John Durham Special Counsel Probe of FBI
Why Special Counsel Probe of FBI continues: Explained
"He who speaks the truth is the most hated of all"-- Socrates
The special prosecutor probing the origins of the federal investigation into ties between the Trump campaign and Russia, John Durham, has charged Washington lawyer Michael Sussmann with lying to the FBI during the early stages of the inquiry.
Sussmann, who worked through his firm as an attorney for the Hillary Clinton campaign, is accused in a grand jury indictment returned Thursday of a single felony count of making a false statement during a September 2016 meeting with FBI General Counsel James Baker.
Feb. 28, 2022
Special counsel appointment has no time limit
John Durham given wide-open mandate
Special counsel John Durham has spent a year longer investigating the origins of the Mueller report than Robert Mueller spent compiling it, filed 34 fewer charges and survived three attorneys general—with no end in sight.
Durham’s probe into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election stayed mostly in the background, at least until this month when he filed what is normally a routine conflict motion involving attorney Michael Sussmann, who is charged with one count of lying to Durham’s team. Although Sussmann waived any claim of conflict, Durham’s 13-page motion laid out a series of events involving people connected to the campaign of Hillary Clinton who haven’t been charged.
That set off a firestorm, with former President Donald Trump—who was in office when Durham was appointed special counsel—accusing Clinton of spying on him, and Sussmann alleging that Durham’s filing was based on provably false claims. No hearing date has been set on Durham’s motion.
The order appointing Durham is broad, allowing him to not only seek out wrongdoing in connection with the Mueller report, but to prosecute any crimes he may find along the way.
With a trial likely for later this year, here’s a look at Durham’s investigation and the statutes guiding the appointment and work of special counsels.
What Is a Special Counsel?
U.S. Code 28 CFR §600.1 allows an attorney general to appoint a special counsel if there is a perceived or actual conflict, or if “it would be in the public interest to appoint an outside Special Counsel to assume responsibility for the matter.”
Trump’s attorney general, William Barr, cited the latter when he first tapped Durham in May 2019 to investigate the matter.
Why Was Durham Appointed?
Barr appointed him to investigate what he called unethical actions by FBI agents and others during their search for links between Russian intelligence officials and Trump’s campaign. Barr specifically cited leaks detailing former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn’s contacts with a Russian ambassador. Those press reports led to Flynn’s removal and he later pleaded guilty to perjury.
More than a year into the probe, on Oct. 19, 2020, Barr elevated Durham to special counsel and announced that it was officially a criminal investigation.
Barr’s order gave broad authority to determine whether any law enforcement or intelligence officials broke the law while investigating Trump and his campaign.
Barr made the appointment just weeks before the presidential election, ensuring the probe would continue no matter who won. However, Barr specifically noted that he would delay his required notification to Congress until after the election.
Can’t Biden Fire Him Like Other Appointees?
No. Even though Durham was appointed under Trump, only the attorney general can fire a special counsel, and only for cause such as violating Justice Department rules or breaking the law.
Any firing must be accompanied by a detailed explanation to Congress.
Does a Special Counsel Appointment Have a Time Limit?
No. There is no set time limit once any counsel is appointed, although each spring he or she must submit a progress report to the attorney general, who decides whether to fund another year or bring the investigation to a close.
While the counsel can’t be fired, the investigation can be brought to a close in this way, leaving the administration to face any political consequences.
Durham’s filings this month come just six weeks before he has to submit a report asking for a new round of funding—about $5 million, based on previous spending —and permission to continue the investigation for another year.
The attorney general can then decide whether to continue the operation, but cannot alter the scope outlined in the initial order appointing a special counsel.
Who Is John Durham?
Durham, 71, was appointed U.S. Attorney for Connecticut by Trump in 2017. He has been a federal prosecutor since 1982, “prosecuting complex organized crime, violent crime, public corruption and financial fraud matters,” the Justice Department said in a releasewhen he was sworn in.
Durham’s cases included the prosecution of corrupt FBI agents and police officers in Boston, and he also looked into “matters relating to the destruction of certain videotapes by the CIA and the treatment of detainees by the CIA.”
Has Durham Brought Any Indictments of Government Officials?
Yes. Barr’s initial order cited abuses by government officials, and he told NBC News in 2019 that the Durham investigation was needed to identify “gross abuses” and “inexplicable behavior” by the FBI in connection to the Mueller probe.
Durham’s first charge came against former FBI attorney Kevin Clinesmith, who in August 2020 pleaded guilty to one count of providing false statements for altering an email in connection with a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act application. He was sentenced to 12 months of probation.
