Unless you have been living under a rock for the past six years or so you have heard much about the “Trump-Russia Collusion” and that “the Russians helped Donald Trump steal the 2016 Election.” The allegations were breathtaking: if indeed a presidential candidate had colluded with a foreign adversary and thus won the White House, our whole republic would be in jeopardy. Without the guarantee of free and fair elections, our system collapses.
Even though Trump proved almost all the pundits wrong by pulling off an historic upset and beating Hillary Clinton that November, the accusations filled the news airwaves and newspapers for months and then years. Of course, fighting off those charges hamstrung President Trump and much of his staff for most of his one-term administration…but those charges also distracted the entire country for years.
In other words, this was no “victimless crime.” While the yapping media kept much of the national conversation torqued up about the collusion that had never taken place, we Americans were distracted from focusing on truly important issues: the economy, education, national defense, secure borders, a reasonable immigration policy, poverty, healthcare, infrastructure, the environment, energy…the list goes on and on. Plus, the collusion hoax sucked most of the oxygen out of the room from 2016-2019, so when a new virus came out of East Asia, we were truly caught flat-footed.
Now, with the passage of time–and Joseph Robinette Biden conveniently ensconced in the White House–more of the truth of the matter has trickled into the light, bit by bit.
Well I’ll be a Money’s Uncle. It so turned out, the whole Trump-Russia collusion narrative was a colossal lie.
The spider web of intrigue surrounding this whole scandal is so complex, intricate, and involves so many people and interactions, time and space do now allow us to even attempt to discuss it all here. And of course, the intricate web of deception was by design–to make tracks so faint and byzantine, and then to cover those tracks, so they would never be discovered.
The Epoch Times deserves a hat tip for digging deep into this sordid tale and doing their parts as journalists to make their findings public. Their diligence stands in stark contrast to the bias and I would say dishonesty of so many of the other media channels. Overall, most of the legacy media have beat the drum that the collusion story was a proven fact, and then when evidence to the contrary came out that it was a hoax to help drag Hillary Clinton across the finish line in 2016, many of those same media voices all suddenly developed serious cases of lockjaw.
(As I write this, it has finally dawned on the people at NBC that the Hunter Biden laptop scandal was real all along. It only took them a year and a half to admit what the New York Post tried to alert us all to in the fall of 2020, when the news would have made a difference, before the election. At this rate, maybe by June NBC will tell us if King Henry VIII got his divorce or not.)
But back to the Russian collusion hoax:
According to The Epoch Times’ April 22, 2022 story, “Where Things Stand With John Durham’s Probe,” in the spring of 2019 prosecutor John Durham was assigned the task of investigating the connections between Trump and Russia. Was there truly collusion? Or, was Trump being framed and the whole thing was a set-up?
To quote The Epoch Times: [Durham’s] first indictment, in August 2020, targeted former FBI attorney Kevin Clinesmith for altering a CIA email to say that former Trump campaign aide Carter Page was “not a source,” when in fact he was providing information to the agency. The message was then used as a part of an application to extend surveillance of Page. FBI Director Christopher Wray later admitted that the surveillance was illegal.
Clinesmith pleaded guilty and in January 2021 received a year of probation and 400 hours of community service. Prosecutors demanded six months in jail. His license to practice law in D.C. was reinstated after less than a year.
I don’t know about you, but I think if you or I tried to falsify an email between the FBI and CIA, we’d get more punishment that just 400 hours of community service. This is just one more example of what many decry as a “two-tiered justice system” in our country.
This week, another big trial in this Russian collusion hoax scandal opened. The defendant is Michael Sussman, who is 2016 was a top lawyer for the Hillary Clinton campaign. That same Epoch Times article indicates that, evidently seeking to create an “October Surprise” with which to blindside Trump and make Mrs. Clinton president, Sussman went to the FBI and, posing as a “Good Samaritan,” told the FBI he had secret information linking Trump to a Russian bank.
But instead of being a true “Good Samaritan Patriot” who was concerned about his country, it so happens that Sussman was billing the Clinton campaign for his “services.” In other words, Sussman was feeding a false narrative to the FBI. He lied to the government, and then with some well-placed “leaks,” some government officials then planted the false story with some major news outlets, who were all too happy to jump on the bandwagon and spread the (false) story like wildfire.
In sum, you could say that Sussman’s lying to the FBI in September 2016 was the initial tap that knocked down the first domino, that then set off the chain reaction.
As further evidence of what some see as a two-tiered justice system and particularly a Washington DC court system that some would label “incestuous,” there are numerous connections and relationships among the judges hearing these cases and many of the defendants.
For clarity, here are the last four paragraphs of that Epoch Times piece, and I ask you to ask yourself: does this sound like impartiality?
All three current cases of Durham’s have highlighted the tight-knit nature of the federal judicial and law enforcement community in the D.C. area.
The judge in the Clinesmith case, James Boasberg, sits on the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that approved spying on [Carter] Page based primarily on the Steele dossier and partly on the false information provided by Clinesmith.
The judge in the Danchenko case, Anthony Trenga, presided over the Mueller-brought case against former business partner of Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, former national security adviser to President Donald Trump. Trenga threw out the conviction in that case for a lack of evidence.
The judge in the Sussmann case, Christopher Reid Cooper, used to be a colleague of Sussmann’s at the DOJ. His wife, Amy Jeffress, is a lawyer for Lisa Page, formerly a high-level FBI attorney who’s now suing the DOJ. Page was deeply embedded in the Russia investigation. She was also a mistress of Peter Strzok, former head of FBI counterintelligence operations and a point man in the Russia probe. Cooper and Jeffress also have close ties to the Democratic Party. Cooper served on the 2008 transition team of President Barack Obama, Jeffress spent 20 years at the DOJ and was a national security counselor for Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder, and their wedding was officiated by Merrick Garland, the current Attorney General.
You can’t make this stuff up.
Ponder that last paragraph. The judge in the case that began this week, Judge Cooper, used to work with the defendant, Sussman, at the Department of Justice. Does it strike you as odd that a judge would preside over the trial of a former colleague? And Judge Cooper’s wife is a lawyer for Lisa Page? Hmmm. Page you may remember is a huge Hillary fan, Trump hater, and was having an affair with Trump hater and FBI colleague Peter Strzok, who helped exonerate Clinton from her email scandal.
Page and Strzok were the ones who were texting each other about the icky “smelly Trump voters” they saw at Wal-marts in Southern Virginia.
This week the trial has focused primarily on calling jurors. As pointed out in PJ Media, since Washington DC is a city where about 92% of the residents vote Democrat, that makes finding a bipartisan, impartial jury challenging.
Ironically, one day this week a woman, identified as “Juror #5,” explained that her daughter and Judge Cooper’s daughter both plan on the same high school crew team. The woman added that the daughters are not friends, are at least three years apart in age, the crew team has over 40 members, and that she had never before met Judge Cooper or his wife. The woman claims she can be an impartial juror, and let’s all hope and pray they all are. Still, that connection among the two families via their teen daughters seems emblematic of the complex, compromising relationships in that city.
No wonder many call it “The Swamp.”
–Scott Dreyer
