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New emails released as part of the “Twitter Files” show the company appears to have misled reporters, politicians, and the public, allowing a high-level disinformation operation to fester in government and media. A comparison of emails uncovered by Matt Taibbi with the company’s public statements in 2018 reveals serious discrepancies.
This operation, known as Hamilton 68, was founded by former FBI agent and current MSNBC contributor Clint Watts. It functions as a digital “dashboard” where journalists and academics can gauge alleged “Russian disinformation” being spread by specific lists of people online.
Taibbi’s latest report on internal Twitter documents included emails from former Head of Trust and Safety Yoel Roth proving the company knew the anti-Trump dashboard was spreading false information that wrongfully classified Americans as Russian bots. This allowed the data dashboard to fuel false media and Democrat claims that President Donald Trump had treasonously colluded with Russia, hamstringing Trump’s execution of his presidential duties.
Taibbi discovered that Twitter “reverse-engineered” Hamilton 68’s methodology to recreate its highly publicized list of alleged Russian bots. Publicly, though, Twitter was feigning ignorance.
In a Jan. 3, 2018 email, Roth said his reverse-engineering proved Hamilton 68’s claims of providing data to prove Russian disinformation was festering on social media were “totally bogus.”
“They don’t know that we have the list, though, and they’ve refused to release it,” he wrote.
Roth recommended hitting the Alliance for Securing Democracy, one of the groups behind Hamilton 68, with an ultimatum: “either you release the list, or we will.”
The timeline here is important. Roth reverse-engineered the list on Oct. 3, 2017, and emailed it to his colleagues in a Google Doc. Over the next several months, Twitter employees repeatedly vented their frustrations with Hamilton 68 over email. The amount of media attention the project was generating created a public relations headache for Twitter, so they were eager to expose the truth about the dashboard.
Frenzied politicians desperately clinging to the Russia-collusion narrative started to pressure Facebook and Twitter in early 2018. When Republicans on the House Intelligence committee penned a now-vindicated internal report on FBI abuses, a hashtag that said “#ReleaseTheMemo” went viral on Twitter.
“When the hashtag went viral, [Rep. Adam] Schiff had a theory that it wasn’t the American public that was interested in abuse of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act,” Mollie Hemingway noted all the way back in 2018. “Nope, it was Russians! Secret Russian bots were trying to make it look like Americans were interested in FISA abuse against a Trump campaign affiliate.”
Citing Hamilton 68, Schiff and Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-California, wrote a letter to Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg demanding their companies crack down on alleged Russian bots. Twitter responded with a letter defending its work to police foreign interference. An analysis of #ReleaseTheMemo, General Counsel Vijaya Gadde wrote back, “has not identified any significant activity connected to Russia.”
Worse, Gadde claimed Twitter could not evaluate Hamilton 68’s claims. “Because the Hamilton Dashboard’s account list is not available to the public, we are unable to offer any specific context on the accounts it includes,” he wrote. “There may be individual cases where Twitter accounts are operating within our rules but are included in the Dashboard. We have offered to review the list of accounts contained in the Dashboard and this offer remains open.”
Yet the emails Taibbi uncovered five years later show Twitter had the list for months before that point. Roth himself wrote, “They don’t know that we have the list,” three weeks earlier.
In mid-February, Emily Horne wrote, “we’re working extensively with reporters [off-the-record] and on background to explain the flaws in Hamilton 68’s methodology (without getting into our full knowledge of it),” before adding, “we have to be careful in how much we push back on ASD publicly.”
Horne’s concern, along with that of a colleague who was “frustrated” but understood the need to “play a longer game,” was that Twitter couldn’t kill critical media stories with off-the-record warnings if it didn’t also go public with what it knew. Both former Twitter employees now work in the Biden administration.
Hamilton 68 intentionally concocted junk science and concealed important parts of their methodology to bolster a narrative against their political opponents. The intended end result was to silence and discredit all dissent. A stunning number of journalists at allegedly top publications and even researchers at allegedly elite universities took the bait, as Taibbi’s story shows.
Twitter’s internal records raise questions about what key Democratic politicians like Schiff and Feinstein knew about Hamilton 68. Did Twitter brief them privately on its public knowledge of the list? Were any reporters briefed on that as well? Was Gadde seriously unaware that Roth had the list for months at the time of his letter?
The evidence suggests clearly that Twitter employees — who never counted on Elon Musk buying the company and releasing their emails — actively misled the public about a powerful political hoax.
Emily Jashinsky is culture editor at The Federalist and host of Federalist Radio Hour. She previously covered politics as a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner. Prior to joining the Examiner, Emily was the spokeswoman for Young America’s Foundation. She’s interviewed leading politicians and entertainers and appeared regularly as a guest on major television news programs, including “Fox News Sunday,” “Media Buzz,” and “The McLaughlin Group.” Her work has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, Real Clear Politics, and more. Emily also serves as director of the National Journalism Center, co-host of the weekly news show “Counter Points: Friday” and a visiting fellow at Independent Women’s Forum. Originally from Wisconsin, she is a graduate of George Washington University.
The FBI put a contributor to the Hillary Clinton campaign’s Donald Trump smear dossier on FBI payroll as a confidential human source after investigating Igor Danchenko for allegedly spying for the Russian government, revealed Special Counsel John Durham in a court filing unsealed by a Virginia federal court yesterday. The filing contains this bombshell and seven other significant details about the Democrat-led plot to use U.S. intelligence agencies to deny Americans the results of their choice for president in 2016.
The FBI made Danchenko a confidential human source, providing him and the FBI’s use of him “national security” cover, in March 2017 and terminated that designation in October 2020, according to the court filing unsealed on Sept. 13. Danchenko is the originator of the false claim trumpeted all over global media that Donald Trump told prostitutes to pee on beds the Obamas had slept in in a Russian hotel.
The FBI had previously targeted Danchenko, Christopher Steele’s primary source, as a possible Russian agent. But after discovering Danchenko’s identity as Steele’s Sub-Source No. 1, rather than investigate whether Danchenko had been feeding Steele Russian disinformation, the FBI paid Danchenko as a CHS.
Danchenko faces trial next month on five counts of lying to the FBI related to his role as Steele’s primary sub-source. One count of the indictment concerned Danchenko’s denial during an FBI interview on June 15, 2017, of having spoken with “PR Executive-1” about any material contained in the Steele dossier. “PR Executive-1” has since been identified as the Clinton and Democratic National Committee-connected Charles Dolan, Jr. Also according to the special counsel’s office, Danchenko fed Steele at least two false claims about Trump that originated in part from Dolan.