Two other people have been charged so far: a Russian national, and an attorney who brought information to the FBI and CIA about alleged connections between Russia and Trump’s presidential campaign.
The one-count indictment of attorney Michael Sussmann accuses him of telling FBI General Counsel Jim Baker and a CIA employee that he wasn’t working for anyone while reporting his concerns, when in fact he was working for the Clinton campaign. Sussmann countered that Baker’s notes show that allegation is false, and that the Clinton campaign had already been disbanded by the time he brought his concerns to the CIA.
The other indictment accuses Igor Danchenko, 43, of lying to the FBI about his role in supplying information about the infamous Steele Dossier, which alleged some still unproven contacts between Trump and Russian operatives.
(An earlier version of this article, published Feb. 18, incorrectly stated that Durham hadn't brought charges against any government officials. )
Steele dossier source arrested in Durham probe
Researcher Igor Danchenko is charged with five counts of false statements in an inquiry into the origins of the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation.
The special counsel probing the origins of the investigation into ties between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia has brought false-statement charges against a Washington-based foreign policy researcher and Russian emigre who was a key source for an intelligence dossier that played an important role in the early stages of the FBI inquiry.
The researcher, Igor Danchenko, 43, was arrested Thursday in Northern Virginia on an indictment that special counsel John Durham obtained charging the Russian-born researcher with five felony counts of making false statements to the FBI.
Information from Danchenko was a central element of a series of reports from a former British spy, Christopher Steele, that the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign commissioned to detail alleged ties between Donald Trump and Russia.
Those reports, known as the Steele dossier, helped fuel the FBI probe and provided fodder for requests the law enforcement agency made to a secret surveillance court to obtain warrants to examine the communications of a former foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign, Carter Page.
However, several claims in the dossier turned out to be false, prompting congressional, inspector general and criminal investigations into how the reports were compiled and why the U.S. government gave them such credence.
At a brief hearing in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Va., on Thursday afternoon, prosecutors did not ask that Danchenko be detained as he awaits trial.
Magistrate Judge Theresa Buchanan ordered Danchenko’s release on a $100,000 unsecured bond.
Prosecutors allege Sussmann lied by denying that he was representing any client as he told the FBI about digital evidence allegedly linking computers in Trump Tower to Russia’s Alfa Bank. The FBI subsequently investigated the purported link but found “insufficient evidence” to support it, prosecutors say.
Shortly after the indictment was announced, the law firm where he was a partner, Perkins Coie, said it had accepted Sussmann’s resignation. In a statement issued prior to the indictment, Sussmann’s lawyers insisted that their client was innocent and they suggested that politics were at work in the decision to charge their client.
“Mr. Sussmann has committed no crime,” defense attorneys Sean Berkowitz and Michael Bosworth said in the statement. “Any prosecution here would be baseless, unprecedented, and an unwarranted deviation from the apolitical and principled way in which the Department of Justice is supposed to do its work.”
Sussmann’s lawyers also contend that he never made such a statement, that the evidence in the case is weak and that there’s no sign the alleged falsehood affected the FBI’s work.
The charge against Sussmann from a Washington grand jury is the first outward sign of activity in Durham’s investigation in nearly nine months. Republicans have grown impatient with the probe, while still hoping for a report that will vindicate former President Donald Trump’s charge that the original inquiry was a thinly veiled and unfounded political attack.
“Does everybody remember when we caught the Democrats, red-handed, SPYING ON MY CAMPAIGN? Where’s Durham?” Trump wrote in a statement emailed to reporters last month.
Sussmann’s meeting with Baker had already been a subject of intense interest to Republicans on Capitol Hill, who grilled Baker about it during closed-door testimony in October 2018 during their own probe of the origins of the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation. Baker, at the time, said he didn’t recall whether Sussmann had represented himself as working on behalf of the Democratic Party or the Clinton campaign.
And under questioning from Democratic staff, Baker added that he wouldn’t have viewed the information differently had he been aware of Sussmann’s link to the campaign. In a second October 2018 interview led by House Republicans, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) pressed Baker on Sussmann’s affiliation with the Clinton campaign, saying he found it “unbelievable” that Baker didn’t press him for details on the origin of the Alfa Bank allegations. But Baker emphasized that he intentionally avoided learning more about the claim.
“I mean, so I was uncomfortable with being in the position of having too much factual information conveyed to me, because I’m not an agent,” Baker said. “And so I wanted to get this — get the information into the hands of the agents as quickly as possible and let them deal with it. If they wanted to go interview Sussmann and ask him all those kind of questions, fine with me.”
He said after Sussmann dropped off the material, he quickly passed it to Bill Priestap, the head of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division at the time. Priestap, Baker told lawmakers, assured him that he had extensively followed up on the Alfa Bank matter.
