‘Russiagate’ is indeed worse than Watergate. Here’s why — Analysis

The fascinating thing about special counsel John Durham’s investigation is that it keeps revealing things about “Russiagate” almost incidentally, in seemingly unrelated procedural filings concerning prosecutions of process crimes. 

In the case of a highly-qualified lawyer who was charged with lying about the FBI, a conflict-of interest statement highlighted a Democrat plot against President Donald Trump. The FBI also received scurrilous claims against the lawyer. 

Back in September, Durham charged Michael Sussmann – partner in the DC law firm Perkins Coie, on retainer to the Democratic National Committee – with lying to the FBI. Sussmann allegedly fed the discredited “Alfa Bank” story to the FBI general counsel James A. Baker, claiming he was not acting on anyone’s behalf, while actually coordinating with a tech executive and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

Durham, a Durham attorney filed a Motion to Investigate Potential Conflicts Of Interest in Sussmann’s case on Friday. The 13-page document pointed out that the legal firm representing Sussmann – Latham & Watkins LLP – previously represented his firm of Perkins Coie, its former partner Marc Elias, and the Clinton campaign, all in dealings with the Durham investigation.

So far, so boring – except that the filing also lays out the role of a tech company that exploited access to Trump Tower, another Trump-owned building, a “healthcare provider,” and even “the Executive Office of the President of the United States” (EOP) in order to “mine Internet data to establish ‘an inference’ and ‘narrative’ tying then-candidate Trump to Russia.”

The Durham documents are not naming the company or executive but they were identified as Rodney Joffe (New York Times) and Neustar (by Durham). Durham claims that Neustar was employed by the Obama government. “access and maintain dedicated servers for the EOP as part of a sensitive arrangement whereby it provided DNS resolution services,”These servers have been available to them since at most 2014.

Recall that Sussmann was accused of “coordinating” the tech company’s work with the Clinton campaign, including feeding the Alfa Bank story to the FBI. He allegedly also leaked the story to the press, which then ran multiple articles about the FBI investigation – which were promoted by Clinton herself as well as her aide Jake Sullivan, now President Joe Biden’s national security adviser.

According to Durham, Sussmann also packaged the false Alfa Bank story with another claim that came from Joffe and Neustar – that Trump and his aides used “Russian-made wireless phones” at the White House – and fed it to the CIA, on February 9, 2017, almost three weeks into Trump’s presidency.  Durham “identified no support for these allegations”Joffe.

The FBI cannot spy on Americans without a warrant while the CIA can’t spy on US soil. How did the two agencies react to attempts to use them to their political advantage? Well, we know that the FBI was instrumental in the ploy to pressure Trump’s national security adviser Michael Flynn to resign over allegedly lying about his perfectly legitimate conversations with the Russian ambassador to the US. 

The CIA’s then-director, and Trump-hater confirmed John Brennan, actually informed President Barack Obama that Clinton had approved a plan to denigrate Trump. “stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security service.”A probe was opened by the FBI three days later. “Crossfire Hurricane” – targeting not Clinton, but Trump.

Previously, Durham’s probe has revealed the primary sub-source of the infamous “Steele Dossier” – another smear job against Trump, funded by the Clinton campaign, using Perkins Coie, Elias, and the DNC as cutouts – by indicting Igor Danchenko. Former Brookings Institute researcher Christopher Steele allegedly received the bizarre allegations regarding Trump and Russia from him. This dossier was used later by FBI for the justification of the FISA court application to spy upon Trump in the course of his presidency and during the campaign. 

Kevin Clinesmith was an FBI lawyer who admitted that Page falsified evidence in order to secure the FISA warrant. Instead of a fine, Clinesmith received a minor charge for lying to federal agents. A friendly judge sentenced him to probation and his law licence was reinstated. This is a stunning display of Washington partisan standards. 

The narrative that emerges from all these indictments is that Clinton’s 2016 campaign paid a British spy to manufacture a “dossier” of lies against Trump, used a tech company with access to White House servers to manufacture another set of lies, and fed both to the FBI and the CIA – with full knowledge of the Obama administration – all in a bid to prevent Trump from winning the election, and later to sabotage his presidency. That would make “Russiagate” orders of magnitude worse than Watergate, the scandal involving a 1972 burglary of DNC offices that ended up forcing President Richard Nixon to resign a year later.

So obviously, almost every corporate press outlet in the US – 99% of which had endorsed Clinton in 2016, after all – spent the past five years screaming about the (literally nonexistent) Trump-Russia “collusion” and describing it as “worse than Watergate.” Projection is the oldest play in the propaganda book, after all.