Details in Michael Sussmann’s Indictment Reveal Conspiracy Against Trump

Loading

By Jeff Carlson and Hans Mahncke

On Sept. 17, former Perkins Coie partner and Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann was arraigned on a single-count charge of lying to the FBI. The charge stems from special counsel John Durham’s investigation into the origins of the Russia probe that plagued the presidency of Donald Trump.
 
The indictment of Sussmann, a cybersecurity specialist, makes clear that a group of individuals worked with him to devise allegations regarding a secret communications channel between the Trump Organization and Russia’s Alfa Bank. The Durham indictment takes pains to note that Sussmann assisted in the drafting and dissemination of materials that were provided to the FBI and media.
 
The allegations were passed by Sussmann to the FBI in a successful attempt to instigate an FBI investigation of Trump under false pretenses. The Alfa allegations also were used to lend weight to the allegations made in the Steele dossier, which up to this point, had failed to gain material traction within the FBI and the media.
 
Sussmann is charged with lying to former FBI General Counsel James Baker during a Sep. 19, 2016, meeting that had been initiated by Sussmann. At this meeting, in which Sussmann informed Baker of the Alfa allegations, he allegedly told Baker that he was there only in his capacity as a private citizen. Sussmann would later repeat his claim that he was acting in a personal capacity when he reported the Alfa allegations to another undisclosed government agency.
 
 
Although Sussmann told Baker that he wasn’t delivering the information on behalf of any client, the indictment details that Sussmann billed his meeting with Baker to the Clinton campaign.
 
As a result of the allegations that Sussmann provided to Baker, the FBI opened an investigation examining if Alfa Bank was used as a conduit between Trump’s campaign and the Kremlin. According to Durham, the FBI wouldn’t have opened an investigation without the manufactured information that had been provided by Sussmann.
 
Notably, Durham’s indictment, which included only the single-count charge of lying to the FBI, could have been presented to the court in just a few paragraphs. However, Durham chose to submit a 27-page indictment that included many specific details which aren’t immediately relevant to the false statement charge.
 
The level of details in the Sussmann indictment gives potential insight into the direction Durham’s investigation may have taken.
 
Why Indictment Reads Like Conspiracy Indictment
 
Although the indictment is nominally about Sussmann’s false statement, in reality, it’s more akin to a conspiracy charge, specifically a conspiracy to use false pretenses to trigger an FBI investigation of Trump.
 
Durham never mentions the word conspiracy, but almost the entirety of his indictment is dedicated to detailing the coordinated actions of the parties involved.
 
The Sussmann indictment begins by stating that in October 2016, “multiple media outlets reported that U.S. government authorities had received and were investigating allegations concerning a purported secret channel of communications between the Trump Organization, owned by Donald J. Trump, and a particular Russian bank.”
 
 
The unwritten allegation expressed in Durham’s opening is that a group of Clinton campaign operatives conspired to provide the FBI with false information in the hope that this would trigger an FBI investigation that would damage Trump’s chances in the Nov. 2016 presidential election. By focusing on October 2016 news reports about the FBI’s investigation of Trump, Durham established at the outset that the object of the conspiracy was achieved.
 
By their own admission, the purported conspirators understood that anyone with the requisite technical knowledge would ultimately dismiss the data that Sussmann gave the FBI. Durham’s indictment noted that one of the participants in Sussmann’s group privately called the secret communications channel allegation “a red herring.”
 
Another participant admitted that they would need “to expose every trick we have in our bag to even make a very weak association,” adding “The only thing that drive[s] us at this point is that we just do not like [Trump].”
 
But the leaders of the purported conspiracy weren’t particularly concerned if the allegations would stand up to scrutiny. Nor did they expect that Trump or any of his associates would actually be prosecuted. The desired outcome was media reporting that the FBI was looking into the Trump–Russia allegations–which is precisely what transpired.
 
As the indictment emphasizes, the purported conspiracy was about shaping a narrative about secret communications between Trump and the Kremlin. That narrative would then be amplified by media reports of an FBI investigation which, in turn, would reinforce the Clinton campaign’s messaging.
 
Why the Sussmann Indictment Matters
 
Other than Sussmann himself, none of the individuals involved in the purported conspiracy are named in the indictment but their generalized description provides some insight into their identities. The main parties are described by Durham as “Tech Executive-1,” a long-standing client of Sussmann’s who is alleged to have provided Sussmann with data about alleged contacts between the Trump and Alfa servers, and “​​Originator-1,” the person who allegedly compiled the data.

Read more
 

0 0 votes
Article Rating
Subscribe
Notify of
14 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments

Trump was not chosen by the Deep State. He was chosen by the American People.

That could not stand.

