Kash Patel: Durham Hits Clinton Campaign with ‘Joint Venture Conspiracy’; Sussmann Defense ‘in Shambles’
“What I find most striking about this pleading is John Durham’s use of the joint venture/conspiracy exception to [Rule] 404(b).”Special counsel John Durham says he has evidence of a joint venture or conspiracy involving the Clinton campaign. In this episode, we discuss the details of Durham’s latest 48-page filing, why ex-Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann has a defense that is now “in shambles,” according to Kash, and what Kash sees as perhaps the greatest irony of all in Sussmann’s defense.“The defense lawyers for Michael Sussmann, in a federal pleading, are calling the Christopher Steele dossier ‘inflammatory.’”
So Cash, we had a pretty interesting episode plans, and then John Durham came in and just threw a spanner into the whole works.
He totally messed it up, Jan.
So I guess we're going to talk about all things special counsel and John Durham and put off the rest for another time.
And and motions in Lemine.
I mean, as we keep learning all these kind of arcane legal jargon.
So what is that all about?
Okay, so John Durham came in on a late night uh during one of the weekdays of this week and filed what's called a motions in Lemine.
He was actually responding to a defense motion in Lemine.
And all that means is pretrial motions.
It's fancy Latin uh that lawyers get to throw around and sound cool.
I did when I was a federal public defender and a national security prosecutor.
Basically, it's setting up what you're going to do at trial is the easiest way to think about it.
The defense has things they want to accomplish and the prosecution has things they want to accomplish.
And the rules of evidence sort of govern when you have to file these things and who you have to put on notice and what the prosecution's responsibilities are for due process and all that stuff.
We don't have to get into the weeds of that.
A, the defense on behalf of Sussman came in and said a couple of things, um, basically outlining what their defense is going to be.
And you and I have talked about this before, Jan.
I think the defense has made a number of strategic blunders, not legal or ethical, strategic blunders along the way of this prosecution.
If you recall in a previous episode or two, we talked about how they asked the defense, asked John Durham for more evidence at a higher clip.
John Durham obliged and gave them lots of evidence very publicly because he was allowed to do that pursuant to that request.
And then they basically said, okay, wait, wait, thanks, that's enough.
We don't need any more.
Then the defense issued a motion to dismiss just the other week, which was, I thought a shocking move, especially in federal court, since there's technically no actual mechanism to do that.
But they basically unveiled their whole case.
And remember, under the law, the defense never has to divulge what their actual defense is going to be at trial.
And as a public defender, I never did.
Because you, under due process, have the right to not have your defense previewed by the prosecution so you can put on your best uh I don't want to say show, but your best uh evidence.
And remember, the defendant is always presumed innocent.
So that's the heart of why the defense's defense never has to be revealed.
So they file this motion to dismiss, and they basically say the crux of it is, hey judge, we don't necessarily agree or disagree with everything John Durham's filed, but the key is that my client's charged with lying to the FBI, and what we, the defense, are saying is that is immaterial.
And if it's immaterial under the law, then they have a technical out on the client being convicted.
But they outlined all of the reasons why it was immaterial, and we can talk about some of that.
And John Durham responded and said, I disagree, and these are all the reasons why it's material.
And then the defense went again and filed a motion in Lemine to preclude John Durham from using some of this information at trial.
And then John Durham again immediately uh thereafter said, Okay, defense, you say I can't use this stuff.
Here's all the litany of reasons in a 45-page pleading that we're gonna talk about as to why I can under the law.
There's a number of really stunning things in this uh in this pleading and like several text messages, which just you know I I almost had to they almost didn't believe.
But um what let's talk about this.
What is all this uh 404B stuff?
This is another one of these kind of arcane, so to speak, illegal things that many of us don't know about.
But yeah.
When you are prosecuting a case under the rules of evidence, which is the federal procedural rules that guide criminal prosecutions that you have to abide by, and the judge makes the decision, um, you are allowed to use what's called 404b evidence.
And the title of that federal rule of evidence is other bad acts.
So basically what it says in sum is the defendant's charged with X, Y, or Z. The prosecution can use other bad acts that the defendant committed, not necessarily crimes, um, but just other things they did in their life surrounding the indictment they're charged with.
