Durham Indictment Pulls Back the Curtain on Trump–Russia Collusion Hoax

John Durham speaks to reporters on the steps of U.S. District Court in New Haven, Conn., on April 25, 2006. (Bob Child/AP Photo)

Commentary

In my most recent column here at The Epoch Times, I wrote about all the leaking that was suddenly springing up surrounding special counsel John Durham’s Spygate investigation.

It was revealed in April this year that Durham had seated a grand jury, which recently began issuing a flurry of search warrants and subpoenas. This sudden burst of activity led to a story in The New York Times about documents that the Brookings Institution, a Washington-based think tank, was forced to hand over to Durham’s team.

The documents are rumored to center around Igor Danchenko, a former low-level staffer and researcher at Brookings whom former British spy Christopher Steele had identified to the FBI as the primary source of the Trump–Russia collusion allegations found in his fake dossier.

Things got quiet again for the next four months, when suddenly within a span of two weeks, three different stories appeared, all focused on Durham and his investigation—with each new story seeking to cast Durham and his work in a negative light.

Each of the articles—based on leaks—contained claims by “people familiar with the matter” that Durham is out of control, retreading old ground already covered by Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz, and casting the longtime and well-respected prosecutor as a Trump partisan engaged in—of all things—a “witch hunt.”

You could see from the sudden cycle of leaks that something was coming.

Then, just over a week ago, leaks sprang up again all over the news media that Durham was about to issue his first indictment since being appointed as a special counsel by former Attorney General William Barr last October.

According to anonymous sources in multiple reports, the target of this indictment was going to be Perkins Coie lawyer Michael Sussmann. Anyone who has followed the long and winding turns of the massive Spygate scandal for the past five years will be familiar with Sussmann’s name, and how he was intimately involved in creating and then propagating the false Trump Tower/Alfa Bank hoax in mid-2016, as he allegedly made approaches with fake evidence to both the news media and to federal agencies.

Those who carefully read Durham’s indictment of Sussmann can see exactly what he’s documenting with it—how the Clinton campaign allegedly tried to cleverly use attorney-client privilege to hide that the campaign was both funding and directing political operatives at Perkins Coie and Fusion GPS to create fake Trump–Russia scandals and then promoting these fake scandals to the news media and to federal law enforcement.

The Clinton campaign and the private operatives in their employ should have settled for simply selling the usual fake smears and hit jobs in the news media. Instead, they appear to have gotten ambitious and decided to engage in what could be a criminal conspiracy.

They weren’t content with selling their fake Trump–Russia scandals to just the news media; what Durham appears to be documenting in the Sussmann indictment is how top officials inside the Clinton campaign, Perkins Coie, and Fusion GPS conspired to approach federal officials with fake “evidence” that “proved” that Trump’s presidential campaign needed to be investigated for Russian collusion.

This conspiracy had the goal of getting federal agencies to take the Alfa Bank white papers and the Steele dossier so they’d be able to begin leaking in the press that “this Alfa Bank/Steele dossier scandal must be real since the FBI is investigating it.”

It worked. Probably beyond their wildest dreams. But that’s the problem the conspirators face now that Durham’s been on their trail meticulously collecting the documentary evidence for several years.

They left a paper trail behind them a mile wide and several feet deep. In this new indictment, Durham frequently cites detailed notes about their alleged activities, as well as how much they billed the Clinton campaign for everything they were allegedly doing in creating and promoting this hoax.

As a result, the FBI ended up going on a wild goose chase on the Alfa Bank hoax.

Sussmann was indicted for that particular escapade, which resulted in nothing more serious than some FBI agents wasting their time for a few weeks until closing the probe down.

But these same conspirators were behind another similar hoax—the fake Steele dossier. I believe that their ability to get the FBI to take that fake evidence is proving to be their undoing.

That’s because the fake evidence from Steele’s dossier ended up in a FISA surveillance warrant on a U.S. citizen named Carter Page.

That warrant was granted by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) and was renewed three times. The warrant was in force from Oct. 26, 2016, all the way to Sept. 22, 2017.

What people need to remember is that Page was far from the only person who was spied on and whose civil rights were grossly violated as a result.

How many people ended being spied on and having their rights violated based on the fraudulent warrant and its renewals from October 2016 to September 2017?

I’ve been researching Spygate for several years now, and I can’t tell you the answer to that question. But at this point, there very likely is someone who could give you a ballpark figure. But he’s busy. And he’s not ready to start talking yet.

His name is John Durham.

Just as the fake spy warrant on Page opened a door to one of the most massive civil rights abuses ever, Durham has now opened his own door.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.