It’s just common sense to want fair and free elections for all people, not special exploitation of the poor or minorities by using Billions to buy/copy their vote.

There’s never going to be a “Biden Tower”, now is there? Xi will get one, most likely…

Hmmm… lying to FBI agents. Are there any agents telling those making charges that they don’t really think Sussmann lied, as there were for Gen. Flynn? Let’s watch and see if Sussmann receives the same persecution as Gen. Flynn received.

Well, there you have it, just as we had already surmised. The accusations against Trump were never anything more than political theater. From this accusation, all the others sprouted. The FBI knew or suspected that the charges were concocted, but proceeded none the less. Compare that to the laptop scandal.

Yeah, Trump was targeted for destruction… but why? He proved to be supremely competent and capable, succeeding at every endeavor when not effectively blocked by Democrats hating him more than being committed to serving the country. We can evaluate his success by comparing it to idiot Biden’s program of doing the opposite of everything Trump did, resulting in abject and complete failure on all counts.

I’m not sure I feel any better having my well-founded suspicions confirmed. I literally want to see heads roll. It is essential.

Trump has been “targeted for destruction” by way of exposing the truth about what he actually is.

Greg I agree Trump is actually totally innocent.
Now that they set the rules lets dig into Biden and his dubious finances. And everyone that helped him get installed.

Hell, the dirt on idiot Biden and the Biden Crime Family lays right on the surface, no digging required. All that is necessary is a non-corrupt DOJ that will apply justice equally across the board.

If they wanted to dig, they could find out how much idiot Biden is being paid by Pfizer to vaccinate everything that walks and talks. Get his full tax returns, Hunter’s, Jill’s, James’, anyone and everyone associated with them. Dig into every aspect of their public and private lives, just in case they are involved. Just like they wanted to do with Trump.

Well, gee, Greggie… where IS that “truth”? Do you expose the “truth” by composing lies, then spreading those?

Here’s some: Republican Party operatives charged with arranging illegal Trump campaign contribution

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. prosecutors on Monday unsealed criminal charges against two longtime Republican Party operatives, accusing them of illegally funneling a foreign campaign contribution to former President Donald Trump in 2016.

According to an indictment unsealed in federal court in the District of Columbia, Jesse Benton and Doug Wead “conspired to illegally funnel thousands of dollars of foreign money from a Russian foreign national into an election for the Office of President of the United States of America.”

U.S. law bans foreign nationals from donating money to presidential campaigns.

According to the indictment, Benton and Wead helped a Russian national get a ticket to a fundraiser with Trump in Pennsylvania in September 2016.

The Russian, who was not identified in the indictment, donated $25,000 to political action committees associated with Trump in order to attend the event, according to prosecutors.

But the true source of the donation was concealed from the Trump campaign, the indictment said, because the payment was secretly funneled through Benton, who acted as a “straw donor.”

Benton, 43, previously managed campaigns for Republican Senators Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul of Kentucky before he was convicted for his role in a political endorsement scheme. Benton avoided jail time and received a presidential pardon in December 2020 from Trump.

Wead, 75, worked as a senior adviser on multiple presidential campaigns and ran for Congress as a Republican in 1992.

It was not yet clear if the two had engaged legal counsel.

https://news.yahoo.com/republican-party-operatives-charged-arranging-231737701.html

Here you go, Comrade Greggie:

Ng Lap Seng

Someone illegally (allegedly) collecting campaign funds for Trump does not involve Trump. It only shows how desperate you are to find something to blame him for and how clean he himself actually was. You are obsessed with hating Trump because he shows how our government SHOULD operate and exposes how it is currently abused to enrich the politicians while disregarding the citizens.

Here we have a story exposing the false accusations the left makes about Russians supporting the Trump campaign and along comes you, the textbook useful idiot, with an accusation, unfounded, about Russians aiding the Trump campaign. You need a mirror to see how absolutely ridiculous you consistently look.

If you want campaign finance violations, go investigate AOC, Talib and Omar. With Omar you can lump in income tax fraud and immigration fraud.

Your post is just a weak side show for lefty straw grabbers. You got played for two years with Russian collusion and learned nothing. It seems you’ve become a punch line here.

Uniparty operatives?

Yeah.

Trump represents the Majority: non-partisans.

Us.

If you are a Republican it is intensely important you remember that for 2 years the Rove/Bush Junta yelled VOTE CLINTON!!?*^&#!!?#%&*
Many radical left GOP say “What if does it make now?”!

As Sun said 2,500 years ago, and Alexander said 2,400 years ago “KNOW YOUR ENEMY!”! The enemy of the GOP is , and has been fo 40 years, GWB!