And you can't use it, you cannot use It to show the defendant's guilty of the crime charged.
That's forbidden by the rules of evidence.
But 404B has an exception.
What it says is you can show use all these other bad acts to show motive, intent, knowledge, planning, and operation.
And so all these exceptions, you know, me as a federal public defender would respond to 404B pleadings all the time, saying this is out of bounds, that's talking about criminal conduct, that's not meeting one of the exceptions.
And what John Durham has uh methodically done is laid out a case, as we were talking about, because the defense laid out their strategy to meet each one of these responses.
So he's provided all this evidence in the form of emails in the form of text messages in the form of deposition sworn testimony and whatnot to say, judge, the defense is incorrect.
This is 404B evidence and it satisfies the statute.
So it's a pretrial sort of uh kickboxing match about evidence.
And the judge doesn't have to rule right now, but he'll take the motions under advisement, as we say, and he'll rule just before trial or you know, sort of in the first couple of days of trial.
Well, and I guess we should mention that I think three of those pages in there are actually congressional testimony that you took from Sussman.
Yeah, so um, you know, when I was the chief investigator under then Chairman Nunez for the Russia Gate investigation, we part of what we did was you have to one, get go out and get the documents.
That was the biggest part, right?
Go out, get the FBI documents, the DOJ documents, the email traffic, classified, unclassified, put it together for the American people to read for themselves.
In order to provide context for those documents, sort of the window dressing, you have to go find the people in government positions and private sector that spoke or own those documents, spoke to or own them, I should say.
And so one of the individuals was Michael Sussman.
He was one of the 60 some odd people we we deposed under oath.
And at the time he was the head or co-lead attorney for the Hillary Clinton campaign in DNC, a lawyer at the lawyer at Perkins Cooey, the law firm that we, you know, now so uh tied to this entire um series of events we're talking about.
And during that deposition, I believe it was like December of 2017, I asked him flat out.
I asked Michael Sussman, and I'm paraphrasing, but we'll put up the exact quote.
Are you doing any of this work?
And this work being we were talking about him and his involvement in the alpha bank work, the alpha bank material that he took to the FBI and to the later to the CIA.
I said, are you, Michael Sussman, doing all of that work on behalf of any client?
He said under oath, yes, I absolutely am.
And so we knew four or five years ago that he was working for the Hillary Clinton campaign because we took that statement.
We took the money that we had proven through subpoenas that was flowing from the Hillary Clinton campaign in the DNC to Fusion GPS, who's also involved with this entire ordeal, and we'll get to that.
And we showed that the money was flowing from the campaign coffers to the law firm.
Sussman was coordinating and quarterbacking this entire operation.
And that included two things, the Steel dossier and the Alpha Bank server on parallel tracks.
And we're focusing mostly on the on the Alpha Bank thing today, but we'll touch on the Steel thing.
And so I got him to admit he said, yeah, I was there for a client.
Fast forward to John Durham's indictment.
He's indicted for lying, he, Michael Sussman, to the FBI's general counsel, James Baker.
He, Michael Sussman, went in to see his friend in September of 2016 with these things called white papers or these summaries that they had put together on Alpha Bank and trying to find a connection between Trump Tower and some bank in Russia.
But ostensibly as a good Samaritan.
That's what he said.
Yeah.
You know, that's part of what's in this pleading, and that's part of it what's been his defense is no, no, I didn't go there and lie.
I was just doing work as a good Samaritan.
Well, it can't both be true, right, Jan.
You you told Congress under oath you were there on behalf of a client, a paying client.
And then you told the head of the FBI's law legal department, I'm not here on for any client.
I'm here just as a good Samaritan.
One of those is a lie.
And he got charged with lying to the FBI.
And now we have a text message to from Sussman to Baker that essentially follows the, I guess the good Samaritan narrative.
Yeah, so look, as a former public defender, one of the hardest things To defend against was your client's own statements because you can't run away from them.
You have to own them and you have to craft a defense around them.