The four other counts of the indictment concerned Danchenko’s allegedly false claims that he had spoken with a source whom he believed was the then-president of the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce, Sergei Millian. Danchenko repeated that assertion during several different FBI interviews.
Danchenko’s trial begins next month, but two weeks ago, as part of the pre-trial process, the government filed a “Motion in Limine,” which seeks a ruling from the court on the admissibility of various evidence. While originally filed under seal, the court ordered the docket entry unsealed on Tuesday, making public more details about the case against the Russian national.
Here’s an overview of what we learned yesterday.
While it has previously been reported that Danchenko was a subject of an FBI counterintelligence investigation from 2009 to 2011, the special counsel’s motion revealed more specifics. Specifically, the prosecution explained that “in late 2008, while the defendant was employed by a prominent think tank in Washington, D.C., the defendant engaged two fellow employees about whether one of the employees might be willing or able in the future to provide classified information in exchange for money.”
“According to one employee,” the court filing continued, Danchenko thought the employee “might be in a position to enter the incoming Obama administration and have access to classified information.” Danchenko allegedly then told the employee “he had access to people who would be willing to pay money in exchange for classified information.”
The think-tank employee relayed the information to a government contact, who passed it on to the FBI. The FBI then initiated a “preliminary investigation” into Danchenko but converted it to a “full investigation” after learning Danchenko “had been identified as an associate of two FBI counterintelligence subjects” and “had previous contact with the Russian Embassy and known Russian intelligence officers.” Durham also noted that Danchenko “had also informed one Russian intelligence officer that he had interest in entering the Russian diplomatic service.”
The special counsel further revealed the FBI closed its investigation in 2010 after incorrectly concluding Danchenko had left the country.
In its motion in limine, Durham’s team argues this evidence is important to its case because it will establish that Danchenko’s lies to the FBI were “material.” Specifically, the FBI argues that had Danchenko truthfully told the FBI that he had discussed some of the content in the dossier with Dolan, the FBI might have interviewed Dolan or obtained Dolan’s emails.
That line of inquiry would have revealed the possibility that Danchenko was a Russian asset, the special counsel’s motion argues, noting that “Dolan, on two separate occasions, stated in emails dated June 10, 2016, and January 13, 2017, that he believed the defendant was ‘former FSB’ and a Russian ‘agent.’”
Had the FBI learned from Dolan that Danchenko was connected to the Russian intelligence services, “this naturally would have (or should have) caused investigators to revisit the prior counterintelligence investigation,” Durham argues, and “raise[d] the prospect that the defendant might have in fact been under the control or guidance of the Russian intelligence services.”
While this revelation is spicy, Danchenko’s attorneys will quickly dispatch this argument by pointing out that if the FBI’s own counterintelligence investigation into Danchenko that included the details noted above didn’t “raise the prospect” that Danchenko was “under the control or guidance of the Russian intelligence services,” surely Dolan’s beliefs would not alter the trajectory of the investigation.
Further, because this evidence consists of “character” or “bad acts” evidence, even if it helps the government build its materiality argument, the court will likely rule it inadmissible as “unfairly prejudicial” to Danchenko, meaning that it may cause a jury to wrongly convict Danchenko because of his past conduct, not because of his current alleged crime.
A second shocker from the Sept. 13 court filing concerned Danchenko’s hiring as a paid CHS.
“In March 2017, the FBI signed the defendant up as a paid confidential human source of the FBI,” the special counsel revealed in the motion. It was not until October 2020 that “the FBI terminated its source relationship with” Danchenko.
Simply put: Our federal government paid for Russian disinformation to frame the president of the United States for colluding with Russia.
The FBI did this knowing that Danchenko “was associate of two FBI counterintelligence subjects”; “had previous contact with the Russian Embassy and known Russian intelligence officers”; “had also informed one Russian intelligence officer that he had interest in entering the Russian diplomatic service”; and, according to a think-tank employee, suggested he had contacts willing to purchase classified information.
Also, the FBI and Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team continued to use Danchenko as a paid CHS even knowing his stories were fabrications. In fact, Mueller’s team was so focused on getting Trump, it completely ignored whether the Steele dossier included Russian disinformation.
Not only did the FBI pay for Russian disinformation, so did Clinton, and she did so to interfere in the 2016 election. The public already knew from Durham’s (failed) prosecution of Clinton campaign attorney Michael Sussmann that the campaign paid Fusion GPS for opposition research. Fusion in turn hired Steele to dig up dirt on Trump.
That trial also revealed that Clinton personally approved pushing a smaller aspect of the Russia-collusion hoax, namely the Alfa-Bank secret communications hoax.
From yesterday’s filing we now know the primary sub-source for the Steele dossier paid for by Clinton was not merely a Russian national who fabricated the “intel,” but also a suspected Russian agent. Tuesday’s motion also highlighted the fact that longtime Clinton backer “Dolan maintained a relationship with several high-ranking Russian government officials who appear in the Steele Reports.”
So, for all her vapors over Trump’s connections with Russia and his supposed collusion with Russia to interfere in the election, the evidence shows Clinton holds that dishonor.
Durham’s motion also revealed what appears to be the “tradecraft” of the spooks for hire, in the form of a February 24, 2016 email Danchenko sent his former boss, Cenk Sidar. Sidar, who ran the business intelligence firm Sidar Globak, asked Danchenko to review a report he had prepared.
After reviewing the draft, Danchenko emailed Sidar recommendations on how to improve the report, including the following suggestion: “Emphasize sources. Make them bold or CAPITALISED. The more sources the better. If you lack them, use oneself as a source (‘Istanbul-Washington-based businessman’ or whatever) to save the situation and make it look a bit better.”
The government seeks to admit this email to show that Danchenko followed a similar or “common plan” when working for Steele by creating sources “to save the situation,” such as what the prosecution maintains Danchenko did with Millian. This argument holds merit, and the trial court accordingly will likely allow Durham’s team to tell the jury about the email.
While corruption may be a better explanation than incompetence, either way the special counsel’s brief leaves the FBI looking like fools. First, the bureau closed an investigation on a suspected Russian asset after wrongly thinking Danchenko had left the country. Then the FBI paid that suspected Russian agent to serve as a confidential human source, with Danchenko then telling agents a litany of lies, including ones that should have been obvious.
