21 May 22
Let us begin with positions on Hillary Clinton because ultimately, that’s where this ends. It matters not that Mook maligned Clinton in day four of the impotent John Durham Special Counsel trial of Michael Sussmann testifying that she personally approved the Russian collusion scheme leveled against candidate and then president Donald J. Trump. Here’s why.
Recall remarks from a previous article covering days one and two of this dog and pony show designed to go nowhere but to concealment and institutional preservation; and whereby we hold that Clinton, who has never been elected for anything other than Senator, is an expendable commodity who can be sacrificed and ejected from the pack if need be. Previously, I put it like this,
“Clinton duped ’em all!” That’s what is forthcoming from Durham and it precludes the staking of any prominent heads as long contended. Sussmann is on trial for the process crime of a single count of lying to the FBI and process crimes are the historical mechanisms of cover-up and clean-up. Durham was doomed from the start and never intended to get out of the blocks.
For anyone considering that any future prosecution of Hillary Clinton and her campaign is somehow a victory, I urge caution and pragmatism there, too. From the second article above, “Perhaps Durham will bend back on Clinton but she’s now irrelevant and disposable and so any such development would become nothing more than fat to chew-on for the partisans assuming that eventually happens. Moreover, it would be irrelevant given that Clinton has never been elected for anything other than Senator; she’s only been a failed candidate beyond her appointment as Secretary of State.”
A Clinton prosecution would amount to no more than a constructed effort to compartmentalize the extreme criminal culpability of a wide swath of individuals and entities into an expendable container while protecting the DOJ and FBI officials caught-up in the Durham/Mueller overlay outlined above.
Political Moonshine
It’s the last paragraph about the compartmentalization of extreme criminal culpability into a single and expendable container that’s most important. Charles Darwin and the law of nature prevail in the jungle of geopolitics and if grandma wildebeest is so diseased and debilitated such that she compromises the collective Democratic herd, they’ll eject her from that herd and sacrifice her to the lions in an instance; especially in the interests of self-preservation and institutional preservation.
Yahoo News delivers the details on Mook’s testimony [emphasis added],
Robby Mook, Clinton’s campaign chief, said in federal court that as the campaign against Trump heated up in the late summer and early fall of 2016, Marc Elias, who was then a lawyer with the Perkins Coie law firm and served as the campaign’s top legal adviser, told Mook that “people with expertise” in cyberactivity had briefed the campaign on data alleging links between the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank, a Russian financial institution with ties to the Kremlin.
[…]
The FBI quickly determined that the purported connection between the Russian bank and the Trump Organization was implausible, and Michael Sussmann, Elias’s then law partner who brought the claims to the FBI, has since been indicted by Justice Department special counsel John Durham on charges he lied to the bureau’s general counsel to hide his connection to the Clinton campaign.
[…]
After learning about the Alfa Bank allegations, the source of which Mook said was unknown to him, Mook said his “recollection is we decided to give it to a reporter so the reporter could pin it down more.” He said the Clinton campaign itself did not have sufficient data or expertise to confirm the accuracy of the information itself.
After consulting with Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, Mook said he told Clinton that the campaign wanted to share the Alfa Bank information with the media and “she agreed to that.” One of the main purposes of giving the data to the media was so that a reporter could investigate and try to confirm it, Mook said.
The campaign subsequently did make the information available to Eric Lichtblau, then with the New York Times, as well as a reporter for the online magazine Slate. Mook, though, was vague about precisely who in the campaign’s “press department” did the leaking.
On Oct. 31, 2016, days before the election, Slate published a lengthy story about the purported Alfa Bank/Trump link under the headline “Was a Trump Server Communicating With Russia?” That same day, the New York Times published a story by Lichtblau and another journalist claiming that for much of the summer of 2016, the FBI had been pursuing a “widening investigation” of possible Trump links to Russia that included chasing a lead regarding a possible Trump/Alfa Bank communications link.