The hardest thing to do is when you have written statements, recorded statements that your client gave at two different periods of time that are contradictory.
And that's what you have here.
So what the prosecution, I believe, will do, what I would do when I was also when I was later a federal prosecutor was I would just take the transcript where he was deposed under oath and said X, and I'd hand it to the jury.
And then I would take the state the recorded statements from the FBI's general counsel and their agents, where he said why on the exact same subject.
Two totally opposite statements that were recorded.
And you can just hand the jury the pieces of paper and say, This is what he said.
He lied.
What's the defense going to say?
Well, he was just joking to Congress.
The FBI's notes are inaccurate.
The FBI's recordings of these conversations are wrong.
Multiple agents got it wrong.
The general counsel for the FBI came in and testified during this trial and lied.
Their defense is in shambles right now, and I think largely because of some strategic blunders, but mostly because Michael Sussman lied and should be convicted of this crime.
Basically, they can't use any of these defenses that you just outlined because he himself sent that message.
Yeah, the text message, right?
The night before Michael Sussman went to meet with James Baker, the head of the FBI legal department.
He he, Michael Sussman, texts James Baker.
And now John Durham has got that text message and put it in this pleading.
And that text message in Michael Sussman's own words that he typed out on his phone and hit send, say, and I'm summarizing, but we can put it up.
I am not coming to you on behalf of any client.
And that's it.
That's the case.
But there's so much more to this pleading.
I can't help but think and ask myself the question you know, how long has Durham had this?
So that's a great question that no one's talking about.
And I think we've touched on it in past episodes.
John Durham, as a federal prosecutor in national security cases, which this this is a national security case, has had this for a long time.
He didn't just get it.
He he would you you hold your best evidence as a prosecutor.
You don't divulge it.
You turn it over to the defense, of course, because you have obligations to give them all of your information and evidence that you're going to use at trial and that they might be able to use for their defense.
Now the defense isn't going to put this statement out there.
And up until this point, John Durham had no cause to publicly put it out there because it would have been unethical for him to leak it.
He could only issue it in a pleading.
Going back to the defense's blunders, the defense said, I want a motion to dismiss.
They filed it.
I want to do a motion in limit on behalf of the defense.
And now John Durham's saying, well, Judge, their defense is going to be that this statement was immaterial and that he did not lie.
I have statements that directly contradict that from the defendant's own cell phone.
So he filed it.
But the reason I asked that question is there were these phones which were kind of held back from Durham for a while.
And my question is I wonder if uh that particular text message might have been from there.
So it could be, you know, exploiting cell phones should be a fairly um mundane and automated process by now.
But as we've seen, the FBI has an uncanny ability to lose cell phones for Peter Strack and Lisa Page and other folks involved in Russia Gate investigation.
They delete other cell phones, and it's one of the things that frustrates American citizens about our law enforcement is why aren't we holding them accountable?
And maybe John Durham had it for a while from one of these phones.
Maybe he just got it, but I think he had it for a while.
And the point is he's got it.
He's now told the world he has it, and the defense is now gonna have to scramble to figure out what to say to a jury with a straight face uh about their client.
So we've talked about one of the text messages.
That was that's the one that that really struck me, but there's a whole number of other communications in here that are worth digging into.
Which ones did you remark on?
We've always said, or I've always said um on this show that I think that the Hillary Clinton campaign, the DNC, Fusion GPS, Joffy the Tech Executive, and the media, and Christopher Steele have all acted in concert.
That is, together, um, in some sort of conspiracy against whether it was against Donald Trump or whether it was just breaking the law, we said they've done it together.
And we've got called out for that, even though we put forth evidence in the Nunes memo supporting all the Steele Dossier allegations and the concert that the act, the actors acted in there between the Hillary Clampaign and all the folks that I just mentioned.
What I find most striking about this pleading is John Durham's use of the joint venture conspiracy exception to 404B.
What he's saying, he, John Durham, in a federal pleading, which is basically you're saying it under oath because you can't lie as a prosecutor there.
Judge, not only did Michael Sussman do all this stuff alone, and not only should you admit this evidence because it's it satisfies other elements of the evidentiary statutes, but even if I was wrong about all the other exceptions, I now have a joint venture, a conspiracy that I can show you through all this evidence.
