Paul Sperry's Masterful Durham Update

I really can’t recommend Paul Sperry’s latest article enough. It’s a must read for anyone following the Russia Hoax investigation of SC John Durham. It’s not that the article contains new revelations, so much, as that what has been discovered is organized and reviewed in highly readable form—for all of us who have been juggling the flood of information in our mind. The value in this effort at organizing the data is that Sperry is  also able to credibly suggest—based on Durham’s latest status memo—the direction in which Durham is headed. A day or two ago I stated that the fact of Marc Elias’ appearance before Durham’s grand jury is a sure sign that Durham is targeting the upper reaches of the Clinton organization—and quite possibly Hillary herself, as the logic of such an investigation inexorably suggests. Sperry reminds us of some key facts in that regard. So, first things first, here’s the article:

What Did Clinton Know and When Did She Know It? The Russiagate Evidence Builds

As a reminder, the most recent of our rare glimpses of what Durham is up to have shown that Durham is clearly focusing on the Clinton campaign itself, with an emphasis on the various Russia related hoaxes—the Steele “dossier” and the Alfa Bank hoax. We know this from the indictments of Igor Danchenko and Clinton lawyer Michael Sussmann, but also from the references in the indictments and other legal filings of key Clinton legal and political advisers Charles Dolan and, above all, Dem election super lawyer Marc Elias.

Against that background Sperry recounts the clear involvement of Hillary’s top circle in peddling both the Alfa Bank hoax as well as what appear to be clear references to the Steele/Danchenko/Dolan material (which was produced by Glenn Simpson’s Fusion GPS shop). That top circle includes Jake Sullivan (current national security adviser in the Zhou regime), Jen Palmieri, and Robby Mook. It also includes Hillary herself, as Sperry amply documents. Other names are drawn in, including John Podesta and Brian Fallon.

However, the material that Sperry provides regarding Jake Sullivan is especially striking for what it may signify regarding the direction that Durham is headed in. Sullivan has been in the spotlight among Russia Hoax researchers because in his Senate testimony he flatly denied knowing anything about the “dossier” and even denied knowing who Marc Elias worked for. This was always dubious, but Sperry shines a bright light on Sullivan’s actual role in the Hillary campaign—far more prominent than most people realized. When you combine that important campaign role with the undoubted fact that Sullivan was peddling Russia Hoax disinformation to the MSM, a clear picture emerges that the highest levels of the Hillary campaign were in on the hoax:

Sullivan’s title was misleading. He was far more than a foreign policy adviser to Clinton. His portfolio included campaign strategy.

“Hillary told Sullivan she wanted him to take over [her campaign],” journalists Amie Parnes and Jonathan Allen reported in their 2017 bestseller, "Shattered: Inside Hillary’s Doomed Campaign.” “You’re going to be my traffic cop and my rabbi, she told Sullivan, adding that he would be her de facto chief strategist.”

Let’s be real here. Who thinks that a chief presidential campaign strategist would not be totally briefed in on the source of opposition—the use of which he would surely have authorized? The fact that we later learn that Marc Elias briefed the campaign on his many (at least 20) contacts with Glenn Simpson should suggest why Durham would want Elias in front of a grand jury.

Sullivan was included in “every aspect of her campaign strategy,” they wrote, because “no one on the official campaign staff understood Hillary’s thought process as well as Sullivan."

Now serving in the White House as President Biden’s national security adviser, Sullivan has denied under oath knowing details about the dossier project.

In other words, Durham may already have a perjury hook into Sullivan, if Elias has been at all forthcoming. 

Sullivan spread the anti-Trump rumors behind the scenes while Clinton Campaign Manager Robby Mook went in front of the cameras to echo essentially what Steele, a former British intelligence officer, had reported back to the campaign.

Add to that the fact that key Hillary adviser Jen Palmieri has confirmed the centrality of the Russia Hoax to the entire Hillary campaign strategy—as if we didn’t already know that:

“We were on a mission to get the press to focus on the prospect that Russia had not only hacked and stolen emails from the Democratic National Committee, but that it had done so to help Donald Trump and hurt Hillary Clinton,” Palmieri stated in a 2017 Washington Post column. “We wanted to raise the alarm.”

