John Durham Pulls The Curtain Back

Yes, of course. We all know that the MSM operates hand in glove with the Dem party for shared goals. It’s not news reporting, it’s information shaping. However, today John Durham pulled the curtain back to show the process at work, and we have the names and emails of reporters colluding with Hillary’s oppo research shop—Fusion GPS. Deliciously, the way this happened was that Team Hillary was trying to assert attorney/client privilege in the Sussmann case, claiming that Fusion GPS’s work was “legal” work. This was patent nonsense:

FoiaFan @15poundstogo

Merely involving a lawyer in non-legal matters (like political consulting) doesn’t establish privilege. There are stacks of cases that so hold. It is just this kind of CRAP that makes it harder for those of us who probably assert privilege in court to have to deal with suspicion.

Techno Fog explains what’s going on here, with today’s Durham filing:

Durham's latest: He has hundreds of e-mails between Fusion GPS and reporters

Also - DARPA Contracts and Classified data

I can only offer a few explanatory highlights—follow the link for some concrete examples drawn from Durham’s filing. Here’s the general context:

Special Counsel John Durham just filed this motion in response to the efforts of Hillary for America, Fusion GPS, et al. to keep secret (by use of the attorney-client and work product privileges) communications involving Fusion GPS. …

Durham states the “purported privilege holders who have intervened do so in a case in which the defendant has denied representing any client when he brought the Russian Bank-1 allegations to the FBI.” The privilege controversy thus entraps Sussmann to a certain extent, seemingly precluding his denial that he was working on behalf of a client. Brilliant.

Additionally, Durham casts doubt on the declaration of Marc Elias that Fusion GPS was retained to provide “legal advice.” Here he makes a key point:

”if rendering such advice was truly the intended purpose of Fusion GPS’s retention, one would also expect the investigative firm to seek permission and/or guidance from [Hillary for America] or its counsel before sharing such derogatory materials with the media or otherwise placing them into the public domain.”

In support of that point, Durham states he is in possession of “hundreds of emails in which Fusion GPS employees shared raw, unverified, and uncorroborated information – including their own draft research and work product – with reporters.” (He even filed them under seal with the court.) These include:

What kind of “legal advice” are non-lawyers providing when they don’t even clear their work with the lawyers for the organization that employs them?

That’s a nice legal argument—it’s a winner for Durham—but naturally Durham supports his statements with examples. LOTS of examples. Here’s Techno Fog describing one set of examples—lovely:

Take a close look at Foer’s interactions with Fusion GPS. This is the press you don’t see: groveling to opposition researchers, begging for their assistance with “omissions and errors,” and pleading that his draft not be distributed to the competition. In other words, entirely consistent with the journalistic standards of Slate.

As Techno Fog notes:

As Durham makes clear, no lawyers are copied in these e-mails and this doesn’t have anything to do with legal advice. And even if there were some type of privilege or work product, it was waived when Fusion GPS distributed the info to the press.

Durham goes on (p. 13) to totally destroy the statements that John Podesta and Robby Mook made in their affidavits—their claims are completely evidence free and unsupported by facts, in stark opposition to Durham’s presentation:

Nor does the record reveal any indications whatsoever that the specific materials being with held bore a direct relationship to legal advice. The parties’ arguments falter especially in light of the affidavits that HFA Campaign Chair John Podesta and Campaign Manager Robby Mook submitted in connection with the instant Motion. Tellingly, neither affidavit makes reference to specific instances of legal advice that Elias dispensed to HFA based on Fusion GPS’s research. ... Indeed, the Mook and Podesta affidavits provide or describe no examples of occasions when Elias advised them on laws concerning libel, defamation, or any other legal issue.

In addition, the Government has interviewed Mr. Mook. During that interview, Mook stated that he could not recall any specific instances of legal advice that Perkins Coie provided based on Fusion GPS’s work. When asked if he would have remembered such advice if it had been given, Mook stated that such a question was difficult to answer given the passage of time.

There’s more good stuff in the article and in the filing, both linked above. In addition, there is the doc dump of emails. No doubt researchers will be combing through them for juicy tidbits beyond those that Techno Fogs cites:

2022-04-25 - Durham HUGE reporter email list.pdf