Yahoo News
Subsequently, Clinton made this social media post noting current Biden National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan’s involvement – it’s all in the family, folks:
Relative to Mook’s maligning of Clinton and further of Perkins Coie attorney Marc Elias, we draw back on old news as covered by The Federalist. Therein, recall that,
Top U.S. intelligence officials were so concerned heading into the 2016 election that the Russians were aware of and potentially manipulating Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s plans to smear Donald Trump as a Russian agent that they personally briefed President Barack Obama on the matter, newly declassified Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) documents show. CIA officials also requested that the FBI investigate Russian knowledge of the Clinton campaign’s collusion smear operation.
Newly declassified handwritten notes from former CIA Director John Brennan show that the U.S. intelligence community knew in 2016 that Russian intelligence was actively monitoring, and potentially injecting disinformation into, Clinton’s anti-Trump collusion narrative. The intelligence concerning Russia’s knowledge of Clinton’s campaign plans was so concerning to Brennan and other national security officials that they personally informed Obama of the matter in the Oval Office in the summer of 2016. The handwritten notes from Brennan were declassified by Director of National Intelligence (DNI) John Ratcliffe and provided to Congress on Tuesday afternoon.
The Federalist
This is old news. Nothing new. We’ve covered and evidenced this and the broader case against Brennan for a very long time. In fact, Obama effectively signed-off on the Russian collusion scandal in advance drawing back to mid-2016. Read the “concern” and the need to establish investigations into it as the same premise for Durham’s Special Counsel appointment altogether: clean-up and cover-up. Read that as Obama dispatching Brennan to sow the narrative and pretext for it.
So then, what did Mook deliver with his maligning of Clinton? Exactly what he was supposed to according to the predetermined Barr/Durham clean-up/cover-up operation script: “Clinton duped ’em all!” That’s all Durham is producing and it precludes the staking of any prominent heads as I’ve long contended and evidenced because the Durham Special Counsel designed in scope by a corrupt AG William Barr contains a hard stop between private entities and individuals and federal agencies, departments and institutions. It will preclude Durham from breaching that firewall to move on officials in the FBI and DOJ recalling that they fall under the purview of the Executive – the nation’s chief law enforcement officer – which was occupied by Obama at the time the genesis and approval of the Russian collusion scheme.
Durham was doomed from the start and never intended to get out of the blocks. It’s why there are no substantive crimes charged in the flimsy Durham indictments; just process crimes that are historically leveraged in clean-up and cover-up operations. Durham was never intended to run the race; much less win it.
As I warned on 01 Jan 20: “I would urge caution here and for these admittedly pessimistic but factually grounded reasons. For one, investigations are opened for one of two purposes: a) to reveal crimes and prosecute crimes -or- b) to conceal crimes and then seal away evidence of those crimes. For the balance of those reasons, read this: A Beholden and Bad Bill Barr Betrayed the Boss.
-End-
RESOURCES
The previous articles in this sub-series:
- Durham: Deflection and Clean Up or Delivery of Justice?
- An Evidenced Reminder to Temper Expectations About Durham – He’s the Clean-up and Cover-up Operation
- Clinton Duped ‘Em All! The Fraud Extends to Durham in Flimsy but Clear Cover-up and Clean-up Strategy: Days 1 and 2
- Durham Day 3: Carve-out for FBI General Counsel James Baker Confirmed in Clean-up, Cover-up Operation
DOJ webpage dedicated to Durham Special Counsel: https://www.justice.gov/sco-durham
Sussmann indictment / “Special Counsel John Durham today announced that a federal grand jury returned an indictment in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia charging Michael A. Sussmann, 57, a Washington, D.C.-based attorney, with making a false statement to the FBI on Sept. 19, 2016.” / press release.
Danchenko indictment / “Special Counsel John Durham today announced that a federal grand jury returned an indictment in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia charging Igor Danchenko, 43, a Russian citizen residing in Virginia, with five counts of making false statements to the FBI.” / press release.
[…] Durham Day 4: Mook Maligns Clinton and It Matters Not, Clean-up and Cover-up Moves Forward […]