And of course Sperry has lots more detail on offer. Much more. There are details on events during the campaign that most of us have forgotten, but Sperry is here to remind us.

From there, Sperry moves on to the creation and rapid implosion of the Alfa Bank hoax. The significance of that hoax is that it was a key part of the campaign strategy—the Russia Hoax in general was the key:

The Alfa smear was meant as an “October surprise” that would rock the Trump campaign and take media focus off the probe of Clinton's emails, which then-FBI Director James Comey had been pressured by a New York agent to revive in the final week of the campaign. Clinton’s team had even "prepared a video promoting the Trump-Alfa Bank server connection and was poised to make an all-out push through social media,” according to Isikoff and David Corn in their book, “Russian Roulette.” But “that plan was canned,” they wrote because the Oct. 31 Times story noted that the FBI had not been able to corroborate the claims of a cyber-link. The skepticism cooled the media firestorm the campaign had hoped for.

“We had been waiting for the Alfa Bank story to come out,” Clinton Campaign Chairman John Podesta told Isikoff and Corn. “Then — boom! — it gets smacked down.”

In congressional testimony, Podesta has largely claimed ignorance about the campaign’s opposition-research efforts.

Who else thinks Durham is looking into the veracity of Podesta’s claimed ignorance? Durham seems thorough to a fault, so don’t discount that angle.

Sperry, at this point in his narrative, now moves on to Marc Elias’ role in briefing the Hillary campaign inner circle about the Alfa Bank hoax—and likely more Russia conspiracy hoaxes. Key here is Sullivan’s denial under oath of any such knowledge, which is belied by now known facts—facts that Sullivan thought would never see the light of day:

In Durham’s indictment of Sussmann for lying to the FBI about his work for the Clinton campaign while feeding them the Alfa Bank story, prosecutors revealed that Sussmann’s partner Marc Elias kept Clinton campaign bigwigs in the loop about the project to manufacture a Trump-Russian bank conspiracy, which the FBI months later completely debunked. Emails obtained by Durham’s investigators show the lawyer [i.e., Marc Elias] had briefed top Clinton campaign officials Sullivan, Palmieri and Mook about the Alfa smear in September 2016. “Elias kept Clinton campaign members informed,” the indictment said.

Ouch. Emails—writings—to confirm that Elias is telling the truth (if he’s called as a witness)? That’s a tough one to counter. And look what Sullivan wants us to believe:

Sullivan, who now serves as President Biden’s national security adviser, maintained in December 2017 congressional testimony he didn’t even know that the politically prominent Elias worked for Perkins Coie, a well-known Democratic law firm representing the Clinton campaign. Major media stories from 2016, however, routinely identified Elias as “general counsel for the Clinton campaign” and a “partner at Perkins Coie.”

“To be honest with you, Marc wears a tremendous number of hats, so I wasn’t sure who he was representing,” Sullivan testified. “I sort of thought he was, you know, just talking to us as, you know, a fellow traveler in this – in this campaign effort.”

A “fellow traveler” instead of the campaign’s lead lawyer, says the campaign strategist. Cue the belly laughs!

And it only gets worse—for the Hillary campaign honchos. Sperry turns to recent Durham revelations that must have a number of Clinton org people puckered:

Durham’s investigators have been questioning Elias under subpoena [i.e., a grand jury subpoena]. A new court filing in the Sussmann case reveals that Elias has given testimony before a criminal grand jury impaneled by Durham in Washington, D.C.

Grand jury testimony is sealed and it’s not known what Elias told prosecutors. But In 2017, he testified in a closed-door session of Congress that Mook was his campaign contact for opposition-research projects, including the dossier. “I consulted with Robby Mook, who was campaign manager,” he said, noting that Mook handled budget matters and signed off on opposition-research expenses billed by Perkins Coie, which totaled more than $1.2 million.

