Former Lead Russiagate Investigator Says Biden's National Security Advisor Could Be Durham's Next Target
Kash Patel — who was the senior counsel for the House Intelligence Committee under former GOP chairman and Rep. Devin Nunes — says special counsel John Durham should charge White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan with lying to Congress.
Fox News reported Tuesday that Sullivan is the “foreign policy advisor” to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign listed in former Perkins Coie law firm attorney Michael Sussmann’s September indictment.
Sussmann has been charged with lying to the FBI when he did not disclose he was working for the Clinton campaign when he met with then-FBI General Counsel James Baker and alleged a secret communication channel existed between the Trump Organization and a Russian bank.
Patel praised Durham for starting to bring to justice those involved in propagating what he described as “Russiagate.”
Patel, a former federal prosecutor, led the investigation for the House Intelligence Committee in 2017-2018 that uncovered the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee paid for the debunked Steele dossier, which was used by the FBI to help justify its surveillance of former President Donald Trump’s campaign adviser Carter Page.
“I was running the Russiagate investigation and the only people, it’s now finally coming to light, that colluded with the Russians were the Hillary Clinton campaign, the DNC and their attorneys, and finally Durham’s getting to the bottom of it,” Patel told Fox News on Wednesday.
Patel asserted that Sullivan should be charged with lying to Congress, when he stated under oath in 2017 he was not aware of the nature of the work people like Sussmann were doing.
“I deposed Jake Sullivan. I deposed Michael Sussmann. My deposition is in the Durham indictment calling him out for lying,” Patel said.
“Jake Sullivan, I think, has the same exact problem,” the former prosector continued. “He testified under oath to Congress that he had no idea what the Perkins Coie lawyer Sussmann was saying, yet the Durham indictment shows communications between Jake Sullivan, the current national security advisor, and Michael Sussmann about the Russiagate hoax.
“So either he lied to Congress or he’s lying in the indictment.”
Sullivan testified in a December 2017 executive session of the House Intelligence Committee that “Mark, and without going into privilege, would occasionally give us updates on the opposition research they were conducting. But I didn’t know what the nature of that effort was, inside effort, outside effort, who was funding it, who was doing it, anything like that, nor was I sort of centrally responsible for figuring out how to deal with or use opposition research.”
New York Post columnist Paul Sperry identified the “Mark” listed in the deposition transcript as Marc Elias, Sussmann’s law partner at Perkins Coie and fellow Democratic Party operative who worked as an attorney on Clinton’s campaign.
The Sussmann indictment states that an unnamed Clinton campaign lawyer (Elias, according to Sperry) exchanged emails in mid-September 2016 with the candidate’s campaign manager, communications director and Sullivan (listed as foreign policy advisor) explaining that Sussmann had shared the Russian bank allegations with a reporter.
By Patel’s assessment, this email exchange is proof Sullivan was aware of the nature of the work Sussmann was up to.
Patel also addressed the charges Durham brought last week against Igor Danchenko, a Russian national who worked for the liberal Brookings Institute in Washington, D.C., during the 2016 campaign.
The indictment alleges Danchenko lied to the FBI regarding being a primary source of information that former British intelligence agent Michael Steele used in compiling his anti-Trump dossier.
“I think the Durham indictment is a larger scale conspiracy that he’s building out,” Patel said.
“I don’t think it just looks bad. You don’t take 40 pages to indict someone for lying to the FBI,” he added. “That’s a two to three-page indictment. You don’t identity 10 people, including Fusion GPS, the current national security advisor, Clinton cronies and Charles Dolan.”
The opposition research firm Fusion GPS had been hired by Perkins Coie to dig up opposition research on Trump. Then Fusion GPS turned around and hired Steele.
Dolan, a Clinton aide, allegedly fed information to Danchenko that ended up in the Steele dossier, the New York Post reported.
Both Sussmann and Danchenko have pled not guilty to the charges brought against them.
Fox News host Bill Hemmer asked Patel to predict what will happen to Sullivan in relation to the Durham probe.
“The irony of it is there was a former national security advisor under President Trump who was convicted while exculpatory evidence was withheld in Michael Flynn,” Patel said.
“Now you have the current national security adviser who I believe actually lied and should be convicted. And there is no exculpatory evidence, and we’ll see if the Justice Department acts.”
Truth and Accuracy
We are committed to truth and accuracy in all of our journalism. Read our editorial standards.