Sussmann also tried to deliver similar material to another undisclosed agency in December 2016, after Trump had won the election.
Sussmann, a former federal prosecutor and cybersecurity expert, is the second defendant facing charges brought amid Durham’s long-running investigation. The first, Kevin Clinesmith, pleaded guilty to altering an email used to obtain a surveillance warrant against former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.
Clinesmith’s alterations, Durham charged, obscured Page’s prior relationship with the CIA. Clinesmithwas sentenced in January to probation.
Then-Attorney General Bill Barr tapped Durham in May 2019 to examine how the FBI’s investigation into the Trump campaign and Russia began.
Last year, Barr converted Durham’s probe into a special counsel investigation under Justice Department regulations.
That move effectively took Durham out of the normal Justice Department hierarchy and supervision, although after the Biden administration assumed office, Attorney General Merrick Garland retained the right to overrule any of Durham’s major decisions, such as the effort to seek an indictment of Sussmann.
A spokesperson for Garland did not immediately respond to a request for comment on his role in the case.
The precise scope of Durham’s mandate has never been clear. Some close to the investigation have said Durham appeared not simply to be seeking out potential crimes, but conducting a broader review of the quality of the intelligence that led the FBI to begin investigating people tied to the Trump campaign.
The case against Sussmann was assigned on Thursday to Judge Christopher Cooper, an appointee of President Barack Obama.
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/11/04/steele-source-arrested-519498
Coming up on three years ago, U.S. Attorney John Durham was assigned to look into possible criminal mischief by the FBI and others surrounding the probe of Donald Trump as a supposed Russian spy. A recent court filing says former Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussman used access to computer data to try to build a Trump-Russia collusion narrative that proved false. He's already charged with lying to the FBI. He says he’s not guilty. Today, we speak with Congressman Darrell Issa, a top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, about the long-running investigation. --------- Full Measure is a weekly Sunday news program focusing on investigative, original and accountability reporting. The host is Sharyl Attkisson, five-time Emmy Award winner and recipient of the Edward R. Murrow award for investigative reporting. She is backed by a team of award winning journalists.
John Durham’s investigation of the Trump-Russia probe enters final stages
The John Durham Probe Gave Trump What He Wanted
https://www.theatlantic.com › ideas › archive › 2022/09
September 15, 2022
Special Prosecutor Durham successfully petitioned the federal judge in the upcoming trial of Igor Danchenko to unseal a motion revealing that Danchenko, the primary source of the now-discredited Steele dossier was paid by the FBI as a “Confidential Human Source” (CHS) for more than three (3) years until the fall of 2020 when he was terminated for lying to FBI agents.
The falsified information the FBI accepted without even corroborating any of it resulted in the investigation of Donald Trump during the lead-up to 2016 campaign and time he was President even though the FBI had prior concerns that the Confidential Human Source,” Igor Danchenko was tied to Russia’s intelligence services.
Durham's unsealed court filing disclosed for the first time that in March 2017, the FBI recruited Igor Danchenko as a “Confidential Human Source” (CHS). The FBI then terminated its source relationship with Igor Danchenko in October 2020, because they claim that he knowingly lied to FBI agents during several of these interviews."
This revelation means that the FBI first fired former MI6 agent Christopher Steele, the author of the now infamous Hillary Clinton-funded Steele dossier, as a “Confidential Human Source” in November 2016, for having unauthorized contacts with the news media.
The FBI then turned around a few months later and hired Steele's primary informer to work with the Bureau even after determining most of Danchenko's statements in the Steele dossier were either exaggerated or outright lies.
The Special Prosecutor Durham confirmed that even the FBI had prior concerns about Danchenko's ties to Russian intelligence and even opened up a counterintelligence probe on him after learning he was trying to buy classified information from the Obama administration, but they caved into the radical left and accepted Danshenko’s lies.
Based on this information, the FBI quietly initiated a “preliminary investigation” into Danchenko. The FBI then converted its probe into a 'full blown investigation' after learning that Danchenko had been identified as an associate of two FBI counterintelligence subjects and he had previous contacts with the Russian Embassy and known Russian intelligence officers. The FBI closed that counterintelligence probe, but only after it "incorrectly believed that the Danchenko had left the country," Durham told the court.
The filing requested that the court grant permission to use the evidence at trial of other lies that Danchenko told the FBI that are not charged as part of his indictment. The prosecutor argued the new evidence would show a pattern and how Danchenko's deception led to false narratives in the Steele dossier and the news media, including the salacious and untrue allegations that Trump had consorted with prostitutes in Moscow.