Now get a load of this:

In his testimony, Elias said he met with Simpson and other Fusion GPS researchers at least 20 times and Steele at least once during the campaign. He said he would receive written reports from them and direct them to find certain information. He, in turn, would travel each week to Clinton campaign headquarters in Brooklyn, N.Y., to report what he had learned about Trump and Russia.

It’s an excellent bet that Durham has emails and texts and phone records that confirm most of this, so when he looked at Elias’ Senate testimony, under oath …

However, Elias insisted he left his interlocutors in the dark about the sources of that information, for which the campaign was paying him in excess of $1 million. He also insisted he didn’t tell his campaign contacts about his meetings with Steele or Simpson, despite billing the campaign for such consultations, and never shared the dossier reports or other materials they generated with those Clinton officials. Elias even maintained that he hired Fusion GPS on his own without consulting with Mook or the campaign. “I was the gatekeeper,” he said, between the research contractors and the campaign.

Uh oh. That suggests how Durham may have been able to pressure Elias to speak more candidly to the grand jury.

According to "Russian Roulette," however, Elias shared the findings of Steele’s memos with at least Mook. "Elias would at times brief Mook on their contents,” Isikoff and Corn wrote.

Should anyone believe those earlier denials. Sperry quotes veteran Clinton insiders who flatly tell us not to believe it:

Former Bill Clinton political strategist Doug Schoen said it stretches credulity to suggest that top officials in the Clinton camp, including the candidate herself, weren’t fully aware of the research their campaign attorney was billing them for.

“With more than 380 payments from the Clinton campaign and the DNC being made to Perkins Coie, it is seemingly impossible that the candidate herself would not have direct knowledge of the purpose of those payments or any earmarks being made, especially those for Fusion GPS,” Schoen said.

Quoting unnamed Clinton surrogates, both the New York Times and CNN have reported that the candidate was unaware of the dossier prior to BuzzFeed publishing it two months after the 2016 election. Former Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon told CNN in a separate interview she may not have been totally out of the loop, however. “She may have known [about the dossier and its financing before the election],” he said, "but the degree of exactly what she knew is beyond my knowledge."

“Not totally out of the loop” means, I think, “in the loop.”

This sounds about right:

A senior congressional investigator who insisted on anonymity said ... “The biggest lie is Hillary didn’t know about any of this oppo stuff even though she tweeted about it!” he said.

Who can argue now with Sperry’s assessment?

With each new indictment and court filing, Clinton inches closer to the center of the special prosecutor’s investigation, now in its third year.

Durham indicated in a recently filed court document that he is actively investigating the Clinton campaign and seeks to question its top officials. His office declined to say whether it intended to question Clinton herself.

Sperry concludes with a powerful several paragraphs that demonstrate the sheer malevolence of the Clinton org—and its “fellow travelers”:

J.D. Gordon, who held a position roughly equivalent to Sullivan’s on the 2016 Trump campaign, said in an interview that he hopes Durham adds Sullivan and other Clinton aides to his criminal investigation, “if he hasn’t already.”

He suspects Sullivan was “the Russiagate hoax mastermind” and hopes that he and other members of Clinton’s 2016 team — as well as the candidate herself — are subpoenaed for testimony and document production just as he and other Trump advisers were targeted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, based almost entirely on rumors started by the Clinton machine. He called the Clinton-funded smears “depraved” and “nationally destabilizing."

"In addition to outright surveillance via the fraudulent FISA warrant against Carter Page, many of us were hit with federal and congressional subpoenas, subjected to grueling Senate and House investigations, special counsel interrogations and resulting harsh media spotlight,” he said. "I appeared before the Senate Intelligence Committee, Senate Judiciary Committee, House Intelligence Committee and produced requested documents to the House Judiciary Committee. Three times I was summoned before the special counsel, the first of which in August 2017 was apparently leaked to the Washington Post.”

“Depraved”. That sums up the entire anti-Trump effort. And “nationally destabilizing.” Never forget. 

Do yourself a favor. Read the entire article.