For example, as the motion highlights, Danchenko claimed to agents that Millian might be the source for the “pee-tape” info. But those allegations appeared in Steele’s report dated June 20, 2016, and Danchenko “repeatedly informed the FBI that the first and only time he allegedly communicated with Millian was late July 2016.”
“Put bluntly,” the special counsel wrote, “these facts demonstrate that the defendant could not keep his lies straight, and that the defendant engaged in a concerted effort to deceive the FBI about the sourcing (or lack thereof) of the Steele Reports.” Unless they were corrupt, this indicates the FBI agents investigating Trump were a bunch of incompetent boobs.
The special counsel’s team further exposed the incompetence (or corruption) of the FBI when it introduced the public to Bemd Kuhlen, a German citizen who served as the general manager of the Ritz-Carlton Moscow in June 2016, when the pee-tape tale was purportedly sourced. The Steele dossier described the source as “a senior (western) member of staff at the hotel.”
According to Durham, Kuhlen is prepared to testify at Danchenko’s trial that at the time he was the only “western” member of management at the hotel. Kuhlen will also testify that he never heard any story resembling Steele’s reporting until it became public and never discussed those claims with Danchenko.
If six years after the fact prosecutors could locate and question Kuhlen, the Crossfire Hurricane team could have done the same for Steele’s reporting, quickly disproving the dossier. If they wanted to, that is.
Yesterday’s motion revealed another unsettling fact: Prosecutors appear poised to continue with the company storyline that Steele and in turn the FBI were duped. In its motion, the government notes that Danchenko “informed Steele that he met in person with Sergei Millian on two or three occasions,” and that Danchenko “subsequently informed the FBI that he had not in fact met with Millian on any occasion.”
So, how does the special counsel address this discrepancy? Danchenko “further stated to the FBI that Steele incorrectly believed the defendant had met in-person with Millian” and that “Danchenko had not corrected Steele in that misimpression.” It was all just a big misunderstanding, folks, until Danchenko lied to the FBI.
This short section of the motion shows Durham does not intend to expose the FBI’s complicity at Danchenko’s trial. While Durham may not want to put the FBI on trial, Danchenko has made clear that he intends to. Unless the special counsel’s team acknowledges the FBI’s role in the Russia collusion hoax, Danchenko will likely score the second acquittal.
Four of the five counts against Danchenko concern Danchenko’s allegedly false statements to the FBI about a telephone conversation Danchenko claimed he had with an individual he thought was Millian. Under these circumstances, Millian would seem to be a star witness for Durham. But in the motion in limine, the special counsel revealed that Millian refuses to testify because of “concerns for his and his family’s safety (who reside abroad)” and because “he does not trust the FBI and fears being arrested if he returns to the United States.”
While “the Government has repeatedly informed Millian that it will work to ensure his security during his time in the United States, as it does with all witnesses,” Millian remains firm in his refusal. And who can blame him? Even if Durham can provide physical security for Millian, Durham doesn’t run the Department of Justice. As the recent raid on Trump’s home shows, the deep state will go to great lengths to get its enemies.
After establishing that it used its best efforts to arrange for Millian to testify at Danchenko’s trial, the government argues that because he is “unavailable,” as that term is legally understood, three emails Millian wrote to a friend are admissible, even if they are hearsay. Those emails show that a mutual acquaintance attempted to connect Millian and Danchenko and that Millian later figured out Danchenko was Steele’s source who invented the story of the phone call.
The government presents a persuasive argument that these emails should be admitted at trial, and the court will likely agree, meaning Millian’s prudent absence from the trial is unlikely to prompt an acquittal.
A final takeaway from yesterday’s filing stems from the special counsel’s mention of Cyprus.
“On June 10, 2016, Dolan, while in Cyprus meeting with Olga Galkina (another source for the defendant), emailed a U.S.-based acquaintance regarding efforts to assist the defendant in obtaining a U.S. visa,” the motion says. It quotes the email: “Monday night I fly to Moscow and will meet with a Russian guy who is working with me on a couple of projects. He also works for a group of former MI 6 guys in London who do intelligence for business …. [H]e owes me as his Visa is being held up and I am having a word with the Ambassador.”
The special counsel’s office included these details to establish that Danchenko had lied to the FBI about facts beyond those contained in the indictment. This helps Durham’s case by showing Danchenko’s allegedly false statements were not mere mistakes. The reference to Cyprus, however, also raises an entirely new set of questions.
In addition to Dolan’s presence in Cyprus on June 10, 2016, where he met with another of Danchenko’s sources, we have a June 1, 2016 email to President Obama’s undersecretary for State Victoria Nuland noting that “Kathleen [Kavalec] is recommending [she] look at the first 10 days of July for a Cyprus trip.” Nuland made the trip on July 12, 2016.
On July 1, 2016, Steele emailed the DOJ’s Bruce Ohr, noting that Steele was traveling to Cyprus with his family on holiday from July 9 to 16, 2016.
Nuland’s presence in Cyprus at the same time as Steele seems a tad too coincidental to ignore. After all, Nuland, who “served as Kavalec’s boss at the bureau of European and Eurasian affairs, was the government official who approved an FBI agent in Rome meeting Steele in early July 2016.” Steele would later also meet with Kavalec in D.C. in October 2016 about his Trump reporting. Jonathan Winer, who knew Steele since 2009 and reportedly met with Steele in the Summer of 2016, appears to have arranged the Steele-Kavalec meeting.
The overlapping players and timeframe demand answers. Did Steele meet with Nuland in Cyprus? If so, was Steele alerted to Nuland’s travel plans? What did the duo discuss? Did Steele or Nuland meet with Dolan or the Cyprus sub-source?
While Cyprus may well be a nothingburger, the FBI launched a full investigation into Trump’s presidential campaign on less.
It’s extremely unlikely that Danchenko’s trial will answer any of these Cyprus questions. But future filings and the anticipated week-plus trial may fill in some of the other Spygate blanks.
Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
Recently released handwritten notes from a briefing of the acting attorney general on the status of Crossfire Hurricane reveal the FBI either lied about the source of intel or the British intelligence community fed information to the U.S. agents investigating Donald Trump and his associates.
As part of the pre-trial discovery in the government’s prosecution of former Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann, the special counsel provided defense lawyers notes taken on March 6, 2017, during a high-level briefing of acting Attorney General Dana Boente about the then-ongoing investigation into supposed Russia collusion.
