American people now calling for Hillary’s accountability for the fake news she started in Trump-Russia Hoax.
According to her former campaign manager, Hillary Clinton personally signed off on a plan in 2016 to quietly pitch to the media the now-debunked theory that Donald Trump’s company’s computer servers had a secret communications link with a Russian bank.
Robby Mook, a witness in the trial of a former Clinton campaign lawyer accused of lying to the FBI, testified on Friday that the 2020 Democratic presidential nominee agreed to provide information to a reporter about a link between her opponent Donald Trump and Russian Alfa Bank, despite her campaign’s uncertainty about the allegations’ veracity.
Mook said that he and others at the campaign “weren’t totally confident” in the server data’s veracity in the Alfa Bank allegations, but the campaign wanted to give them to a reporter a few months before the election.
Slate first reported that Alfa Bank, a Moscow-based financial institution, had a server “irregularly pinging” a server registered to the Trump Organization in New York. The FBI looked into it, and according to a Justice Department inspector general report, there were no ties between Alfa Bank and Trump.
Mook testified during the trial of Michael Sussmann, who is accused of lying to the FBI during the Trump-Russia investigation after presenting the FBI with unverified evidence about Trump and Alfa Bank. The trial’s focus is on whether Sussmann, whose law firm represented Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, acted on behalf of a client.
Senior campaign officials, including senior policy adviser and now White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan, campaign chairman John Podesta, and communications director Jennifer Palmieri, discussed the decision to release the Alfa allegations to a reporter, according to Mook.
Clinton was briefed on the decision to go public with the allegations in the fall of 2016, Mook said that he “discussed it with Hillary as well” and that “she agreed.”
However, while Mook’s testimony clearly established the Clinton campaign’s role in spreading the unsubstantiated Alfa-Bank allegations, Mook’s testimony may have also bolstered Sussmann’s defense that he approached James Baker, then the FBI’s general counsel, about the Alfa material on his own, rather than as a lawyer for the Clinton campaign.
On his second day of testimony, then-FBI general counsel James Baker told the jury that he would have been “extremely concerned” if he had learned Sussman, whose law firm represented Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, had billed his time to the Clinton campaign for drafting papers presented to the FBI. This was related to the trial’s central question: whether Sussmann provided the information to investigators on his own initiative rather than on behalf of a legal client.
Had Baker known who Sussmann’s clients were, he said he would have feared the FBI was being pulled into a political ploy. “I would have had serious conversations with the leadership of the FBI about what if anything to do with this material and how to handle it.”
This is the first criminal trial stemming from the Durham investigation.
Sources: Westernjournal, Thehill, Nypost