And to me, that's what was most striking.
And it was shown by their own emails.
And what I mean by their is the folks that I just cited.
And we can we can walk through that a little bit if you want.
Yeah, no, please, let's let's do that.
So as I was and what does joint venture conspiracy really mean?
Yeah.
So that basically is a bunch of folks got together to do something illegal, essentially.
And we've been saying that the whole time.
But of course, we were castigated by a lot in the mainstream media for saying there's no proof for that.
There's when there was, at least with the steel dossier.
And it started to come out that the Alpha Bank, you know, server uh narrative was also, I don't want to say a hoax, but totally conjured up and a fiction that was forced into the media falsely to attack Donald Trump.
And I think this pleading zeros out any doubt.
So what they did was, going back to prosecution 101, what's the best evidence?
Theirs.
I did it when I was a Russia Gate chief investigator.
I took the FBI's own documents, I took the DOJ's own documents, the EIC's own documents, and said, You guys wrote this.
I didn't write it.
It's your information.
This is why I know you guys lied intentionally about the Steele dossier and everything you did at the FISA court.
John Durham goes, I'm gonna go get these guys' emails.
So he gets the emails from Fusion GPS, which as you know is um Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch, who own that operation, the media company, I guess if you want to call it that, but they put themselves out as an investigative firm.
These are the guys that hired Christopher Steele to come in and paid him with money from the Clinton campaign to conjure up the Steele dossier.
So they go get their emails.
Then they go get Rodney Joffee's emails, who's the tech executive that Sussman went to to say, hey, I need information found on Alpha Bank server connections in Trump Tower so that I can show quote unquote a narrative and inference, which is cited by John Durham, so we can make a Trump Russia connection.
He gets some of Sussman's emails on top of that.
And he gets a few other people's emails that were working with Rodney Joffy.
And he outlines all of that in this extensive pleading.
What does it show?
It shows in August of 2016, if not before, these characters, these participated in a joint venture conspiracy together to go out and perpetuate, perpetuate this fraud.
The fraud being the Alpha Bank server narrative.
So now he has their own words, their own email saying they're meeting together, they're getting money from the Hillary Clinton campaign, they're all rowing in the same direction, pursuant to the orders of Michael Sussman at the direction of the Hillary Clinton campaign, I believe.
And one of the other most striking parts of this is we finally now know what we've been saying is true.
John Durham has said, actually, your own emails tell us that the Alpha Bank narrative that you tried to create is totally bogus.
One of the companies that the tech executive Jaffee worked with came back to Joffe and said, the information you're looking for doesn't exist.
We can't connect Alpha Bank to Trump Tower.
There's literally a sentence that John Durham found in one of their emails that says, if you want me to fake the information to make it look like there was a narrative and an inference, then I can go ahead and do that.
That's what you call getting caught dead to rights.
And that's what John Durham means by a joint venture conspiracy.
Because it wasn't one man acting alone.
It was all these People, all these entities with the money flowing in from the Clinton campaign, acting in joint concert with uh with the media.
So that's the other part I forgot, right?
So Fusion GPS, the investigative firm, takes all this information and funnels it to the media.
And there's exchanges between the media and fusion GPS in email format that John Durham also captures in this pleading.
And the media goes back to Fusion and says basically, wait a second, we don't understand what you're saying.
What where's the connection?
Where's the proof of this Alpha Bank server connection?
Fusion GPS basically comes in over the top and says, doesn't matter, get it out the door, it's too important.
We need the narrative out there.
And then here's what happens.
Shortly after the Alpha Bank server narrative is put into play in the press in was it the fall of 2016, maybe like Septemberish, I can't remember the exact exact day.
Who?
Jake Sullivan, one of the heads of the Hillary Clinton campaign, comes out and tweets the Alpha Bank server narrative, the story that his campaign had placed through Sussman and Fusion GPS and Rodney Jaffe and says, look at this, Trump did collude with Russia.
He has a server in Trump Tower, and we have the connection.