Boente, who held oversight of the DOJ and FBI related to the Crossfire Hurricane investigation because of then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s recusal, received an update during the meeting from the FBI’s then-Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, then-assistant director of the FBI Counterintelligence Division Bill Priestap, and Counterintelligence Deputy Assistant Director Peter Strzok. DOJ officials Tashina Gauhar, Mary McCord, and Scott Schools took notes during the briefing, and those notes became public during the Sussmann trial that ended in an acquittal last week.
Soon after the release of the notes, Hans Mahncke and Stephen McIntyre detailed for The Federalist, several passages that indicated the FBI had lied to the DOJ during the March 6, 2017 meeting in numerous ways. From the cryptic notes, Mahncke and McIntyre deciphered and exposed several significant false storylines sold to the acting attorney general, making their article a must-read.
While any lies, misrepresentations, or material omissions matter—or should, especially when told to the acting attorney general related to an investigation connected to the president of the United States, the note’s references to “CROWN reporting” prove particularly significant because of the FISA court’s insistence that the DOJ included Christopher Steele’s background as an MI6 agent in the FISA application prior to the secret surveillance court issuing an order to surveil Carter Page.
The phrase “CROWN Reporting” appeared multiple times in one set of handwritten notes taken during McCabe, Priestap, and Strzok’s March 6, 2017, FBI briefing of the DOJ and Acting Attorney General Boente. Next to “CROWN Reporting,” the notes referenced “convention,” Crimea” and “NATO” and “soften stance for exchange of Russian energy stocks.” These notations fell under the header of points related to Manafort.
A second reference to “CROWN source reporting” came during the FBI’s briefing of Boente concerning the investigation of Carter Page, with the notation following the general discussion of Page.
The notes do not elaborate on the “CROWN source” or who provided the “CROWN source reporting.” There are two possibilities, both of which have huge implications for the ongoing special counsel investigation.
First, the claimed “CROWN source” could be former MI6 spy Steele. To date, Steele remains the only person with a connection to British intelligence publicly known to have provided the FBI with information related to Trump and individuals connected to Trump during the Russia collusion investigation.
But if by “CROWN source” the FBI meant Steele, the individual briefing Boente lied to him in several ways, did so in a material way, and there is likely a paper trail that can confirm an earlier, similar lie by FBI agents.
While Steele had at one time served in the British intelligence service, his MI6 status ended long ago, when he retired in 2009 to start the private intelligence service Orbis Business Intelligence. Further, as the Department of Justice Office of Inspector General (OIG) reported more than two years ago, Steele told the OIG that the source network he used to compile the memoranda, referred to colloquially as the Steele dossier, did not involve sources from his time as an MI6 agent. On the contrary, his sources were “developed entirely in the period after he retired from government service.”
So not only was Steele not a “CROWN source,” his supposed “intel” also lacked any connection to “Crown Source Reporting.” Accordingly, unless the FBI had a still publicly unknown “CROWN source” who provided the information on which agents briefed the DOJ during the March 6, 2017 meeting, they lied to the DOJ.
Falsely attributing “intel” to a “CROWN source” proves significant, and not merely for Boente’s oversight of Crossfire Hurricane, but also for Boente’s decision to approve the third application to surveil Page under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). And the DOJ’s representation of a connection between Steele and British intelligence in the FISA applications appeared dispositive to the FISA court’s decision to authorize surveillance of Page.
Two little-noticed passages, separated by some 50 pages in the OIG’s 478-page report on FISA abuse, revealed the importance the FISA court put on Steele’s connection to British intelligence in ordering surveillance of Page. According to the OIG, before filing its official FISA application, the DOJ submitted a “read copy” to the FISA court to obtain feedback from the FISA court’s legal advisor on whether the application met the statutory requirements and on any issues of concern raised by the legal advisor or the FISA judge handling the application.
In the first read copy submitted to the FISA court related to Page, the application “contained a description of the source network that included the fact that Steele relied upon a Primary Sub-source who used a network of sub-sources, and that neither Steele nor the Primary Sub-source had direct access to the information being reported.” The draft application “also contained a separate footnote on each sub-source with a brief description of his/her position or access to the information he/she was reporting.”
After reviewing the read copy, the FISA court’s “legal advisor asked how it was that Steele had a network of sub-sources.” In response, the government’s Office of Intelligence (OI) attorney “provided additional information to him regarding Steele’s past employment history.”
The FISA court’s legal advisor then requested that additional information be included in the final application, resulting in the final version of the October 2016 FISA application including a footnote detailing Steele’s prior work for British intelligence. The FISA court granted the revised FISA application, ordering surveillance of Page to begin in October 2016. The FISA court renewed the surveillance order three additional times, once in December, again in March, when Boente signed the application, and finally on June 29, 2022, when Acting Attorney General Rod Rosenstein signed the final FISA application.
All of the applications referenced Steele’s past service in British intelligence, but, as noted above, Steele’s source network was unrelated to his government work and came entirely from his private work. Given that the FISA court’s legal advisor questioned “how it was that Steele had a network of sub-sources,” and that the advisor directed the OI attorney to expressly include Steele’s previous work as an MI6 agent in the application, the FISA court clearly believed Steele’s network of sources came from his time as a British agent.
Further, given the significance the FISA court placed on that fact, it seems likely the FISA court would have denied the surveillance order had it been told the truth—that Steele’s network of sources had been privately acquired.
The FBI’s representation during the March 6, 2017 meeting that the supposed intel related to Manafort and Page came from “CROWN sources,”—again, assuming the agent meant Steele—suggests the Crossfire Hurricane team deceived the DOJ from the beginning, resulting in the OI attorney representing to the FISA court that Steele’s network of sources were sources used by British intelligence. That deception also likely affected Boente’s decision to sign the second renewal application.
While these events occurred more than five years ago, and a five-year statute of limitations governs false statement offenses, the D.C. Circuit has held that if a defendant engages in a scheme “to falisf[y], conceal[], or cover[]up” material facts, the limitations period does not begin to run until the scheme ends.
In this case, then, any FBI agents involved in concealing from the DOJ during the final preparation and review of the June 29, 2017, FISA application that Steele’s sources were not “CROWN sources” or connected to his work in British intelligence could still face criminal liability.
Further, while the Sussmann trial proved memories fail—sometimes conveniently—uncovering the individuals responsible for representing Steele’s source network as connected to his past life as an MI6 agent seems a relatively straightforward venture given what we learned from the special counsel’s conviction of Kevin Clinesmith.
