Gotta love it when this happens.
Authored by Sundance via The Last Refuge,
Another significant filing by John Durham’s special counsel team to the court was made Monday night. {READ HERE} Within the filing the staff accidentally did not seal the attachments which are emails between Fusion GPS and many major media outlets. Whoops.
First, the background.
In a previous liable lawsuit by Alfa Bank against Fusion GPS, the Russian bank was able to get the internal emails between Fusion GPS and major media outlets as part of the lawsuit discovery phase. Despite the lawsuit failing to advance, those prior emails now become evidence for John Durham to use in the case against Clinton lawyer Michael Sussmann.
Michael Sussmann, a Perkins Coie lawyer, is accused of lying to the FBI about who he was working for when Sussmann was trying to push the Trump-Russia collusion story to trigger an investigation. Former FBI legal counsel James Baker has said Sussmann told the FBI he was operating independently as a concerned citizen. However, Sussmann is defending himself by saying: (a) he never said he was not working for Clinton at the time he brought the FBI the material, a demonstrable falsehood; and (b) he was motivated by altruism, unrelated to efforts to help Clinton, another demonstrable falsehood.
As the case has proceeded all of the parties are now claiming legal and work product ‘privileges’ to stop Durham from using their communication and networked conspiracy against Michael Sussmann, and by extension them, in court. Fusion GPS, Perkins Coie, Marc Elias, Michael Sussmann, Hillary for America (Clinton campaign), Robby Mook (Campaign Manager), along with Tech-Executive-1 Rodney Joffe, are all claiming some form of privilege.
Monday night, in a responsive filing connected to all of the privilege claims, John Durham deconstructed the nature of their defense. Techno-Fog has a good outline {SEE HERE} of the court documents. However, attached to the filing were exhibits supposed to be filed under seal that the Durham staff “accidentally” did not seal right away.
The exhibit consists of the emails between Fusion GPS and media as the opposition research team attempted to push the Trump-Russia collusion story into the media bloodstream -through their ideologically aligned allies- in 2016.
The emails show how extensive Fusion GPS co-founders Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch pushed the Trump Russia story. The emails show the coordinated effort of Fusion GPS with multiple journalists, producers and media outlets. You can read the emails HERE.
I’m not going to publish the emails because the contacts, addresses, phone numbers etc. are not redacted; but you can clearly see the scale of who was involved.
The emails show journalists from Politico, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, CNN, ABC, CBS and NBC all feeding from the same trough of manipulated information being fed from Fusion GPS. The journalists, producers and Fusion GPS all working in close coordination to push the false Trump-Russia collusion conspiracy.
The accidentally public emails highlight a soup-to-nuts ‘who’s-who‘ of political disinformation. {SEE HERE}
(post is archived)