The shocking part is he, as the head of the Hillary Clinton campaign, is putting out this tweet as if he had nothing to do with it or no knowledge of it.
Another guy I interrogated under oath is Jake Sullivan in December of 2017.
And I think that deposition, we could put up a link to it, is a reason that he has a lot of concern as to whether or not John Durham's coming after him for lying to Congress.
You know, and I'll just put it to our audience this way.
Do you really think Jake Sullivan had no idea or no direction or no involvement in perpetuating the Alpha Bank server narrative?
I don't believe it for one second.
I think I asked him about it in my uh interrogation of him, just like I asked Sussman, and um he's got some legal jeopardy.
Well, it'll be interesting to see where this develops, but no, correct me if I'm wrong here, but I don't I don't believe that Fusion GPS has been sort of so unambiguously tied to the Alpha Bank narrative as of yet.
Of course, it's been very tied to the Steel dossier.
But what are your thoughts here?
I think I I agree with you.
I don't think there's been a narrative out there in the media.
You and I have talked about it probably probably on our show in the past that ties fusion directly to Alpha Bank, right?
This in no twisted terms directly implicates Fusion GPS's actions.
It puts them in the middle of this joint venture because they're the hub that's taking in the information from Sussman, from Rodney Jaffee, from the other tech executives in the university that they cited to find this narrative and inference about a connection.
It all goes into the Fusion GPS gonculator while Steele is uh working with them to conjure up the Steel dossier narrative, and then Fusion GPS meets with all of these cast of characters, including Michael Sussman and other lawyers at Perkins Couie, the Clinton campaign lawyers, and then they go to the media and seed these stories.
But I think you're right.
I don't know of another instance, at least in a pleading, that so directly implicates Fusion GPS as a joint venture co-conspirator, which is exactly what John Durham's done here with their own emails.
So according to the pleading, uh the FBI wasn't the only agency that Sussman went to.
In John Durham's pleading that we're talking about today, he says Michael Sussman went to a quote, another government agency with that information.
Now, based on public media reporting, I can say I believe that agency to be the CIA.
And what why is that important?
Why is that relevant?
Who cares if Michael Sussman also took that same Alpha Bank information over to the CIA?
What John Durham says is 404B judge shows intent, shows knowledge, because he went and took that same information to the CIA, and what John Durham is saying is said the same, he Susman said the same exact thing to them.
I'm here on behalf of no one.
I'm here as a good Samaritan.
Here is a white paper or summary of information.
Maybe you, the intelligence community, should utilize this, uh, what I now call political hot garbage and try and investigate a sitting, because at this time President Trump was already in office.
So again, sort of careful what you wish for uh defense.
John Durham is now taking the step appropriately to inform the judge that while I'm not saying that in and of itself was a crime, him going to the CIA and lying to them, it could be, he's using in this case in chief to show judge I've got document and I believe the only way he could do this was if he had documentation and written records from the CIA saying Mr. Sussman came to us on such and such a date and presented this information and said it was on behalf of nobody.
There's also references to some of this information in the deposition I took.
So I think he put those two things together and said, okay if Michael Sussman's gonna come out and say I didn't lie to FBI general counsel Baker about presenting this evidence in terms of who I was presenting it for.
Well he did the exact same thing just a few short months after he went to the FBI to the CIA and that's why I think it's even more problems for Michael Sussman.
He's gonna have a hard time running away from I didn't do it once Judge.
I didn't do it twice.
It was just uh a combination of s of errors and I misspoke.
And it's incredible to see that you know basically Durham making this case kind of again and again and again and that's kind of I guess what you need to to really make the jury sure of what you want to tell them or that's how you layer cake it I mean that's literally how you build conspiracies are very hard to go into court and say judge I got one piece of evidence to show these people conspired and lied but if you can start layering it I've got testimonial evidence, live human beings coming in and saying it.
I've got documentary evidence, I've got emails I've got text messages, I've got recorded conversations I've got the defendant's own words recorded sworn testimony under oath to Congress.
If you can start layering those things on top of each other, it becomes a very strong case for the prosecution and that's what I think John Durham's doing here.
So what's this about Durham wanting to move this under the business records exemption.