Clinesmith pleaded guilty nearly two years ago to altering an email related to Page to make it appear that Page “was not a source” for the CIA. Clinesmith’s undoing came from the fact that in preparing the FISA application and renewals, the various government actors used email to confirm details, including with Clinesmith.
The OIG report on FISA abuse detailed that process, noting there were many “back-and-forth exchange[s]” “between the OI Attorney and the FBI, during which the OI Attorney asked many questions about Page, as well as about Steele’s reporting and the structure and access of his source network.” “To further address reliability, the OI Attorney sought information from the FBI to describe the source network in the FISA application,” according to the OIG report. And that information-gathering process included email exchanges and written summaries of briefings.
Either that briefing left the OI attorney with the impression that Steele’s source network came from his MI6 work, or after the FISA court legal advisor asked, “how it was that Steele had a network of sub-sources,” the OI attorney pushed the FBI for more information. If the latter, emails likely memorialize the exchanges.
Whether the FBI agents affirmatively misrepresented Steele’s source network as connected to his British intelligence work in their communiques with the OI attorney, and in turn the OI attorney relayed that information to the FISA court, is unknown to us, but hopefully not to Special Counsel Durham.
Even if no one lied to the OI attorney and he merely assumed Steele’s source network carried over from his time with MI6, a misrepresentation to Boente during the March 6, 2017, briefing that Steele was a “CROWN source” still matters because the FISA surveillance orders were renewed two more times after that meeting.
That, of course, is assuming the FBI meant Steele when they referenced a “CROWN source”—something not entirely clear. More on that shortly.
Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
Kristi Leigh TV – Jun 5, 2022
Justice Denied: Lawlessness Abounds In DC
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Special Counsel John Durham’s prosecution of Igor Danchenko, the Russian national who served as Christopher Steele’s primary sub-source, will soon heat up—maybe as early as next week, if prosecutors are wise and return to the grand jury to obtain the documents the Hillary Clinton campaign wrongfully withheld based on attorney-client privilege. Those documents will likely reveal Fusion GPS peddled Danchenko’s lies directly to reporters.
The jury’s acquittal of former Clinton campaign attorney Michael Sussmann after less than a day of deliberations represented a setback to Durham’s three-year investigation of the Russia collusion hoax. Americans nonetheless learned much from the prosecution, including that Hillary Clinton held personal responsibility for the peddling of the Alfa Bank conspiracy theory and that, post-Donald Trump, the FBI and legacy media remain corrupt.
The special counsel team also learned a valuable lesson from the court’s rulings on the admissibility of documents withheld from the grand jury based on the Clinton campaign’s assertion of attorney-client privilege: Don’t wait until trial to challenge the improperly withheld documents.
Given the breakneck speed of the Sussmann prosecution, it is to be expected that, following Tuesday’s acquittal, the special counsel team regroups for a few days. But by Monday, their focus should turn to their prosecution of Danchenko.
In November 2021, the special counsel indicted Danchenko on five counts, charging him “with lying to the FBI during the agents’ questioning of him related to his role as Christopher Steele’s ‘Primary Sub-Source’ for the notorious dossier that enabled Obama administration surveillance of the Trump campaign.”
Over 39 pages, the speaking indictment revealed how Danchenko first met Steele in 2010. He was introduced to the former MI6 spy by Steele’s longtime friend, Fiona Hill, who knew Danchenko from their work at the Brookings Institute. Since then, Steele’s London-based firm, Orbis Business Intelligence, hired Danchenko for contract work related to Russia research.
In 2016, the Clinton campaign, through its law firm Perkins Coie, hired the U.S.-based research firm Fusion GPS. In turn, Fusion GPS hired Orbis and Steele to investigate the Trump campaign and any connections to Russia. Steele then contacted Danchenko, a Russian national, eventually relying heavily on Danchenko’s supposed “intel” in crafting the numerous memorandum that later became known as the Steele dossier, and referring to Danchenko throughout as “Primary Sub-Source 1.”
Danchenko, according to the special counsel’s indictment, lied extensively when providing Steele his supposed intel. The indictment also says one of Danchenko’s “sources,” Charles Dolan, Jr., who has long-time connections to the Clintons and the Democrat Party, lied to Danchenko.
Dolan was named in the indictment merely as “PR Executive-1.” According to the indictment, Dolan lied to Danchenko when he told Danchenko a “GOP friend” had told him that Paul Manafort had been forced to resign from the Trump campaign because of allegations connecting Manafort to Ukraine. While Dolan later admitted to the FBI that he had no such “GOP friend” and that he had instead gleaned this information from press reports, Dolan’s fabrication appeared in the Steele dossier thanks to Danchenko’s lies.
Yet when the FBI questioned Danchenko on June 15, 2017, according to the indictment, Danchenko “denied to agents of the FBI that he had spoken with [Dolan] about any material contained in the [Steele dossier].” That lie formed Count I of the special counsel’s charges against Danchenko.
The remaining four counts of the indictment concerned Danchenko’s alleged lies about his supposed conversation with the then-Russian Chamber of Commerce President Sergei Millian. According to the indictment, Danchenko told FBI agents on multiple occasions—thus the four counts—that he believed Millian had provided him information during an anonymous phone call, including the “intel,” later included in the Steele dossier, that there was “a well-developed ‘conspiracy of cooperation’ between the Trump Campaign and Russian officials.”
But Danchenko never spoke with Millian and Millian was not a source for Danchenko nor the Steele dossier, as Millian has long maintained. Millian will not comment further, telling The Federalist that Durham’s team requested he “not talk to the press about details of the investigation.”
Some of those details will likely be made public, however, when pre-trial filings begin to hit the docket in the case against Danchenko. With the October 11, 2022, trial date only about four months away, one could anticipate various filings to flow in soon. But following the court’s ruling in United States v. Sussmann that the special counsel waited too long to challenge documents withheld from the grand jury based on the Clinton campaign’s assertion of attorney-client privilege, Durham’s team should move next week to enforce any subpoenas.
In the Sussmann case, on April 6, 2022, the special counsel filed a Motion to Compel documents withheld from the grand jury to be produced to the court in camera. On May 4, 2022, presiding judge Christopher Cooper ordered Fusion GPS to provide the court 38 documents sought by the special counsel’s office to allow the court to determine whether they were protected by attorney-client privilege. Then, on May 12, 2022, the court ruled that emails between Fusion GPS and the press “as part of an affirmative media relations effort by the Clinton Campaign” were not privileged and must be provided to prosecutors.
