https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2021/10/28/clinton_campaign_spread_bogus_alfa_bank_story_obama_admin-wide_to_press_trump-russia_probe_800927.html

Sperry’s sources who have been briefed on special counsel John Durham’s ongoing investigation say the scheme was much broader than previously known and involved “multiple U.S. agencies.” Newly declassified documents suggest the same thing. Seriously, is anyone surprised by this?

Hillary’s campaign, led by then-Perkins Coie attorneys Michael Sussmann and Marc Elias, worked to convince Obama’s State Department (formerly run by Hillary), FBI/Justice (“Justice”) Department and even CIA to look into the hoax, and kept the pressure on even after Trump was inaugurated in 2017. The Clinton machine just kept pushing and pushing from a variety of angles. “The deception was wide-ranging,” Sperry’s briefed source told him.

(NOTE: We generally are wary of anonymous sources, but Sperry has been consistently right, and sources concerning an ongoing investigation have to remain anonymous. We have never been steered wrong by Paul Sperry.)

Durham’s “speaking indictment” of Sussmann deals with his prodding of the FBI to investigate the false Trump Tower/Alfa Bank “pinging” story and implies a great deal about how that was set up. Durham has emails that show the Clinton campaign knew that this story was a “red herring” but fed it to the FBI anyway as “a very useful narrative.” One of the researchers said “we’d have to expose every trick we have in our bag to make even a very weak association...We cannot technically make any claims that would fly public scrutiny.” But that didn’t stop them from doing it.

What’s new is that after Sussmann approached the FBI with their fake story in September of 2016, as detailed in the “speaking indictment,” the campaign then approached the State Department with the same story, this time from “dossier” imagineer Christopher Steele. Two days later (by now we’re in mid-October), his contact sent the information to the FBI’s top Eurasia/Russia counterintel official, Stephen Laycock. Laycock sent it to...(drum roll, please)...Peter Strzok, plus another supervisor.

At this point, the FBI acted on the flimsy rumors, interviewing tech vendors who worked for the Trump Organization and actually obtaining warrants to search the Trump Tower servers. It was days after this tip that Strzok used the “dossier” to get the warrant to spy on Carter Page.

Clinton foreign policy adviser Jake Sullivan, who is Biden’s national security adviser now, was apparently in charge of the narrative, and he released a written statement about the Trump/Alfa Bank story. SLATE reported it, after being pressured by Hillary-funded Fusion GPS to do so. Then Hillary tweeted Sullivan’s statement on October 31, just days before the election. Her lead line was totally made up: “Computer scientists have apparently uncovered a covert server linking the Trump Organization to a Russia-based bank.”

After Donald Trump shocked the pants off them all in November by winning the election, the Clinton people doubled down on their hoax. (Really, after all that effort, why let a good hoax go to waste? It’s not as if they were going to accept the results of the election.) It was in mid-November that they went back to the State Department, where Bruce Ohr, wife of Fusion GPS researcher Nellie Orh, was a top official. Ohr gave the FBI two thumb drives he had received from Fusion GPS’s Glenn Simpson and quoted his (Clinton) sources as saying the Trump/Alfa Bank story was real.

As Paul Sperry reports, the FBI finally closed their case after finding no basis for the claim, but THEN...Sussmann, again without revealing his Clinton ties, took it to the CIA, to John Brennan’s general counsel. (This is like a Tale from the Crypt –- the thing that wouldn’t die. And now we know why Durham also accuses Sussmann of misleading “Agency -2,” the CIA.) Then the CIA schlepped it to another FBI liaison, who appears to have been...(drum roll, please)...Peter Strzok. Yes, again.

In a new court document filed this past week, Durham revealed that he now has over 80,000 pages of documents in response to grand jury subpoenas issued to more than 15 targets and witnesses, including the computer contractors he enlisted from Georgia Tech. Sperry’s sources tell him that some of these witnesses have been granted immunity and are cooperating.

The CIA isn’t supposed to be involved in domestic political issues at all --- that must be why they passed the story back to the FBI to do the dirty work and damage Trump. As Jonathan Turley said, “One would expect a CIA official to express reluctance in an investigation that would have largely a domestic focus. But as with the FBI, the Clinton campaign found eager officials to move on any such allegation.”

Jake Sullivan kept at it, too. In February of 2017, he teamed with Glenn Simpson and Daniel Jones, an FBI agent-turned Democrat-operative whose name no doubt will become increasingly familiar, to breathe new life into the story. Sullivan is under scrutiny for lying to Congress about his role in this. Jones reached out to his former FBI colleagues, who, unbelievably, re-opened the Trump-Alfa Bank case even though they had originally found nothing to them.

They went BACK to the building that housed the Trump server in question, Examination showed the “pings” between Tower and Alfa Bank to be nothing but...spam marketing emails.

This was all an investigation about nothing. So, of course, the FBI and the media immediately announced that there was nothing to the Trump-Alfa Bank story and apologized profusely to President Trump for their mistake. Haha, I'm kidding.

Strzok has tried to distance himself from the Trump-Alfa Bank story and complained in LAWFARE that Durham is conducting “a partisan witch hunt on behalf of Trump.” To that I’d sat that Trump deserves vindication, and Durham’s hunt seems to be turning up quite a few actual witches.

……………….

Jonathan Turley wrote on his website back in September about the “journalist” who wrote the first media piece about the (fake) Trump Tower-Alfa Bank connection, Franklin Foer. Durham’s “speaking indictment” tells how Fusion GPS pressured him to publish it. “The Investigative Firm’s Employee’s email stated ‘time to hurry’ suggesting that Reporter -2 should hurry to publish an article regarding the Russian Bank -1 allegations. In response, Reporter – 2 emailed to the Investigative Firm Employee a draft article regarding the Russian Bank -1 allegations, along with the cover message: Here’s the first 2500 words.”

It’s clear that In the end, Foer took his chances with a flimsy story because he didn’t want to see Trump elected. Remember this next time you see any other anti-Trump or anti-conservative hit piece in the mainstream media. They’ve lost whatever credibility they might have ever had.