And this is something I I don't really understand.
Yeah so it's a great question.
So a lot of people wonder you know what about you know private companies aren't their emails isn't their work product uh have some sort of protection from being utilized in federal criminal prosecution generally it does but the same federal rules of evidence that talk about 404B,
joint venture and all this stuff prescribe uh a business records exemption to documents that a prosecutor collects in connection with an indictment he is pursuing and so what John Durham is saying is fusion GPS Perkins Coey, Rodney Jaffe, even to a certain extent, the tech executives and all these other folks, they created all of these emails, all of these text messages, all of these documents pursuant to their business, their job.
And the federal rules of evidence allow for you as a prosecutor to submit that evidence through the business records exemption, as long as you as a prosecutor, and John Durham's satisfied this, I believe, show that they, Fusion GPS, Rodney Jaffe, Michael Sussman, Christopher Steele, whoever we're talking about produced that email that work product pursuant to their business.
And once you can show that in a proper chain of custody which is pretty easy because you just say um yeah I exploited it from Michael Sussman's computer.
I got this from Rodney Joffy's phone.
I got this from Fusion GPS's email server.
Then you can go ahead and present it to the judge and say it's under the business records exemption and I'm using it to show you sort of connect the joint venture or I'm using it to show motive or intent or knowledge or planning.
And it's very hard for Michael Sussman to defeat all of those 404B exceptions because seemingly each piece of evidence to me satisfies multiple multiple exceptions not just one about his prior prior bad acts or his motive or his knowledge or his intent because the heart of his defense is saying nothing to see here judge it's either immaterial or he didn't lie.
Well he wrote an awful lot of emails and text messages to an awful lot of people had tens of millions of dollars flow through his law firm paid out a lot of people to create false information presented it to the FBI, the CIA and the media for that's a whole lot of work for someone who's now going to say just kidding I didn't uh really have anything to do with that and we were never going to actually use it so none of its material.
That, my friend, is a stretch and I think I tried 60 some odd jury trials to verdict in federal and state court.
A lot of a lot of them as a public defender, and I don't know even if I could make that argument with a straight face.
It's incredible, isn't it?
Uh how Durham is using these pleadings.
I mean, you know, this is this is ostensibly just kind of entering evidence, right?
Into it in into the trial for the to the judge.
And we so many, so many nuanced details here.
It's quite quite fascinating, frankly.
Yeah, and I think one um interesting tidbit for our audience is um I spoke to President Trump about the uh latest John Durham pleading.
And what I think he found most striking is the level of detail that John Durham is going to to methodically lay it out, lay out his case.
And what I'm able to tell you guys is that, you know, I you know, I relate to uh former President Trump that, you know, as a former federal prosecutor, you want to get it right.
And if you're investigating the largest criminal conspiracy in US presidential history, you gotta get it right, you gotta layer it, and you gotta make sure your I's are dotted and your T's are crossed because any one mistake um can cost you the case.
And I think that this is just the base of the pyramid.
So he's laying out this huge joint venture conspiracy, and now he has all the players sort of at the lower level and just above the the that rung.
And where you go from there is you go up.
You go up to the Lisa Page's Peter Strox, Andy McCabe's, um, fusion GPS of the world, Bruce Orr, Nelly Orr, Chris Steele.
That's how you slowly build your conspiracy till you get to the tip who is your ultimate target.
I don't know whose ultimate target is, but mine would be Andy McCabe.
So this is the that's exactly what I was gonna ask you, which is you're not suggesting that all these people are gonna get indicted, but you think there is someone high up who will be.
Yeah, so uh unlikely that all of them get indicted, likely that a lot of them are cooperating, and thanks for bringing that up.
So, in the pleading, one of the FBI agents whose notes that John Durham submits to be produced into evidence during his case in chief, is from the former assistant director of counterintelligence.
That is Bill Priestap.
He, John Durham writes in his pleading, Judge, I'm going to have, not by name but by title, former assistant director of uh counterintelligence, who I believe is Bill Prestapp.
He's gonna testify that those are his notes.