The court, however, further ruled that because the special counsel waited “until April 6, 2022, just over a month before trial was set to begin,” to challenge the privilege, “allowing the Special Counsel to use these documents at trial would prejudice Mr. Sussmann’s defense.” Accordingly, while the special counsel’s office obtained access to the documents, they could not use those documents during the prosecution of Sussmann.
To ensure prosecutors both have access to all material documents and the ability to use any relevant documents during the Danchenko trial, the special counsel’s office should move quickly to obtain any material previously withheld by Fusion GPS under the auspices of attorney-client privilege. In total, as the court explained in the Sussmann case, Fusion GPS withheld “approximately 1500 documents” from the grand jury, but the judge only considered privilege for 38 documents prosecutors sought access to in its case against the former Clinton campaign manager.
The details contained in Danchenko’s indictment, coupled with the content of various emails between Fusion GPS and reporters, suggest some of the 1,500 documents withheld will concern Danchenko’s supposed intel, even though Danchenko was one step removed from Fusion GPS, having been brought into the Russia collusion smear project by Steele.
The indictment, for instance, notes that on “July 28, 2016, Danchenko sent a message to an acquaintance” stating, “Thanks to my reporting in the past 36 hours, Steele and Steele’s assistant are flying in tomorrow for a few days so I might be busy.” That same day the FBI’s New York Field Office received two of Steele’s election reports.
July 28, 2016, is also the date the FBI received the “tip” from the Australian diplomat that George Papadopoulos “had received some kind of suggestion from Russia that it could assist . . . with the anonymous release of information during the campaign that would be damaging to [Hillary] Clinton.” That “tip” purportedly formed the basis for opening Crossfire Hurricane.
That July 28, 2016 message from Danchenko proves significant in context of the flurry of emails from Fusion GPS’s co-founders, Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch, to reporters that were made public during the Sussmann prosecution. During this same timeframe, Simpson and Fritsch were peddling to the media claims that Millian and Carter Page were part of the supposed Trump-Russia collusion. As with Millian, Danchenko had fabricated supposed intel about Page, providing it to Steele. Steele included it in the dossier, which he then handed off to the FBI.
For instance, on July 24, 2016, Simpson emailed the Washington Post’s Tom Hamburger with the subject line “millian,” providing Hamburger two email addresses for Millian. The next day, Mark Hosenball from Reuters emailed Simpson, asking him to “please remember to send me stuff on Sergei the Millian-aire.” Hosenball also asked Simpson for any “stuff on the Carter Page guy, including his most recent Russian excursions.”
On July 26, 2016, an email thread between Fritsch and Jay Solomon from the Wall Street Journal shows Fritsch saying, off the record, that an “easy scoop waiting for confirmation: that dude carter page met with igor sechin when he went to moscow earlier this month.” Fritsch also told Solomon that Page “met with a senior kremlin official called divyekin, who told page they have good kompromat on hillary and offered to help. He also warned page they have good kompromat on the donald.”
Fusion GPS also pushed Millian as a Russian stooge to ABC News’ Matthew Mosk in an email thread from July 28, 2016. Yet another email thread, between Simpson and the Washington Post’s Hamburger dated July 29, 2016, also confirms that Fusion GPS pushed the fiction that Page met with Sechin and Ivanov in Russia to the Post reporter. Hamburger told Simpson that he had checked with one of their Moscow sources, who called the claim of a meeting “bullshit” and “impossible.”
The Danchenko indictment includes a second allegation that proves key when read with Fusion GPS’s emails to the media. According to the indictment, on September 18, 2016, Danchenko sent another message to the same acquaintance, stating that he had “work to do for Steele who’s probably coming to DC on Wednesday.” The indictment further noted that Steele then traveled to Washington D.C. on September 21, 2016.
While in D.C. on September 21, 2016, “at the direction of Fusion GPS, Christopher Steele brief[ed] the N.Y. Times, Washington Post, New Yorker, Yahoo! News, and CNN.” According to a Yahoo! News reporter present at that briefing, “Steele told him at the meeting that he had provided his election reporting to the FBI and that there were ‘people in the [FBI] taking this very seriously.”
The day after Danchenko mentioned the work he had to do for Steele, Fusion GPS’s Jake Berkowitz sent his boss Simpson and Mosk an email further painting Millian as a Russian asset. A thread between The New York Times’ Eric Lichtblau and Fritsch dating from September 24 and September 27, 2016 likewise focused on Millian, with Fusion GPS providing the Times reporter Millian’s IP address and screengrabs indicating it was registered in Moscow.
The timing and content of these emails suggest Danchenko’s lies went from Steele to Fusion GPS and then straight to the media. What the emails don’t disclose, however, are the conversations between Steele and Fusion GPS, internally at Fusion GPS, and between Fusion GPS and Marc Elias of Perkins Coie.
Some of the approximate 1,500 emails Fusion GPS withheld from the special counsel likely include discussions of the “intel” Steele obtained from Danchenko. It is well past time for Durham to fight for those documents.
Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
The jury in the Michael Sussmann criminal case resumes deliberations today after the long Memorial Day weekend. While prosecutors presented overwhelming evidence over the last two weeks that Sussmann lied to then-FBI General Counsel James Baker in 2016, an acquittal by the D.C. jury still seems likely.
Judging the success of Special Counsel John Durham’s probe into the investigation of President Trump and those associated with the Trump campaign and administration should not rest on the outcome of the Sussmann prosecution, however. In fact, even if the special counsel’s office scores a conviction in its false statement case against Sussmann, that would do little to right the scales of justice unbalanced by more than five years of the politically motivated abuse of power that began as Crossfire Hurricane and continued even after Special Counsel Robert Mueller issued his final report.
So, measuring Durham’s performance by the outcome in United States v. Sussmann would be a mistake. Also, especially in the case of an acquittal, it would ignore the valuable information exposed related to the broader Spygate scandal. Using that gauge as a measure, the special counsel’s office succeeded wildly.
On September 19, 2016, Sussmann provided Baker data and whitepapers purporting to show a secret communications network between the Russia-based Alfa Bank and Donald Trump. In indicting Sussmann for allegedly lying to Baker during this meeting, the special counsel’s office revealed in its 27-page speaking indictment “a scandal much deeper than merely Sussmann’s role in a second Russian hoax — a scandal that entangles the Clinton campaign, multiple internet companies, two federally-funded university researchers, and a complicit media.”
