania. The firm sent promotional emails out all over the world on behalf of multiple hotel chains, including Trump hotels.

Some of the routine promotional emails sent out by Cendyn that mentioned Trump hotels went to Alfa Bank in Moscow. That bank had maintained an office in New York since 2001.

A marketing firm in the pay of multiple hotel chains sent out promotional emails all over the world. Some of those emails ended up at a bank in Moscow.

This was the evidence relied upon by Sullivan and others in claiming that Trump was in collusion with Putin.

“The FBI’s investigation revealed that the email server at issue was not owned or operated by the Trump Organization but, rather, had been administrated by a mass-marketing email company that sent advertisements for Trump hotels and hundreds of other clients,” Durham wrote in his indictment of Hillary campaign lawyer Michael A. Sussmann recently.

Were it not so serious, the whole thing would be funny, because it is so absurd. No cyber ninja looked into this “connection” and believed it suggested a conspiracy to overthrow the government of the United States. No rational person ever looked at this ridiculous assertion and actually believed what was being peddled to the American people. They did not care. They understood that all anyone was going to hear from the lapdogs in the media was “Trump – Putin – collusion” and that would be enough.

Jake Sullivan was not a bystander in all this. He may, in fact, have been the key figure orchestrating this entire effort within the Clinton campaign. On October 31, 2016, he characterized the information regarding marketing emails for Trump hotels being sent to Alfa Bank this way.

“This could be the most direct link yet between Donald Trump and Moscow. Computer scientists have apparently uncovered a covert server linking the Trump Organization to a Russian-backed bank.”

All evidence shows that throughout the entire RussiaGate effort Sullivan was intimately involved inside Hillary Clinton’s campaign in orchestrating the smear campaign against President Trump. It also suggests strongly that after the election, Sullivan was at the center of an effort to continue pushing the narrative and attempting to destabilize the Trump administration. Yet, when he appeared before Congress in December 2017 to testify Sullivan suddenly appeared to have only fragmentary knowledge of any of the key facts involved.

Despite the fact that the entire RussiaGate lie was the creation of Fusion GPS a firm working for the Clinton campaign, by which Sullivan was employed, Jake claimed to have no idea where the information regarding Alfa Bank came from. He also claimed not to have understood that lawyers working for Clinton’s campaign were in her employ. In some cases, he claimed not to have even known for what law firms various lawyers with whom he met worked.

In Sullivan’s telling of the story to Congress, he appears as some sort of blithely passive and ignorant figure who simply repeated assertions brought to him by virtual unknowns without any attempt to vet the information. He assumed everyone was acting in good faith. He meant no harm.

It is an absurd contention and yet it sounds strangely familiar. In the aftermath of the Benghazi debacle, when it became clear that Mark Morrell, the head of Central Intelligence at the time, had altered the assessment of what happened on the ground to fit the desired White House narrative, Morrell ultimately admitted he had misstated the fact but claimed unnamed analysts somewhere in the Headquarters building had given him bad information that led to his assessment.

Sure, by the time Morrell talked to any analysts he was already buried in real-time reporting from the field telling him what was really going on. Of course, no analyst in a cubicle at Headquarters had any info that had not come from the field in the first place. In point of fact, the entire story was absurd, but it did not matter.

Morrell stuck to his story. Perhaps he was an idiot, but he had done nothing criminal. He skated, and he got his reward. When he left federal service, he went on to a cushy, well-paid job at a think tank aligned with the Democratic Party.

Let us hope that Jake Sullivan is not so lucky. The National Security Advisor to the President of the United States appears to have been involved in an effort to smear Donald Trump and prevent his election. It seems he then redoubled those efforts after the 2016 election and attempted to destabilize a sitting President.

I think we can safely say he is unfit to serve. The only question is – when will he be indicted?

https://andmagazine.com/talk/2021/12/03/will-jake-sullivan-be-indicted/

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We could fill a prison with Democrat operatives that have attacked this country.

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