Special Counsel John Durham has subpoenaed witnesses from the 2016 Hillary campaign and the DNC to appear as witnesses in the trial of Michael Sussman. Durham is convinced that the gathering and releasing of questionable (and by questionable, I mean totally false) links between Russia and Donald Trump. Durham is operating under a belief that this was a joint venture meant to smear Trump. Sussmann is accused of lying to the FBI when he went to give false information about Trump.
Hillary’s campaign, the DNC, Perkins Coie law firm, and Fusion GPS are working together to try to prevent Durham from gaining evidence of their duplicity. They now claim that Fusion GPS provided legal advice to Perkins Coie, but, Glenn Simpson wrote in a book he published that Marc Elias of Perkins Coie approached him to do opposition research. Also, he spread what he found in major media outlets, so what he was doing was in no way confidential.
Earlier this month, Durham said that Fusion GPS:
“Was not primarily providing or supporting expertise relating to legal advice; instead, it appears that the investigative firm’s primary, if not sole, function was to generate opposition research materials that the firm then shared widely.”
Durham’s work so far identifies:
“Tech Executive-1” Rodney Joffe, “Originator-1” April Lorenzen of the information services firm Zetalyitcs, and other researchers began to discuss “searching for and collecting derogatory internet data about the online activities of Donald Trump and his associates.”
Durham continued:
“The joint venture continued and crystalized in August 2016,” when Sussmann, Joffe, and “agents of the Clinton Campaign” met. Durham pointed to a meeting held on August 12, 2016, where Sussmann, Joffe, Elias, and the co-founder of Fusion GPS met to discuss “the same Russian Bank-1 allegations that the defendant would later bring to the FBI.”
“The parties agreed to conduct work in the hope that it would benefit the Clinton Campaign, namely gathering and disseminating purportedly derogatory data regarding Trump and his associates’ internet activities,” Durham wrote. “The evidence will show that as a result of these conversations and during this same time period, Tech Executive-1 did exactly that: he tasked employees from multiple Internet companies and a university working under a pending national security contract to mine and gather vast amounts of internet metadata in order to support an ‘inference’ and ‘narrative’ tying the candidate to Russia.”
With any luck at all, Sussmann will be the first person to go to prison over the Russian collusion hoax and with a bit more luck, he will be far from the last.
