‘Our Kids Carpooled Together’: How Old Friends In High Places Assembled The Russia Collusion Hoax
Not just anyone can call up the FBI general counsel with claims of conspiratorial criminality by a presidential candidate and get a private sit-down. And yet that is exactly what happened.
Eric Felten
By Eric Felten
September 23, 2021
The indictment of Washington attorney Michael Sussman — accused of lying to the FBI in order to smear Donald Trump during the 2016 campaign — reveals the ace up the sleeve of high-powered Democrats. It’s a card they played time and again to advance the Trump-Russia conspiracy theory: friends in high places.
They used friends in law enforcement to launch secret investigations; they used friends in the federal government to broaden those investigations; and they used friends in the media to spread the word about Trump and his organization being under investigation.
The Russia fiasco metastasized in large part because those involved in advancing the false allegations had important connections. They used friendships with powerful federal officials to encourage investigations against team Trump. Those targeted by Sussmann and others were unabashed outsiders, and as such lacked the sort of connections the insiders exploited so adroitly.
Sussmann was a partner at the Washington law firm Perkins Coie in 2016, which represented the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign for president. But, according to the indictment handed down by Special Counsel John Durham last week, when he met with the FBI’s general counsel, James Baker, to allege that Trump was in cahoots with the Russians, Sussmann claimed he was representing another client. The indictment alleges this was false.
Securing a meeting with the FBI’s top lawyer can’t have been easy. But for Sussmann it was.
more
https://thefederalist.com/2021/09/23/how-old-friends-in-high-places-assembled-the-russia-collusion-hoax/