Since then, proof that the Clinton campaign held near-total responsibility for launching the Russia-collusion hoax mounted with nearly every legal filing. It eventually culminated during the Sussmann trial when former Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook testified that Hillary Clinton personally “agreed with the decision” to feed the unverified—and quickly debunked—theory that Trump was communicating secretly with Russia through a back-door Alfa Bank channel.
Other trial evidence confirmed the Clinton campaign paid the law firm Perkins and Coie a flat fee of as much as $130,000 per month during the campaign, and authorized lead counsel Marc Elias to hire Fusion GPS for opposition research. Billing records then showed Sussmann charged his time for working the Alfa Bank hoax—including the time he spent meeting with the FBI’s General Counsel Baker—to the Clinton campaign. In fact, late last week, the jury in the Sussmann case learned that Sussmann even charged the Clinton campaign for two thumb drives purchased at Staples used for the Alfa Bank project.
While the Sussmann case focused on the Alfa Bank hoax, the detailed evidence presented over the course of that prosecution also confirmed the Clinton campaign paid for Fusion GPS to compile the Christopher Steele dossier. Given Mook’s testimony that he sought Clinton’s approval to push the Alfa Bank claims to the media, it is only reasonable to infer she likewise personally green-lighted the peddling of the claims contained in the Steele dossier.
But even if Clinton did not personally approve of peddling the lies contained in the Steele dossier, the Sussmann case established that her campaign paid for the lies—including those emanating from the Russian-national Igor Danchenko. And Special Counsel Durham’s indictment against Danchenko reveals that individuals hired by the Clinton campaign fed that Russian disinformation to U.S. media, law enforcement, and intelligence agencies.
Beyond exposing the Clinton campaign’s responsibility for the Russia-collusion hoax, Durham’s prosecution of Sussmann sets the stage for potentially even more damaging revelations about Clinton’s personal involvement in the scandal.
To date, the Clinton campaign has hidden behind claims of attorney-client privilege to prevent Durham from obtaining documents, communications, and testimony through the grand jury. The Clinton campaign claimed material prepared by, or communications between, Perkins and Coie attorneys, Fusion GPS employees, investigators, and other third parties are protected by attorney-client privilege. Prosecutors in the Sussmann case, however, succeeded in obtaining a court ruling that several documents withheld by Fusion GPS, based on the Clinton campaign’s claims of privilege, are not protected and must be given to prosecutors.
While Fusion GPS continues to withhold thousands of documents, this precedent provides the special counsel’s office solid grounds to challenge the privilege in both the Danchenko case and in other grand jury probes that may be pending. Piercing the privilege will prove key to further exposing Clinton’s personal involvement in Spygate.
No matter the verdict the jury returns in the Sussmann case, the special counsel’s prosecution also revealed that the Alfa Bank stories were hoaxes—and the scandalous way they were crafted and seeded to America.
Voters first learned of the supposed connection between Trump and the Russian-based Alfa Bank about one week before the 2016 U.S. presidential election, when Slate reported that trusted cyber experts had discovered an “irregular pattern of server lookups” that suggested “a sustained relationship between a server registered to the Trump Organization and two servers registered to an entity called Alfa Bank.”
While the Slate article hedged somewhat by admitting “what the scientists amassed wasn’t a smoking gun,” and that the data “doesn’t absolutely preclude alternative explanations,” the headline, “Group of Computer Scientists Believes a Trump Server Was Communicating With a Russian Bank,” captured the essence of the article—and what its author Franklin Foer, Fusion GPS, and the Clinton campaign wanted Americans to believe.
The Alfa Bank hoax did not end there, however, or even after Trump’s election. Sussmann continued to push the theory to the CIA in February 2017, following Trump’s inauguration. Soon thereafter, Daniel Jones, a former staffer for the U.S. Senate Committee on Intelligence, Ranking Member Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-California, and the president and CEO of The Democracy Integrity Project (TDIP) continued the Alfa Bank witch-hunt.
According to a complaint filed with the Senate’s Ethics Committee, staff and members of the Senate Armed Services Committee, including T. Kirk McConnell, “requested and accepted” professional services from Jones and TDIP. Specifically, the complaint alleged that the Armed Services Committee, “via senior leadership staff acting in their official capacity, asked Mr. Jones to research and offer his insights into the alleged connections between Alfa Bank and Trump Organization servers,” and to “evaluate information it had received about DNS look-ups between Alfa Bank servers and Trump Organization servers.”
Jones, the TDIP, and the Senate Armed Services Committee continued the Alfa Bank investigation long after the FBI had concluded in early February 2017 that there “were no such links” between the Trump organization and Alfa Bank. The media also persisted in pushing the supposed Russia collusion scandal.
The New Yorker’s Dexter Filkins re-upped the Alfa Bank tale in 2018, in a tome titled, “Was There a Connection Between a Russian Bank and the Trump Campaign?” Filkins then resurrected the story for The New Yorker in October 2020, repeating many of the same allegations in “The Contested Afterlife of the Trump-Alfa Bank Story.”
In both pieces, Filkins referenced “Max,” who claimed that he, along with a team of other supposed guardians of the internet, had uncovered the mysterious Alfa Bank-Trump connections. But thanks to the prosecution of Sussmann, we now know “Max” is tech executive Rodney Joffe, and that his fellow cyber experts pushing the Alfa Bank hoax were April Lorenzen and David Dagon.
Court filings in the Sussmann case also revealed that the cyber researchers saw the Alfa Bank theory as flawed. They also showed another expert, Manos Antonakakis, who reviewed the Alfa Bank-Trump whitepapers, had congratulated Joffe on crafting the paper to avoid the most glaring hole in the thesis.
The more devastating take-down of the Alfa Bank theory, however, came during Sussmann’s trial, when government cyber security experts testified of their review of the data, telling the jury they had quickly concluded the hypothesis made no sense. One agent noted it sounded “5150ish” at the time. He explained to the jury he meant that the individual positing the Alfa Bank-Trump connection sounded as if he “was suffering from some mental disability.”
Beyond burying the Alfa Bank hoax as a crazy conspiracy theory, Durham’s investigation also exposed the scandalous way the theory permeated both the media and U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Joffe tasked two Georgia Tech cyber researchers, as well as employees at tech companies over which he had influence, with mining proprietary and sensitive government data for any connection between Trump and Russia to push the Russia collusion narrative. Joffe also held responsibility for providing the Alfa Bank data to Sussmann, who shared it with the Clinton campaign’s head lawyer, Elias, and Fusion GPS, with the group then plotting to push the tale to the media.