Durham plans to show the jury evidence that Danchenko made "uncharged false statements to the FBI regarding his purported receipt of information reflecting Donald's Trump's alleged salacious sexual activity at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Moscow," the filing stated.
Now, Prosecutors have evidence that supports that Igor Danchenko never received such damaging information about Donald Trump. Additionally, prosecutors plan to introduce testimony that members of the Moscow hotel staff never made any such claims about Trump's behavior such as those identified in the Steele dossier.
This all means the the whole Russian Collusion ordeal was not only a complete hoax but an elaborate set up where the Obama Administration and alphabet agencies conspired to fabricate evidence and used a paid Russian cutout they knew was associated with Russian intelligence services to destroy Trump.
During an interview with the FBI, Danchenko suggested that even he was skeptical of the contents included in the dossier. Specifically, Danchenko said, “Even raw intelligence from credible sources, I still take it with a grain of salt because who knows, what if it’s not particularly accurate? Is it just a rumor or is there more to it?”
To make matters worse, the FBI reportedly did not share Danchenko’s concerns with the Department of Justice (DOJ). The DOJ inspector general found in 2019, that the FBI had totally relied on information from the dossier and accepted it without any corroboration despite Danchenko casting serious doubt on its contents. The FBI ended its relationship with Danchenko in October 2020, for obvious reasons.
THIS ALL MEANS THE THE ENTIRE RUSSIAN COLLUSION ALLEGATIONS AGAINST DONALD TRUMP WERE NOT DISMISSED DUE TO A LACK OF EVIDENCE, IT WAS ALL BASED ON LIES, DECEIT, DECEPTION, DISINFORMATION AND A MASSIVE GOVERNMENT CONSPIRED COVERUP.
See also: https://thedissedent.page/2021/07/07/the-clinton-crime-family/
Yup … That’s it folks!
New DOJ Notes Reveal FBI Panic After Trump Tweeted He Knew He Was Being Spied On
Newly released notes taken by high-level Department of Justice (DOJ) officials during a March 6, 2017, meeting with FBI leadership expose some of the lengths the FBI engaged in to cover up its spying on the 2016 campaign of President Donald Trump.
The notes were released on May 8 by lawyers representing former Hillary Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann as part of an effort to clear him on charges of having lied to the FBI. The notes, in reality, appear to do little to exonerate Sussmann but do provide quite a bit of information on the FBI.
The meeting at which the notes were taken took place just two days after Trump’s March 4, 2017, tweet in which he accused former President Barack Obama of having wiretapped Trump Tower. Trump’s tweet panicked FBI leadership, who were unsure exactly how much Trump knew about their efforts to tie him up with Russia collusion allegations.
What the notes reveal is that in response to the tweet, they tried to cover their tracks.
By March 2017, FBI leadership already knew with near-certainty that the Trump–Russia collusion claims were a hoax. They knew that Clinton’s campaign had a plan to vilify Trump by portraying him as a puppet of Putin. The FBI also knew that not a single claim in the so-called Steele dossier—which was the primary source of allegations of Trump–Russia collusion—had checked out.
In fact, at that point, the FBI had already spent three days interviewing Steele’s primary source, Igor Danchenko, who disavowed pretty much every claim in Steele’s dossier. The FBI also knew that the Alfa Bank story, which claimed that a Trump server was communicating with a Russian bank—information that had been brought to them by Sussmann—was bogus.
In short, the FBI knew that all the claims of Trump-Russia collusion had proven to be fake.
But things took a sudden and dramatic turn on March 4, 2017, when Trump said on Twitter that he knew that Obama had wiretapped Trump Tower, a very public claim of spying that set off alarm bells with both FBI and DOJ leadership. Trump’s tweet so alarmed these DOJ and FBI officials that the topic dominated a meeting two days later that included FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe and the acting U.S. attorney general, Dana Boente.
The problem for the FBI was this: They didn’t know how much Trump actually knew about their actions. Just a day earlier, on March 3, 2017, radio host Mark Levin had reported that the Obama administration had obtained Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants that involved Trump and several of his campaign advisers. Levin also reported that Trump’s off-the-cuff joke in July 2016—“Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing”—had become the basis for the Russia collusion accusations.
But as we now know, the FISA warrants weren’t the only thing that the FBI leadership was involved with. The FBI was actively spying on the Trump campaign and the incoming Trump administration’s transition communications, a fact that also was revealed in the new notes. The FBI had not only spied on Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, but also on another aide, George Papadopoulos, going so far as to lure him to London, where they tried to set him up in a clumsy but elaborate sting.