They were taken contemporaneously, and they literally say Michael Sussman told the FBI he was not working on behalf of a client when he presented that information.
So that shows to me folks like him are helping the prosecution and not necessarily going to get indicted.
That's just an example of something um of how to disportray that uh and my belief in what's going to happen.
Others I think are in his crosshairs.
I think Fusion GPS is.
I think Andy McCabe is, um, Lisa Page, Peter Strapp, Bruce Orr, Nelly Orr, Fusion GPS, um Glenn Simpson, Peter Fritsch, and some FBI employees uh along the way who helped perpetuate uh that fraud to the FISA court.
And John Durham is showing you in these pleadings that he's building up.
And that's what you do in a federal indictment.
You can't start at the top.
It's it's impossible to say, I want to get the CEO, I want to get the owner, I gotta go after that guy.
That that may be your target, but you have to build up with evidence that you can use at trial for that.
And that's what I think John Durham's doing.
Well, so uh Hans Manke, you know, one of our one of our reporters, analysts, uh I know he read the thing, you know, immediately after it was published in the middle of the night.
I don't know how he does it.
But so his where we were just talking this morning, and his theory is basically that, you know, by talking about portraying this whole conspiracy and so forth in the pleading that uh Durham is kind of nudging Sussman and saying, hey, you know, maybe it's time for you to play ball with me.
That is a prosecution strategy, it's an approach when you're working on a joint venture conspiracy.
You rarely have the evidence that you can present to get everybody convicted without having someone, as we say, flip and that goes turn states.
You've heard it in movies and cooperate with the federal government.
It's a strategy.
Um I think hands is correct in that John Durham has considered it and probably rolled it out, but I don't think it's one that Michael Sussman's going to take.
Um I just don't believe his universe is going to allow him to come in after making all these pleadings and all these statements and fighting this in both the media and in court so hard.
He could, he could change, you could change his plea and say, I'm gonna cooperate now.
But for me as a prosecutor, there also comes a point in time in your prosecution when you make the determination, it's your call.
Then I'm not gonna give the defendant a deal.
I don't need him anymore.
I've got so much more evidence along the way that I've been collecting, collecting, collecting.
And thanks to some of the defendant's strategic blunders, I've obtained even more evidence that I didn't think I was going to get.
And now I've put it out that I'm going to convict him.
And I don't need him.
And I've had that happen when I was a public defender.
I've missed the opportunity, that is to say, because the, you know, the guys I was representing said, I don't want to deal just yet, I don't want to deal just yet.
And there's always a shelf life to that.
And so I think Michael Sussman has probably missed that opportunity, even if he wanted to do it.
And I just don't think he ever would want to cop to a plea.
That doesn't mean there's not other people that are already uh cooperating with John Durham.
Right.
And I mean, in your city, are there any others other than Bill Priestapp?
That in your estimation.
Well, James Baker's obviously cooperating.
He's the star witness, I think you would say, in terms of the Michael Sussman prosecution, because he was the recipient of said lie.
Um he's got a couple of his agents, a deputy general counsel, a few other folks that were named in there.
Now, those all those folks aren't necessarily in any legal jeopardy.
They're just cooperating to help and do the right thing.
Some of them might be.
So just you know, I want to make that really clear.
But I think there's others in the whole grand scheme of Alpha Bank, Christopher Steele, Fusion GPS, Steele dossier, you know, maybe the tech executives are cooperating.
Maybe the university that he keeps citing has cooperated.
Maybe one of the other um internet company folks that uh Sussman hired is cooperating against them.
It sounds like to me that that's what he has.
It's much my reading of this pleading and all the other ones he's doing is that he's got some folks on board Team America, as we say, uh, for purposes of not just this prosecution, but the rest of his investigation.
Cash, let's talk about one of these, I guess we called it an unforced error, and though that's kind of how you've described it in the past, uh, that the defense may have done uh to basically elicit this this massive pleading from Durham.
Um so the line is kind of fascinating.
Um basically they say because the language is so kind of obscure in a way.
Um they say that's right, the the indictment contains no reference to Mr. Steele or the inflammatory steel dossier.
