In addition to the FBI, the 2016 Clinton campaign tried to convince the Obama administration\u2019s State Department, Justice Department and Central Intelligence Agency to look into the hoax, and continued pressing the issue\u00a0even after Trump was inaugurated in January 2017.<\/p>\n The goal was to trigger federal investigative activity targeting her Republican rival and leak the damaging information to the media.<\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cThe Clinton machine flooded the FBI with pressure from a number of angles until investigations of Trump were opened and reopened,\u201d said one of the briefed sources who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive law enforcement matter. “The deception was wide-ranging.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Michael Sussmann: The indicted former Clinton campaign attorney wasn’t the only one feeding the bogus Alfa Bank story to the feds. perkinscoie.com<\/em><\/p>\n Special Counsel John Durham outlined the FBI part of the scheme in a felony\u00a0indictment<\/a>\u00a0of Michael Sussmann. The former Clinton\u00a0campaign lawyer was charged last month with making a false statement to the former\u00a0general counsel of the FBI when he claimed he was not working \u201cfor any client\u201d in bringing to the FBI\u2019s attention allegations of a secret channel of communication between computer servers in Trump Tower and the Alfa Bank in Russia.<\/p>\n According to the indictment, Sussmann was in fact acting on behalf of clients including the Clinton campaign, and an unnamed tech executive who RCI has previously\u00a0reported<\/a>\u00a0is Rodney L. Joffe, a regular adviser to the Biden White House on cybersecurity and infrastructure policies.<\/strong><\/p>\n Internal emails reveal the Clinton operatives knew the links they made between\u00a0Trump and Russia were \u201cweak,\u201d even describing them as a \u201cred herring,\u201d but fed them to investigators anyway.<\/p>\n The Sussmann indictment revealed the doubts of those developing the Alfa Bank story. U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia<\/em><\/p>\n After Sussmann\u2019s meeting with the FBI in September 2016, the Clinton campaign approached the State Department the following month with the same lead, this time using paid Clinton campaign subcontractor Christopher Steele to feed the rumors. A former British intelligence officer, Steele was offered as a reliable source to help corroborate the rumors. On Oct. 11, 2016, Steele gave his contact at Foggy Bottom documents alleging that a supposed hidden server at Trump Tower was pinging Moscow.<\/p>\n Christopher Steele: Author of the debunked dossier passed the Alfa Bank story to the State Department, which passed it along to FBI agent Peter Strzok. (Aaron Chown\/PA FILE via AP)<\/em><\/p>\n Two days later, a State official who previously worked under former secretary Clinton funneled the information\u00a0to the FBI\u2019s then-top Eurasia\/Russia counterintelligence official,<\/strong>\u00a0Stephen Laycock, according to recently declassified\u00a0notes<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0testimony<\/a>. Laycock, in turn, forwarded the information to Peter Strzok, the FBI agent who led the investigation of Trump and his campaign and had just weeks earlier texted a bureau lawyer, \u201cWe\u2019ll stop [Trump from being elected].\u201d<\/p>\n “I informed Peter Strzok and another supervisor,\u201d<\/strong><\/em>\u00a0Laycock\u00a0testified<\/a>\u00a0last year in a closed-door Senate hearing.<\/p>\n Telephone: After Steele fed the Alfa Bank story to State, it was passed to the FBI\u2019s then-top Eurasia\/Russia counterintelligence official, Stephen Laycock (left), who in turn passed it on to lead FBI agent on Trump-Russia, Peter Strzok (right). Facebook\/Twitter<\/em><\/p>\n Steele, who later confessed he was \u201cdesperate\u201d to defeat Trump, was the author of the debunked dossier\u00a0claiming Trump colluded with Russia to steal the election. He even misspelled the name of the Russian bank as\u00a0\u201cAlpha.\u201d\u00a0<\/strong>Still, the FBI took his rumors seriously enough to interview tech vendors working for the Trump\u00a0Organization and obtain warrants to search Trump Tower servers. Within days of receiving the State\u00a0Department tip, Strzok also used Steele\u2019s dossier to secure a wiretap on Trump adviser Carter Page.<\/p>\n Clinton foreign\u00a0policy adviser and current National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan would put out a written statement trumpeting the Trump-Alfa Bank story, which was\u00a0shared<\/a>\u00a0by then-candidate Clinton on Oct. 31, 2016, after Slate reported on it. Fusion GPS, the Washington opposition-research group that worked for the Clinton campaign as a paid agent, and helped gather dirt on Alfa Bank and draft the materials Sussmann would later submit to the FBI,\u00a0reportedly<\/a>\u00a0pressed Slate to publish the story by the\u00a0account<\/a>\u00a0of its author, journalist Franklin Foer.<\/p>\n The Clinton campaign played up the Trump-Alfa Bank story on the eve of the 2016 election. Twitter\/@HillaryClinton<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cThis was a highly sophisticated operation using enablers in both the media and federal agencies,\u201d\u00a0<\/strong>George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley told RealClearInvestigations.<\/p>\n The Clinton campaign did not let up even after Trump won the election.<\/p>\n In mid-November 2016, it enlisted top Justice Department official Bruce Ohr \u2013 whose wife, Nellie, worked for Fusion GPS \u2013 to add credibility to the Alfa rumors.<\/strong>\u00a0That month, Ohr advised the FBI that Steele had told him that the Alfa Bank server was a link to the Trump campaign. Then in early December, Ohr met with the FBI case supervisor who worked for Strzok at least twice. Declassified notes and other records show that during those meetings, Ohr provided him with thumb drives he had received from paid Clinton opposition researcher and Fusion GPS co-founder, Glenn Simpson, and Ohr\u2019s wife and Simpson\u2019s colleague, Nellie. Quoting his Clinton sources, Ohr insisted the alleged backdoor computer channel between Trump and Alfa was real.