There were also the new fake accusations brought forward by Sussmann that Trump was tied to the use of a Russian Yota phone. And there was the matter of tech executive Rodney Joffe–a man with deep ties to the FBI–who had been using his access to non-public data to spy on Trump both at Trump Tower and at the White House.
In all likelihood, Trump probably only knew what Levin had reported the day before–that there was a FISA warrant on a campaign aide–but the FBI leadership didn’t know how much Trump knew and had to assume that he knew a lot more.
The discussion at the March 6 meeting was dominated by Trump’s tweet, with the FBI’s McCabe kicking things off by stating that the bureau was trying to determine what was behind Trump’s tweets.
Epoch Times Photo
Notes at the meeting were taken by three DOJ officials—Tashina Gauhar, Mary McCord, and Scott Schools. The notes were released because one of the notes appears to show that McCabe stated that Sussmann had represented clients when he took the Alfa Bank allegations to the FBI. Sussmann initially told the FBI that he didn’t represent anyone and was merely acting as a good samaritan. It’s that lie to the FBI by Sussmann that he has been charged with and Sussmann’s lawyers are hoping to sow doubt by introducing that single sentence that appears to say otherwise.
This claim by Sussmann’s lawyers, however, is, in essence, a side-show as the notes are double-hearsay evidence written six months after Sussmann told the FBI the exact opposite.
The real bombshells are in the many pages of notes that Sussmann doesn’t cite; those notes reveal the true extent of the FBI’s panic over Trump’s tweet. The first reaction from FBI leadership appears to have been to tell the acting attorney general, Boente, a sequence of lies about their investigation.
The notes reveal that the FBI repeatedly referred to Steele’s dossier as “Crown reporting,” suggesting the dossier represented some sort of official UK government intelligence, when it was mostly information made up by Steele and Danchenko–a fact the FBI already knew at the time.
The new notes also revealed that FBI agent Peter Strzok lied to his DOJ superiors about what triggered Alexander Downer, the Australian ambassador in London, to come forward to the FBI with information regarding his meeting with Papadopolous. It has always been the FBI’s official story that it was Downer who initiated the official Trump–Russia investigation, but that story is now undermined in the new notes, in which Strzok claims that it was Trump’s joke about Russia finding Clinton’s emails that had triggered Downer.
In truth, Downer had come forward before Trump had even made the joke.
The FBI also lied to the DOJ about the Carter Page FISA warrant, which they claimed was “fruitful,” when it actually had revealed nothing nefarious–something that the FBI was aware of by this time.
tb continued...
Special Counsel John Durham Wins Key Motion in Case Against Former Clinton Lawyer
May 4, 2022
A federal judge on May 4 granted a motion from special counsel John Durham to review documents that Hillary Clinton’s campaign and other parties had claimed were protected by privilege, which means the documents may ultimately be made available to the public.
U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper, after a hearing in Washington, granted Durham’s motion to compel production of unredacted versions of said documents from the Perkins Coie, a law firm hired by the campaign ahead of the 2016 election; Rodney Joffe, a technology executive; and Fusion GPS, a firm that specializes in opposition research that the campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) used extensively to investigate then-candidate Donald Trump—Clinton’s rival for the presidency.
The parties had resisted producing some documents and handed over redacted versions of others because of shielding afforded by attorney-client privilege or another form of privilege that protects documents used in producing “work product”—claims Durham has disputed in part because Fusion primarily engaged in non-legal matters such as opposition research for the campaign, the DNC, and Perkins.
The documents include details on Fusion’s opposition research into Trump and the firm’s promotion of dubious stories regarding Trump to various media outlets, Durham has said. Among them are emails and attachments sent by or received by Fusion, Perkins, and Joffe.
Other communications between Fusion and Joffe appear related to the claim that the Trump Organization, Trump’s business, had a secret backchannel with a Russian bank.
Evidence purportedly substantiating that claim was brought by Michael Sussmann—at the time representing the campaign and Joffe—to the FBI, which could not substantiate the allegations. The CIA found the claims were not “technically plausible.”
The motion was brought in the case against Sussmann, who is set to go on trial later in May for allegedly lying to the FBI when he said he was not bringing the information on behalf of a client.
The documents in question may or may not ultimately be made available to the general public.
The motion asked Cooper, an Obama appointee, to agree to compel the parties to produce unredacted forms of the documents and then review the documents in private.
After conducting such a review, Durham requested the court to give prosecutors access to unredacted versions of any documents the judge determines aren’t shielded by privilege. Any such documents would likely be posted on the court docket, making them available for anybody to read.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/special-counsel-john-durham-wins-key-motion-in-case-against-former-clinton-lawyer_4446031.htm
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