By Washington Examiner, |
| September 18, 2021 12:00 AM
We’ve known for decades that the Clintons and their henchmen are corrupt. But the latest indictment filed by special counsel John Durham exposes a breadth and depravity of corruption that is disgraceful and dangerous even for them.
Durham’s first indictment and subsequent conviction of ex-FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith put the country on notice that whatever checks our federal government has tried to place on deep-state adventurism just aren’t working. Durham proved that Clinesmith fraudulently edited warrant applications to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to get permission to spy on Carter Page, one of President Donald Trump's foreign policy advisers. This clear abuse prompted calls in Congress to reform the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
Now, we also know the federal government needs to reform how tech companies help the federal government protect us from cyberattacks.
Durham’s latest indictment centers on Democratic National Committee and Clinton Foundation lawyer Michael Sussmann. One of Sussmann’s other clients, only identified in the indictment as "Tech Executive-1," approached Sussmann in July 2016, claiming he had information that could help create a “narrative” of Trump collusion with Russia. Tech Executive-1 would later say in an email that he wanted Hillary Clinton to win the presidency because he believed she would give him the nation’s top cybersecurity job.
Tech Executive-1 then used his connections with a cybersecurity firm helping the federal government to gain access to nonpublic internet data about Trump and six of his associates. Although Tech Executive-1's employees later told their boss that the data supposedly linking Trump and a Russian bank “will not fly in [the] eyes of public scrutiny,” Sussmann nevertheless fed it to media allies upon whom he could count to build a false narrative that Trump was colluding with Moscow.
Sussmann, who had worked with the FBI during its investigation into the Russian hack of DNC servers, told the FBI he had information showing a link between Trump and a Russian bank. During the meeting, Sussmann insisted to the FBI that he was turning the information over simply as a concerned citizen and that he was not working on behalf of any client. He further claimed that cybersecurity experts had approached him about a possible link between Trump and a Russian bank, but he never mentioned the true source of the data, Tech Executive-1.
This was a monstrous lie and now it has been exposed. Sussmann had been billing Hillary Clinton's campaign for his collusion with Tech Executive-1 the whole time. That is, he was working for her. If the FBI had known that Sussmann approached it on behalf of the Clinton campaign merely so he could dish dirt on her political rival, it might never have opened an investigation. But since Sussmann lied about his motives, an investigation was opened.
The Department of Justice inspector general would later conclude in 2019 that the link between Trump and Russian banks was utter fiction. But Sussmann had already primed the media with his false information, and they dutifully played their part in creating the Trump-Russia “narrative” that would distract and divide the nation for most of Trump’s presidency.
The Clintons’ grip on the Democratic Party is waning, for which mercy, heaven be praised. We hope we won’t see another political family as corrupt. But more worrisome is the ease with which Big Tech executives use and abuse the power given to them by the federal government to spy on, then lie about, their political opponents.
Durham will indict more people before he is finished. And as we gather more facts about how the Russian collusion narrative was invented, Congress should be ready to rein in what information Big Tech has access to, or at least make it easier to punish those executives who abuse their power.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/editorials/hillary-clinton-used-the-deep-state-to-fabricate-the-russia-collusion-narrative
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