<\/p>\n Bruce Ohr: The Justice Department official — linked to Clinton opposition research firm Fusion GPS through his wife Nellie, a Fusion employee — brought the firm’s arguments and materials to the FBI. The Global Initiative<\/em><\/p>\n The FBI spent months investigating the claim, eventually dismissing it as baseless.<\/strong>\u00a0After the FBI closed the case, Sussmann turned to the nation\u2019s top intelligence agency for assistance, as RCI\u00a0first\u00a0reported<\/a>.<\/p>\n In December 2016, Sussmann called then-CIA Director John Brennan\u2019s general counsel \u2013 Caroline Krass \u2013 to set up a meeting to brief her about the same Alfa Bank rumors. Krass expressed interest in the tip. Then in early February 2017, officials from her office formally sat down with Sussmann for more than an hour to discuss the Trump-Russian bank rumors. Sussmann provided them updated versions of the materials he had handed off to the FBI.<\/p>\n Caroline Krass: General counsel to then-CIA Director John Brennan welcomed Sussmann’s pitch of the Alfa Bank story, which reportedly passed from the CIA to FBI. CIA\/Wikipedia<\/em><\/p>\n The CIA, in turn, referred the rumors to an FBI liaison for further investigation, according to the sources briefed on his case. Strzok was the lead FBI liaison to the CIA at the time.<\/strong><\/p>\n Among the documents Durham has obtained is a CIA memo memorializing the meeting with Sussmann, according to the sources. In his grand jury indictment, Durham accused Sussmann of also misleading the CIA, which he referred to only as \u201cAgency-2.\u201d The special counsel alleges that Sussmann, as he did when meeting with an FBI official, had also failed to inform contacts at Langley that he was representing a client \u2013 in the latter case specifically Joffe \u2013 tied to the Clinton campaign operation and who had been promised a high-level job in a Clinton administration.<\/p>\n Billing the Democrat\u2019s campaign for his work on the \u201cconfidential project,” Sussmann recruited Joffe and a team of federal computer contractors to mine proprietary databases containing vast quantities of sensitive, nonpublic Internet data for possible dirt on Trump and his advisers. In a new court\u00a0document<\/a>\u00a0filed last week, Durham revealed his team has obtained more than 80,000 pages of\u00a0documents in response to grand jury subpoenas issued to more than 15 targets and witnesses, including the\u00a0computer contractors<\/a>. Among others receiving subpoenas: political organizations, private firms, tech companies and other entities, including a major university \u2014 Georgia Tech \u2014 which allegedly participated in the Clinton conspiracy as a Pentagon contractor. Some witnesses have been granted immunity and are cooperating with prosecutors, the sources close to the probe said.<\/p>\n Jonathan Turley: “One would expect a CIA official to express reluctance in an investigation that would have a largely domestic focus,” says the law professor. CNN<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cWhile Sussmann may have hidden his work for the Clinton campaign, this was obviously a useful attack on Trump,\u201d\u00a0<\/strong>Turley said. \u201cOne would expect a CIA official to express reluctance in an investigation that would have a largely domestic focus. But as with the FBI, the Clinton campaign found eager officials to move on any such allegation.\u201d<\/p>\n The CIA is largely barred from collecting information inside the United States or on American citizens.<\/p>\n \u201cThe CIA has no business involving itself in a domestic political issue,\u201d\u00a0<\/strong>Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton told RCI.\u00a0\u201cThe evidence suggests the primary purpose of the meeting was political.”<\/strong><\/p>\n Fitton said his watchdog group has filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the CIA demanding all records generated from the contacts Sussmann had with the agency in December 2016 and February 2017.<\/p>\n The CIA did not return requests for comment.<\/p>\n For good measure, old Clinton hands tried another pressure point.\u00a0<\/strong>In early February 2017, Clinton’s foreign policy adviser Sullivan huddled with Fusion GPS’s Simpson and Daniel Jones, an FBI analyst-turned-Democrat-operative, to reboot the same smear campaign against Trump. (As RCI previously\u00a0reported<\/a>,\u00a0Sullivan, who spearheaded the campaign’s effort to promote the narrative of a disturbing Trump-Russia relationship via the Alfa Bank story, is under scrutiny for possibly lying to Congress about his role in the operation.<\/strong>) Jones, in turn, reached out to his former colleagues at the FBI, who reopened the investigation into the old allegations of a cyber-link between Trump and Alfa Bank.<\/p>\n Jake Sullivan played a pivotal role in the Alfa Bank story as 2016 Clinton foreign policy adviser. AP Photo\/Ng Han Guan, File<\/em><\/p>\n The next month, acting on Jones\u2019 recycled tip, FBI agents visited the offices of the Pennsylvania company that housed the Trump server, which was actually administered by a third-party hotel promotions firm \u2013 Cendyn, based in Florida. But their second investigation proved to be another dead end.\u00a0The sinister communications Jones claimed were flowing between an alleged Trump server and Alfa Bank were found to be innocuous marketing emails. In other words, spam.<\/strong><\/p>\n Sources say it is odd that FBI headquarters continued to pursue the allegations, because internal FBI communications reveal\u00a0that the bureau\u2019s own cyber sleuths had pooh-poohed them within days of Sussmann\u2019s briefing, RCI has learned.<\/p>\n Strzok himself had been briefed on that assessment of the materials Sussman dropped off at headquarters on\u00a0Sept. 19, 2016.\u00a0In fact, in a Sept. 23, 2016, internal message to Strzok, an FBI official relayed his preliminary\u00a0findings following an interview with Cendyn, the Florida marketing firm that managed the alleged Trump server.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.zerohedge.com\/s3\/files\/inline-images\/557551_6_.jpg?itok=DKWB_o19\")
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