Exposed: DC Elite Incest

And Speaking Of Disinformation

We’ve discussed Durham’s wins in the failed prosecution of Dem legal operative Michael Sussmann—beginning even before the end of the trial itself. The big win, of course, was tying Hillary directly into the Russia Hoax at the top authorization level. That was something everyone knew and understood, but Durham put into the framework of sworn testimony under threat of perjury.

Kim Strassel expands on Durham’s wins at the WSJ. Let’s start with Michael Caputo’s reminder (and, btw, I found I was able to access Strassel’s entire article from the link below):

.⁦@KimStrassel⁩ spells out the wreckage that was once the American justice system. It’s a big club and you ain’t in it.

Opinion | John Durham vs. the Beltway Swamp Michael Sussmann’s trial showcased the incestuous culture of elite Washington.https://www.wsj.com/articles/john-durham-vs-the-beltway-swamp-dossier-clinton-fbi-trial-expose-politics-11654207276?mod=djemalertNEWS

2/ It's a big club, and you ain’t in it. You and I are not in the big club. And by the way, it's the same big club they use to beat you over the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe. All day long beating you over the head in their media…

3/ The table is tilted folks. The game is rigged, and nobody seems to notice, nobody seems to care. Good honest hard-working people… these are people of modest means -- continue to elect these rich c*******ers who don’t give a f*ck about them. They don’t give a f*ck about you…

4/ They don't care about you at all… And nobody seems to notice, nobody seems to care. That's what the owners count on; the fact that Americans will probably remain willfully ignorant of the big red, white and blue d*ck that's being jammed up their a******s every day…

5/5 “Because the owners of this country know the truth: it's called the American Dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it.”

And the Durham trial proved it.

No doubt, if George Carlin were still with us he would say “I told you so!”

We should have listened to him.

What’s Caputo talking about—the Durham trial proved what? Strassel explains:

… John Durham did more than expose Hillary Clinton’s dirty political tricks. He exposed the incestuous elite Washington world that enabled those tricks to succeed. ...

…

… it’s a long way from unfounded smears to full-fledged FBI investigations. The entire Clinton operation depended on getting the FBI to bite. The Durham trial was a glimpse at the chummy web of brokers who used their access and influence to make that happen.

… Rodney Joffe —the tech executive who used privileged access to nonproprietary data to create the Alfa claims—was a confidential human source for the FBI in 2016. Yet Mr. Joffe … didn’t take his accusations to his regular handler. He instead gave them to . . . Mr. Sussmann …

Is Strassel a bit naive here, or just indulging in a bit of rhetoric? I’d be willing to bet that, far from concocting the hoax material and then bringing it to Sussmann, Joffe was recruited into the Russia Hoax by people like Jake Sullivan and Michael Sussmann because they needed Joffe’s expertise. Still, we get the picture. Joffe didn’t have the access that Sussmann had to the top levels of the FBI. To make this work Sussmann had to be personally involved.

Why? Mr. Sussmann was tight with the FBI. So tight that according to trial evidence, the bureau in 2016 allowed him to edit the draft of one of its press releases. Mr. Sussmann was even on a first-name basis with then-FBI general counsel James Baker. He was able to text his “friend” (Mr. Baker’s description of their relationship) and score a meeting the next day. He assured “Jim” he didn’t need a badge to get in the building—he already had one. All this allowed Mr. Sussmann (who later sought to recruit Mr. Baker to his firm, Perkins Coie) to avoid the pesky agents and questions that would accompany any average Joe trying to sell the FBI on wild claims.

That’s important, about the “pesky agents.” What came out very clearly at the trial was that, if the Russia Hoaxers had had to go up the chain or ladder of command at the FBI with their hoax they would have fallen off the ladder at the first rung. New York, Chicago—all the agents sniffed out the bullsh*t immediately, and said so. Only Comey and crew kept the hoax alive, with top down orders to keep the investigation open until January, 2017. Strassel expands on this:

The Steele dossier likewise received special handling. Fusion GPS happened to choose for its dossier duties a guy who’d also worked as an FBI source. Mr. Steele initially went to regular FBI agents. But he followed up with his own top contact—former senior Justice Department official Bruce Ohr, whose wife worked for (where else?) Fusion. Mr. Ohr handed the dossier up to Deputy FBI Director Andy McCabe. Mr. Steele separately shopped his dossier to a top State Department appointee, Jonathan Winer —who also handed it up the chain.

Getting the dirt to the top made all the difference. Prosecutors in the trial introduced an internal message from FBI agent Joseph Pientka two days after the Sussmann-Baker meeting, reading: “People on the 7th floor to include Director are fired up about this server. . . . Did you guys open a case? . . . Its [sic] not an option—we must do it.” This despite testimony from rank-and-file agents who said they’d quickly dismissed the claims as ludicrous.

