Christopher Steele

Michael Sussmann, a senior lawyer for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, is currently on trial for lying to the FBI. The allegation is straightforward. As the election approached, Sussmann texted his old friend and fellow attorney, James Baker, requesting a brief, urgent meeting. Baker was the FBI’s top lawyer and Sussmann was a partner at Clinton’s election-law firm. They were friends from their days together at the Department of Justice and continued to know each other socially. According to the indictment, Sussmann told Baker he was coming solely to help the Bureau and not on behalf of any client.

The month of May won’t be a merry one for Michael Sussmann, one of Hillary Clinton’s top lawyers at her favorite election law firm Perkins Coie, who is facing a criminal charge of lying to the FBI when he passed information to the Bureau’s general counsel, James Baker. Sussman stated explicitly that he was acting as a “good citizen,” not as a lawyer for Trump’s election opponents. Wink, wink. Nudge, nudge. The tip was false. It described a secret, traitorous back-channel connection between candidate Trump and the Kremlin and included some “white papers” as “proof.” But that deceit is not part of this criminal charge.

Part I of this article demonstrated that a conspiracy to smear Donald Trump with false allegations of collusion with Russia took place, with Hillary Clinton at its head. This second part will show the FBI was an active participant in the conspiracy. The FBI smoking gun has been hiding in plain sight. In June 2018 Inspector General for the Department of Justice Michael Horowitz released his report on the FBI’s Clinton email investigation, including FBI director James Comey’s drafting of a surprise press release announcing no prosecution for Clinton, written before the full investigation was even complete.

Let's connect the dots between John Durham, Russiagate, the FBI, and Hillary Clinton. They strongly suggest the Clinton campaign ran a sophisticated, multi-prong coordinated intelligence operation against Trump with either the active or tacit support of the FBI. In the case of prong one, the dossier, the Clinton campaign hired MI6 intelligence officer Christopher Steele. The hiring was through its law firm, Perkins Coie, which hired Fusion GPS, which hired Steele to hide the funding source. The use of the law firm as a cutout allowed Hillary to deny that she'd funded the dossier, and the media to claim for a year or more that it was actually the Republicans themselves who paid for it.

Ultimately, I suspect, John Durham will break your heart. At least, he will if you think, as I once hoped, that he was going to get to the bottom of the soft coup that was the Russia Collusion Hoax. I admit that I have been bucked up, somewhat, by Durham’s three indictments. Why only somewhat? First, I remember the many long months of silence. He didn’t call, didn’t write. I began to think he didn’t care. Then, in August of 2020, the radio crackled briefly to life. Amazing! John Durham, who had initially been presented as a sort of super Canadian Mounty, a prosecutor who always got his man, had come in from the cold with that scary facial hair and flashing spectacles with a real, honest-to-goodness indictment. At first blush, anyway, it seemed like a choice one.

Rod Rosenstein’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee was quiet, calm, almost bemused. But the tale he told was devastating — to the FBI, the Department of Justice, and the Mueller investigation. It destroyed three years of media narrative about ‘Trump-Russia’ collusion. It’s obvious now why Senate Democrats want to kill all future hearings on the topic. They lack the votes to do it, but it’s the thought that counts. Testifying under oath, Rosenstein laid out a series of fundamental problems plaguing the entire collusion investigation. Actually, he did even more.

This article is in The Spectator’s January 2020 US edition. Subscribe here.Crime in Progress is, inadvertently, the cruelest book ever written about the American media. Its authors, Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch, are the two former Wall Street Journal reporters who founded the DC-based consultancy Fusion GPS. In 2016, the Hillary Clinton campaign paid them to use their former media colleagues to push a conspiracy theory smearing her Republican opponent, Donald Trump. The crime is still in progress. To help top-notch journalists market the fantasy that one of the world’s most familiar faces was a secret Russian spy, Fusion GPS co-ordinated with the FBI to forge a series of ‘intelligence reports’.

This article is in The Spectator’s inaugural US edition. Subscribe here to get yours. More official reports, reprimands and (probably) indictments are to come in the Great Get Trump imbroglio of 2016 to 2019. But it is not too early to begin an autopsy of the greatest political scandal in American history. The patient is dead, dead, dead, and the last doctors in the room are the pathologists. The lawyers crowding the corridor outside the operating theater are interested not in resuscitating the corpse but in distributing and gorging upon its assets.

We hear lots of chatter about the possible appointment of a Special Counsel to investigate how the Obama administration may have abused the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Yet little has been said about the secret court system itself and how easy it is for corrupt government officials to spy on Americans. A court system which works on closed proceedings, classified decisions and only a government attorney present, is ripe for just the sort of misuse that’s alleged to have occurred in the Russia investigation.

There are two Trump-Russia ‘conspiracies’. In one, the US President is bought or blackmailed by the Kremlin. In the other, the FBI and the intelligences agencies — the ‘deep state’ — commit a monstrous abuse of power to try to overturn the election result. The first conspiracy is described in the ‘dossier’ written by a former British intelligence officer, Christopher Steele; the second, in a series of memos and leaks over the past week, from Congressional Republicans defending Donald Trump. They accuse Steele of setting out to destroy Trump for money. They want to see him prosecuted for ‘lying’ to the FBI about his contacts with journalists.