Dec ’16 NYT said (rightly IMHO!) that the $500,000,000 ($half billion) The Rove/Bush super PACs gave Clinton caused millions of “D” to “stay home”, giving Don a clear victory. (Except to GWB’s BFFs Antifa and BLM)For those <50 these are the same radical left GOP Super PACs GWB’s girl Lerner green lighted! While harassing and “inadvertently” releasing Confidential donor lists on Ronny Supper PACs .

DISCLAIMEER:
I have been conservative 70 years. Voted Ronny 9 times! I have said for 34 years GWB is a radical leftist “fifth columnist”! I clearly am biased. .

Biden Security Adviser Jake Sullivan Tied to Alleged 2016 Clinton Scheme to Co-Opt the CIA and FBI to Tar Trump

White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan figures prominently in a grand jury investigation run by Special Counsel John Durham into an alleged 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign scheme to use both the FBI and CIA to tar Donald Trump as a colluder with Russia, according to people familiar with the criminal probe, which they say has broadened into a conspiracy case.

Sullivan is facing scrutiny, sources say, over potentially false statements he made about his involvement in the effort, which continued after the election and into 2017. As a senior foreign policy adviser to Clinton, Sullivan spearheaded what was known inside her campaign as a “confidential project” to link Trump to the Kremlin through dubious email-server records provided to the agencies, said the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Last week, Michael A. Sussmann, a partner in Perkins Coie, a law firm representing the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee, was indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of making false statements to the FBI about his clients and their motives behind planting the rumor, at the highest levels of the FBI, of a secret Trump-Russia server. After a months-long investigation, the FBI found no merit to the rumor.

The grand jury indicated in its lengthy indictment that several people were involved in the alleged conspiracy to mislead the FBI and trigger an investigation of the Republican presidential candidate — including Sullivan, who was described by his campaign position but not identified by name.

The Sussmann indictment and the Alfa Bank saga: A preview of coming attractions

In light of Liberty Unyielding saddling up to ride off into the sunset today, I’ve been working on a final “timeline” article that assembles some general-theory thoughts about where John Durham’s indictment of Michael Sussmann, and Sussmann’s key connection with the Alfa Bank subplot in Spygate/Russiagate, fit into the whole picture.

As often happens, time and subsequent thought have clarified for me that (a) this isn’t going to be completed in the next three hours (i.e., before the end of 3 October 2021 on the East coast), and (b) posting it as a farewell article is probably not the best approach anyway.

Instead, the lengthy article itself will appear as the first feature since December 2015 at my old blog, the Optimistic Conservative. (I will, however, add a Web Crawler headline for it at LU once it’s gone to post. As noted in our farewell to readers this past week, the LU archive will remain live for the foreseeable future, although comments will close out in a few days.)

The purpose of this present article is to offer a much-abbreviated preview of the longer one to come.

LU published several articles in September after the Sussmann indictment was announced; see here https://libertyunyielding.com/2021/09/16/lying-to-fbi-durham-indictment-snags-perkins-coie-lawyer-at-center-of-russiagate/, here https://libertyunyielding.com/2021/09/18/indictment-exposes-2nd-leg-of-dems-russia-collusion-smear/, and here https://libertyunyielding.com/2021/09/18/indictment-exposes-2nd-leg-of-dems-russia-collusion-smear/

My principal assessment from a survey of current and past analyses, including my own, is that the Sussmann indictment, which functions as a sort of “Durham report” to date in laying out the potential elements of a conspiracy, effectively fingers the Alfa Bank subplot as an intentional conspiracy, and suggests it’s the key to unwinding the whole ball of string.

The timing of three core events in the Alfa Bank plotline, in 2016 and 2017, reinforces this deduction. There is also a connection with a much more recent event.

The recent event is the eye-catching shift of millions of IP addresses from control by the Pentagon to a tiny, no-background company in Boca Raton, on 20 January 2021, three minutes before Trump’s term ended. Those same IP addresses shifted from the Florida company back to the Pentagon on 7 September 2021, shortly before Durham’s indictment of Michael Sussmann was filed.

The connection with the Alfa Bank subplot is through people, not through cyber evidence or other collateral clues. The proprietor of the small Florida company, Raymond Saulino of Global Resource Systems, LLC, is a long-time associate of a tech expert – Robert Joffe – who is probably “Tech Executive-1” from the Sussmann indictment. (Sussmann represented Joffe during the timeframe covered by the indictment.)

Indeed, Joffe was interviewed by media about Saulino back in April 2021, when the mainstream media became aware of the IP address shift in January.

