Amid a John Durham sighting at federal court in D.C. on Tuesday in the criminal trial of Hillary Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann, an FBI agent involved in analyzing Trump-Russia collusion claims pushed by Sussmann testified that a bureau analysis quickly rejected claims of a secret back channel to Russia.
Sussmann was charged by Durham last year with concealing his clients — Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign and “Tech Executive-1,” known to be former Neustar executive Rodney Joffe — from FBI General Counsel James Baker when he pushed bogus allegations of a secret line of communication between the Trump Organization and Russia’s Alfa-Bank during a September 2016 meeting.
Scott Hellman, currently an FBI supervisory special agent leading a team investigating cybercrime, said he and a supervisor retrieved the thumb drives and other information passed to the FBI the day after the Baker-Sussmann meeting, reviewed the secret communication claims, and quickly rejected them.
Hellman testified that the Alfa-Bank allegations included “technical data” such as website names and domain names as well as a “narrative” about the conclusions reached by the creators of the report “based on their analysis of the data.” Hellman said he and his then-supervisor, Nate Batty, conducted an analysis and then compared the FBI’s assessment of the data to the narrative that had been pushed.
Hellman said the allegations claimed there was a “secret communications channel” between the Trump Organization and Alfa-Bank, and he said his analysis with Batty rejected this after roughly a day.
“We did not agree with the conclusion … that this represented a secret communication channel,” the FBI agent testified. "Whoever had written that paper had jumped to some conclusions that were not supported by the data. The methodology they chose was questionable to me.”
Meanwhile, Trump White House adviser Kash Patel noted his Fight With Kash organization procured a billboard in New York City's Times Square which illuminates the ongoing Durham investigation into the origins of the Trump-Russia collusion hoax.
"What better way to go after the Left then go to the heart of the enemy's kingdom," Patel said.
This is awesome 🔥🔥🔥 pic.twitter.com/UkdRnrd28O
— AG 🔥 (@Yolo304741) May 17, 2022
Something we don’t see very often…
John Durham out and about 👊 pic.twitter.com/rfK4hhoN42 — Suzy (@Suzy_NotSuzy) May 16, 2022
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