The evidence further showed that Sussmann then fed the Alfa Bank story to the FBI, lying to Baker at the time, prompting the FBI to launch an investigation into the supposed secret communication network. Meantime, Joffe provided a different FBI contact the same Alfa Bank “intel” while asking that agent to maintain his anonymity, thereby creating a problem of circular reporting. Special Counsel Durham also revealed that Joffe still risks prosecution.
As with Sussmann, whether Joffe ever faces charges or a conviction says nothing of the success of the Durham investigation. To date, the special counsel has succeeded in exposing Hillary Clinton’s role in the hoax—and that the Alfa Bank hoax was real and spectacularly scandalous.
Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
Rodney Joffe, the tech executive responsible for giving the Hillary Clinton campaign the data used to peddle the Alfa Bank hoax, served as a confidential human source for the FBI. Yet on at least one occasion, former Clinton campaign attorney Michael Sussmann admits relaying a tip from Joffe to a high-level Department of Justice official. That Joffe used Sussmann, and not his handler, to feed supposed intel to the DOJ supports the special counsel’s false statement charge against Sussmann, but whether the jury will learn of this fact remains to be seen.
Last fall, Special Counsel John Durham charged Sussmann with lying to former FBI General Counsel James Baker when Sussmann met with Baker on September 19, 2016, to provide Baker data and whitepapers purporting to establish a secret communications network between Donald Trump and the Russian-based Alfa Bank. Prosecutors claim Sussmann told Baker that he was sharing the information on his own, when in fact Sussmann represented both the Clinton campaign and Joffe.
Trial on the one-count false statement charge began earlier this week in a federal court in Washington D.C. Sussmann’s legal team previewed their theory of defense for the jury during Tuesday’s opening argument.
Sussmann shared the Alfa Bank data with the FBI out of a genuine national security concern and not on behalf of the Clinton campaign, they argued, telling jurors Sussmann wanted to give Baker a heads-up about an impending New York Times story. That was not something the Clinton campaign wanted, Sussmann’s lawyers maintained—even though the facts don’t fit that storyline.
The defense team also rejected the idea that Sussmann was representing Joffe when he met with Baker, telling the jurors, “Sussmann wasn’t there to promote Mr. Joffe’s interests either.” “Mr. Joffe had nothing to gain from this meeting,” Sussmann’s Latham and Watkins attorney claimed in his opening argument.
From the jury’s perspective, that argument may well seem persuasive. After all, presiding judge Christopher Cooper has already axed one motive prosecutors hoped to suggest to the jury when he ruled pre-trial that the special counsel could not admit into evidence an email Joffe sent shortly after Trump’s November 2016 victory over Clinton.
“I was tentatively offered the top [cybersecurity] job by the Democrats when it looked like they’d win. I definitely would not take the job under Trump,” the email read. But, absent evidence that Joffe had, in fact, been tempted with a position in a Clinton administration, the email would not be allowed, the court ruled, eliminating mention of that possible motive.
The defense team’s argument that Joffe had no reason to use Sussmann to share the Alfa Bank information with the FBI also received a boost when trial testimony on Tuesday revealed that at the time of Sussmann’s meeting with Baker, Joffe was a confidential human source, or a “CHS,” for the FBI. Questioning by the defense team further indicated that in September 2016, when Sussmann was allegedly meeting with Baker on behalf of Joffe, Joffe had presented his handler, FBI Special Agent Tom Grasso, a copy of the Alfa Bank whitepaper.
Not only would there be no reason for Joffe to use Sussmann to push the Alfa Bank intel to the FBI but, as Sussmann’s attorney posited during opening argument, “If anything, if Mr. Sussmann had told the FBI about Mr. Joffe, they would have taken all of this more seriously, not less, given who Mr. Joffe is.”
This line of defense is eminently reasonable, but like Sussmann’s attempt to sell the jury on the claim that the Clinton campaign did not want him going to the FBI, the facts say otherwise.
In early 2017, Sussmann told a DOJ Office of Inspector General special agent in charge that an unnamed client “had observed that a specific OIG employee’s computer was ‘seen publicly’ in ‘Internet traffic’ and was connecting to a Virtual Private Network in a foreign country.” While Sussmann did not inform the OIG of his client’s identity, in January 2022, Sussmann’s lawyers informed the special counsel’s office that his “unnamed client” was Joffe. Sussmann’s legal team also alerted Durham to the fact that Sussmann had not merely shared his tip with a special agent, but personally met with Inspector General Michael Horowitz.
So, the precise scenario Sussmann’s lawyers told the jury was illogical, according to Sussmann’s own narrative of what happened in March of 2017: Sussmann, on behalf of Joffe, shared intel with someone high-up in the DOJ, without revealing Joffe’s role in gathering the evidence—something Sussmann’s lawyers stressed would have provided the data more gravitas given Joffe’s reputation. At that time Joffe, still served as a CHS, with his termination for cause only coming years later in 2021.
What possible benefit, then, was there for Joffe to task Sussmann with meeting on his behalf with the DOJ’s inspector general, as opposed to Joffe providing the intel to his handler? Who knows! Whatever the reason, we do know that Sussmann met with the DOJ inspector general on Joffe’s behalf, without revealing his client’s identity—a scenario Sussmann’s defense claims is inconceivable.
Sussmann’s meeting with the CIA in February 2017 also follows this pattern, with Sussmann allegedly sharing supposed intel of a connection between the Russian-made Yota phones and Trump, on behalf of the unnamed Joffe. While the trial court ruled the government may admit evidence related to this February 2017 meeting with the CIA in Sussmann’s trial, the problem for prosecutors is that they must still convince the jury that Sussmann represented Joffe during the CIA meeting.
The special counsel does not face that hurdle, however, on Sussmann’s meeting with the DOJ’s inspector general, because it was Sussmann’s legal team who alerted prosecutors to the fact that Sussmann had met with the inspector general on behalf of Joffe.
Sussmann taking Joffe’s intel anonymously to the DOJ’s OIG supports the prosecutor’s argument that when Sussmann met with Baker on September 19, 2016, he was likely representing an unnamed Joffe. But whether the special counsel will seek to admit this evidence remains to be seen.
Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
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