As I said in a comment at the time, the hoax was time sensitive. Trying to work it up the ladder of the FBI bureaucracy wasn’t an option, because the bullsh*t was, er, palpable. As Strassel says, claims this ludicrous would never have made it past the first rung. She then brings in a host of slimey Deep State operatives:

And the powerful guys at the top continued to work their influence. Former CIA director John Brennan tipped Harry Reid to the collusion claims, prompting the Senate minority leader to write a letter that went public with the accusations. Mr. Comey engineered a Trump briefing in January 2017 that served as catalyst for BuzzFeed to publish the dossier. Mr. Comey secretly memorialized his privileged conservations [sic] with the president, later leaking these to provoke the appointment of his colleague and mentor Robert Mueller as special counsel to investigate President Trump. All this was aided by the Beltway media, which ably served as scribes for their claims, and those of their buddies at Fusion GPS, some of whom formerly worked for the Journal.

The trial environment was no less intimate. Judge Christopher Cooper worked with Mr. Sussmann at the Clinton Justice Department in the 1990s. Merrick Garland, today attorney general, officiated at the judge’s marriage to Amy Jeffress, an Obama Justice Department official and now a private lawyer representing former FBI lawyer Lisa Page. And on and on the special circles go, down to the judge’s refusal to grant prosecutors’ request to dismiss a juror who admitted her daughter is on the same crew team as Mr. Sussmann’s child.

None of this—the special access, the abuse of power—would be granted to an average American, and it explains how the Clinton team was able to spiral a dirty trick into a national hysteria. If Washington institutions want to reclaim the public trust, they’ll first need to remember that the country is rooted in the notion of one set of rules for all. Not a special set for D.C. operators.

Now, in fairness to the nation, Trump was, in fact, elected in 2016 and was reelected in 2020. That “national hysteria” was, therefore, not a nationwide hysteria—it was the cynical faux hysteria of the Left. Shameful enough, I will grant, but it was very much an elite phenomenon that may have made a difference at the margin, to narrow Trump’s margin of victory, but wasn’t a deciding factor—in my opinion. Russia, Russia, Russia was simply a Cold War narrative that, after nearly 30 years, was losing its cachet outside Neocon circles. Even with a populace as neglectful of big issues as the American people, disinformation has its limits. That truth is coming home, more and more, as we see poll after poll documenting lack of interest, lack of belief, in each false narrative thrown up by the Left in this runup to Election 2022. I’ll say it again—shame on Bluto Barr.

Now, before I click on “Publish”, I want to remind one and all about just what was really going on with this Russia Hoax—what it was that made these people to suborn virtually every top level institution in our constitutional order. As Clarice Feldman noted yesterday (The Structural Legal Rot Runs Deep), the rot has spread far and wide, but there was a precipitating issue here that did tip the balance. To explain that, I’ll quote this exchange between commenter Cassander and myself, earlier this morning. Because the roots of the faux impeachment can be found in the Russia Hoax itself and the Ukrainian connection that was at work in the Hillary campaign during Election 2016:

Writes Cassander ·2 hr ago

In the tweet from StarBoy which Mark includes in his post he says, "So the US admits that for the past eight years, America and its allies have planned and prepared Ukraine for war all along... The US began to supply weapons to Ukraine long before the start of the war - Pentagon spokesman John Kirby on Fox News"

I have a hunch they didn't tell Donald Trump what they were up to...another reason he had to go...

Remember Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman? At Trump's (first) impeachment proceeding he testified, "While my interagency colleagues and I were becoming increasingly optimistic on Ukraine's prospects, this alternative narrative [i.e., Trump's] undermined U.S. government efforts to expand cooperation with Ukraine."

Think about that.

51 min agoAuthor

Exactly. That has become crystal clear now. The "interagency" policy of the Deep State that even presidents are not allowed to alter is unalterable hostility to Russia as a strategy--US dominance over the Eurasian landmass as enunciated by the likes of Brzezinski. The tactical aspect to achieving that strategic objective has been a tightening ring of countries around Russia featuring NATO-ization of countries bordering the former Soviet Union and "color revolutions" in former Soviet republics--Ukraine (Georgia, Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan). That is all accompanied by open economic war against Russia ("sanctions") with the increasing threat of military threats--first in Georgia, which Russia defeated, now in Ukraine which is a much larger challenge.

THIS IS WHAT THE IMPEACHMENT WAS ALL ABOUT. Preserving this Neocon policy imperative of subjecting Russia to Neocon rule. Anyone in DC who was unaware of the true dynamics of all this can only have been terminally stupid. I'm frankly puzzled by Trump's failure to understand the enmity facing him.

It is this drive to empire, to imperial overreach spanning the globe, that has corrupted our institutions. It also necessitates the 24/7/365 disinformation campaign that keeps these elites in power, undermining our national political culture for purposes that are never fully explained, never placed before the country for its approval. Because the DC establishment knows that, in this as in so many other policy areas, their schemes simply don’t resonate with We The People.