Republicans are raising red flags over the judge appointed to oversee Special Counsel John Durham’s case against Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann, saying he has serious conflicts of interest that should disqualify him.
Last week, Durham, who was appointed to oversee the probe into the FBI’s investigation of former president Donald Trump, indicted Sussmann for lying to the FBI when he fed the agency bogus cyber “evidence” of ties between a Russian bank and the Trump campaign. When asked, Sussmann allegedly told the FBI that he didn’t have a client, while in fact his law firm, Perkins Coie, was working for Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee.
The revelations of the Michael Sussmann indictment-
It was an smear operation, coordinated with Fusion GPS and Hillary Clinton, to influence the election.https://t.co/GXMRF00mrD
— Techno Fog (@Techno_Fog) September 16, 2021
In a report at Just the News on Sunday, journalist Lee Smith, the author of The Plot Against the President, and The Permanent Coup, suggested Joe Biden himself could be caught up in Durham’s dragnet.
“Republicans and Trump allies are optimistic about the latest development in John Durham’s investigation but are still concerned that Attorney General Merrick Garland might halt the investigation to protect allies and even the president himself,” Smith reported.
FBI notes appear to suggest that as vice president, Joe Biden played a role in the Democratic Party project to smear Trump as a Russian asset by raising the obscure, disused, 18th century statute the Logan Act as a possible vehicle for prosecuting Michael Flynn for speaking with the Russian ambassador to Washington — even after FBI case agents had cleared Trump’s incoming national security adviser of wrongdoing.
District Court Judge Christopher Cooper has too many conflicts of interest to preside over the case fairly, and should recuse himself, current and former officials argue.
Cooper has professional and personal relationships with many of the players behind the FBI’s Trump investigation, including disgraced FBI lawyer Lisa Page.
As Smith points out, Cooper’s wife, Amy Jeffress, represents Page, who infamously schemed with her disgraced FBI agent boyfriend Peter Strzok to “stop” then-candidate Trump in text messages during the 2016 presidential campaign. Page’s Twitter profile currently shows a picture of her and Jeffress.
In September 2016, Sussman met with Page’s boss, then FBI General Counsel James Baker. The former DOJ cybersecurity expert handed Baker documents falsely asserting that the Trump Organization’s computer servers were communicating suspiciously with the computer servers of a Russian financial institution.
The purpose of the documents Sussmann passed to the FBI was to further the Clinton campaign’s false narrative holding that Trump had been compromised by Russian officials. Former CIA director John Brennan reported to President Obama that Clinton herself approved the scheme in order to deflect attention away from her use of a private email server.
Sussman, who pled not guilty, is scheduled to appear before Cooper on Wednesday.
Cooper, Smith reports, was appointed to the bench by then-president Barack Obama in 2013, and is very well-connected in Democrat legal circles.
Garland officiated his 1999 wedding to Amy Jeffress.
Both Cooper and Jeffress worked at DOJ in the Obama administration. He was part of the 2008 presidential transition team, and she was the national security counselor for Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder.
Recently Jeffress wrote approvingly of Attorney General Garland’s focus on “domestic terrorism.” Many Republicans see the phrase as coded language for targeting Trump supporters.
Her most famous client, former FBI lawyer Page, discussed via text message with her paramour, FBI agent Peter Strzok, how they’d stop Trump from becoming president. Page and Strzok were part of the FBI team that spied on the 2016 Trump campaign.
As evidence to obtain the spy warrant, the FBI used a dossier of memos falsely alleging Trump ties to Russia that was paid for by the Clinton campaign. Sussman and Page then participated in the same Clinton-funded initiative to smear her 2016 opponent and use false evidence to spy on his campaign.
Kash Patel, who ran the House Intelligence Committee’s investigation into the Russia hoax, told Smith the situation is “wildly unique.”
“Usually it’s defense lawyers who put in for recusal,” says Patel. “But in this case, it should be the Justice Department’s special counsel, Durham. The judge’s wife happens to be the lawyer for a possible a coconspirator.”
Patel, a former federal prosecutor, predicted that this time, the defense lawyers will be fighting against recusal. “Sussman is indicted for not telling the FBI’s general counsel he was working on behalf of the Clinton campaign, he said. “And that same general counsel, Baker, supervised Lisa Page, who is represented by the judge’s wife.”
Tom Fitton, President of Judicial Watch, said incestuous situations like this one do not always result in recusal in the D.C. swamp.
“The presumption is that a spouse’s independent professional activities don’t necessarily require a judge to recuse unless a spouse has a substantial interest in the outcome of the proceeding,” says Tom Fitton, President of Judicial Watch. “Washington, D.C. is a small town, and the resulting interlocking relationships result in all sorts of apparent conflicts of interest in the justice system here.”
Fitton continued: “obviously we want justice to be administered fairly, but it must also appear to be administered fairly. This is an unusual fact pattern that requires Judge Cooper to seriously and carefully analyze whether he should recuse himself.”
Patel pointed out that there is a gross double in the way the media is handling the situation.
“What if the judge for Paul Manafort’s case had been married to the lawyer that represented Roger Stone, and William Barr had officiated their wedding?” he asked. “Would the media think that’s ok? This is why America hates D.C. — one set of rules for those you rule over, but a different set for those that rule.”