But it appears to me that the IP address shift itself is relevant to the parade of facts, connections, and methods that make up the working story of Spygate and Russiagate. I can’t tell how much Durham already sees, but it looks likely to me that, as Durham’s work unfolds, we haven’t seen the last of the Pentagon IP addresses. Their exploitation is a method, as an opportunity in cyberspace, that hasn’t previously been considered in the general-public treatments of Spygate, as they relate to Trump and his associates, the 2016 election, Russia, Hillary Clinton, or any other element.

If there was a group of so-called “Concerned Nerds” (the going-in proposition of the Alfa Bank-Trump narrative, retailed by the media in 2016), and they included both Joffe and Saulino, we can bet that the Concerned Nerds were well aware of the situation of the Pentagon IP addresses in 2016. Someone they were doing work for probably was as well. More on that in the article to come.

As for the core events in the Alfa Bank timeline, they occurred in March 2016, May 2016, and February-March 2017. The remarkable interest of each of these passages lies in their overlay with the other things going on in Spygate/Russiagate.

What becomes clear with the overlay and the hindsight is that none of this could have been a coincidence. Here’s an excerpt from the article:

[T]he top actors in this “problem set” were not working in a vacuum, or in information stovepipes. People like Hillary Clinton, the circle of advisers she had in common with Barack Obama, Obama himself, and several of his senior officials such as John Brennan, Loretta Lynch, James Comey, and Susan Rice, could not have been in ignorance of the different things that were going on at the same exact time.

Those different things include the Alfa Bank subplot. The Sussmann indictment is about events that occurred mostly between May and October 2016, but we know of one in March 2016 that took place on what may be the most arresting date of all – even though it was seemingly coincidental, although not unimportant, in the “Alfa Bank-Trump” server timeline.

Close followers of the Alfa Bank drama will recognize 4 May 2016 as the day the supposedly “suspicious” server contacts – apparent DNS lookups – began between the Alfa Bank server and a server contracted by the event-promotion company Cendyn, which had had the Trump Hotels as a client. We look at that timeframe as well, because it is loaded with the freight of Spygate/Russiagate decision-making and actions by the principals.

Lesser known, but equally important, is the period February-March 2017, when the Sussmann indictment refers to a few contacts between Sussmann and federal agencies, and follow-on reporting has highlighted collaboration between continuing actors like Jake Sullivan and Daniel Jones as the Trump term got underway.

But the server exchanges of mid-2016 (which had ended in September 2016) were briefly revived in exactly that period, according to a court filing by Alfa Bank in Pennsylvania (where the Cendyn-contracted server was located) in June 2020. And for intensity of interest, the Sussmann-related events, and even the activities of Sullivan and Jones, only scratch the surface. The other things being done by James Comey, for example, and individuals on Capitol Hill, show that at the time of the three mass flurries of server contacts recounted in the Alfa Bank court filing, there was apparently a major decision-making and planning effort underway for a new phase of Spygate.

As I will argue in the article, “coincidences are exactly what cue law enforcement to investigate the hypothesis of a conspiracy. The material events of a conspiracy are rarely the first things identified as a conspiracy. It’s common motives, common timing, and common knowledge, often perceived at first as circumstantial, that cause investigators to suspect a conspiracy.”

Looking for patterns in “coincidences” is the essence of analysis. The probability of conspiracy is also escalated by the need for it, in the known context: “[T]he Hillary campaign per se did only some of the work for this common enterprise [i.e., Spygate/Russiagate]. A great deal of it was done by agencies of the federal executive, from Susan Rice and her ‘unmasking’ spreadsheets and Brennan and his ‘foreign intelligence,’ to the DOJ/FBI honchoing a surveillance effort falsely purported as legitimate (and thus inspectable and potentially usable before the public), and assets of the Pentagon (NSA, the Office of Net Assessment) being used to target and exploit persons in Trump’s orbit – in ways that were much less inspectable or potentially usable.”

The forthcoming article argues that, “in light of the increasing obviousness of a common enterprise, it is less and less possible that coincidences in a timeline are mere coincidences.” The moving parts weren’t moving without a guiding hand and a unified purpose.

The Alfa Bank subplot looks less and less like it was an exploitation (by Hillary and the DNC) of a coincidence involving DNS lookups between servers. It looks more, in fact, like something concocted by planners, at the same time other elements of Spygate were being concocted.

The Pentagon IP addresses, in hindsight, might have served in 2016 as a method of work in the common enterprise, like the actions undertaken through other federal agencies – not directly by the Hillary campaign – mentioned above.

I look forward to interested readers joining me at the Optimistic Conservative for the full-length discussion, which should be posted by Tuesday 5 October at the latest. Until then, farewell and Godspeed from the Liberty Unyielding outpost.

Let freedom ring.

The Sussmann indictment and the Alfa Bank saga: A preview of coming attractions