The indictment similarly contains no allegations, nor is there any evidence of Mr. Sussman's knowledge, awareness, or involvement in any of Mr. Steele's efforts to provide the information to the government.
Yeah, those words are very meticulously chosen by a very smart defense attorney.
And just stepping back for a second, so that defense pleading, that defense motion in Lemine directly preceded John Durham's response motion in Lemine.
But before both of those two motions happened, there was a teleconference in mid-March, which is just uh a court hearing that you do over the telephone between the parties on the Sussman case.
And during that teleconference, it came up that the possibility that John Durham would call Christopher Steele as a witness in the case, and or use some of Christopher Steele's testimony or evidence from Christopher Steele.
So that spurred the defense in part to come in with this statement that you just read to our viewers.
And as a foreign public defender, looking at that and a former federal prosecutor, it's kind of almost too cute by a half.
Because what the defendant and Michael Sussman could have said was, I don't have anything to do with Christopher Steele.
Doesn't matter.
Call whoever you want.
Instead, they said the indictment doesn't name anything Christopher Steele is doing.
The indictment doesn't have to do that.
The evidence can flow underneath the indictment during the case in chief.
That's the whole point.
The indictment is a summary of the crimes you are charging the defendant with.
It's uh not supposed to have everything.
The more interesting part of that sentence or paragraph is the second part where they say the defense for Sussman says, nor is there any evidence that John Durham has provided about Mr. Sussman's knowledge or involvement with any of Mr. Steele's activities.
I want our audience to pause on that for a second.
This was an opportunity for the defense For Michael Sussman to come out and say, not only has John Durham not produced any evidence, there is not any in existence because our client has no relationship with Christopher Steele.
That's what you do if you are ethically able to say that as a defense attorney.
To me, what that means is the defense knows somewhere in the ether, Michael Sussman and Christopher Steele either communicated directly or indirectly, and as we talked about, and I really want to highlight this real quick.
Some of the information that John Durham put out was that in August of 2016, as admitted through their own emails, Fusion GPS, Michael Sussman, Perkins Kuey, Rodney Jaffe, Textives, and the media, all talking and communicating about Russian collusion in August of 2016.
Was Christopher Steele part of those conversations via Fusion GPS, who he's hired by?
Since Fusion GPS was in those conversations, are we to believe that the investigative firm being paid millions of dollars by Michael Sussman and the DNC wasn't telling their client what they were finding?
So it's a very um interesting maneuver or word choice, I should say, by the defense in this case, when they could have just flat out said, nothing to see here, never met the guy, never talked to the guy, never communicated with the guy, and didn't know that any of my any of the clients' money was being paid to Christopher Steele.
They didn't say any of those things.
And these are excellent lawyers.
They just said there's no evidence.
There's nothing in the evidence yet to show that.
To me, that says it's kind of almost a half admission that they I think they again they went too far by trying to get the steel stuff out of the way.
And what's funny, maybe funny is not the right word, but maybe is the irony of all ironies is the defense lawyers for Michael Sussman plead in writing to a federal court that the Steele dossier is, quote, inflammatory.
That is incredible, isn't it?
Just like we like say that again.
Yeah.
The defense lawyers for Michael Sussman in a federal pleading are calling the Christopher Steele dossier an inflammatory.
Yeah.
They just pled that to a federal judge.
They, the guys at Perkins CUI, who paid Fusion GPS millions of dollars to Christopher Steele to write his bogus steel dossier, which they later jammed down the Pfizer courts to surveillance candidate Trump and later President Trump, his lawyers, the central actor of this, his lawyers are now saying uh, well, that dossier is highly inflammatory.
We have said that and proved otherwise when we did the Russian gate investigation on since because we took out the credibility, we used the FBI's own documents, we showed out the corruption of the FBI and the Hillary Clinton campaign paid for it.
It's very ironic now to see the former lawyer, head lawyer for the DNC coming out and saying in court, that document is uh inflammatory.
And so I think it's time for our shout-out, Cash.
Today's shout-out goes to Philip Neri.
Thanks so much for posting your comments on our wall.
Jan and I look forward to reading everybody's comments, and we appreciate your support.
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