Marc Elias Is Gonna Get Indicted As Part of a Criminal Conspiracy

Never write it down, Marc

Lawyers love to get paid.

And to get paid, you have to bill your clients.

Which is what both Michael Sussmann and Marc Elias were doing at Perkins Coie as they worked together for their client - the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign - to manufacture a fake Trump/Russia scandal based on fake evidence and then shop it to the news media as well as to federal agencies.

Now, a lot of people who are unimpressed with the Sussmann indictment are pointing out it only makes one single charge - that Sussmann made a series of false statements to federal officials. This is taken to mean Durham is wasting everybody’s time with minor small ball charges that won’t lead to anything.

That’s wrong. While it’s true the indictment of Sussmann clearly shows he’s a member of a criminal conspiracy, and he’s not charged for that conspiracy, that doesn’t mean he never will be.

Do you know what a "superseding indictment" is? That's when a prosecutor files new charges on top of the indictment he's already filed on a defendant. That's what's going to happen to Michael Sussmann. He's a clear participant in a criminal conspiracy to give faked evidence to the FBI.

So the false statement indictment against Sussmann is going to have another superseding indictment added to it at some point that will charge him with being a member of a criminal conspiracy.

The great thing about being a federal prosecutor is you don’t have to lay out your entire case right from the beginning about every single criminal act committed by your targets. You just need to show enough to get an indictment from a grand jury. Which is what Durham has done.

The Special Counsel doesn’t have to show all his evidence yet or file every single charge against a target that he intends to make. And that’s what’s so interesting about the Sussmann indictment. He goes far beyond merely demonstrating that Sussmann made a series of false statements to federal officials. Durham shows the nuts-and-bolts of criminal conspiracy without charging any of that criminal conspiracy yet.

I believe we’re going to see Marc Elias indicted.

Let me explain why.

The Sussmann indictment lays the groundwork for understanding how Durham is going to deal with the Clinton campaign’s operatives approaching federal officials with fake stories and fraudulent evidence in their attempts to get the Trump campaign placed under investigation.  

Elias won’t be charged with making false statements to federal officials. He wasn’t the point man on the Alfa Bank dirty trick operation, being sent out from Perkins Coie to sell this stuff to the feds and the news media. That was Sussmann. BUT if Durham can prove through documentary evidence that Elias

1] knew the Alfa Bank evidence was fake and that Elias was

2] closely supervising Sussmann’s activities, giving him orders, then sending the Clinton campaign detailed billing about Sussmann’s actions…

that makes Elias the middleman in a criminal conspiracy to give fake evidence to the FBI in order to get his client’s political opponents targeted by a federal investigation.

Even attempting to do something like this is a crime. Elias and Sussmann not only attempted it, they got the FBI to bite.

I’m sure just three weeks ago, about the same time all the news media leaks about Durham’s investigation began springing up, Elias announcing out of the blue that he was leaving Perkins Coie to start his own legal firm has nothing whatsoever to do with the Durham Special Counsel’s office investigating exactly what he was doing billing the Clinton campaign for the Alfa Bank smear while he was supervising Sussmann’s selling of it to the feds.

Most people seem to miss or skip right over this part of the Sussmann indictment:

There’s no doubt about the identity of “Campaign Lawyer-1” in the Sussmann indictment. And the language here makes it pretty clear what Elias was doing.

Durham Appears To Be Going After The Operatives First

If Durham’s starting with the outer layer, then the paid political operatives at Perkins Coie and Fusion GPS will get indicted first. That means some combination of Marc Elias, Glenn Simpson, Christopher Steele and a few others.

This indictment appears to have been written to accomplish two main tasks:

1. Charge Sussmann for his false statements and

2. Clearly reveal the workings of the criminal conspiracy to create this fake Trump/Alfa Bank evidence and give it to federal agencies

3. Send a clear message to some people - one of them certainly being Marc Elias - that Durham is going to pursue this criminal conspiracy activity so they might want to start thinking about cooperating

Expect More Leaks With A Purpose

I pointed out in my previous column, “Nobody Stopped John Durham and He’s Still Coming”, that it’s almost certain the anonymous sources of these stories are some of the targets of the Spygate probe, unhappy about having gotten search warrants and having been subpoenaed and forced to appear under oath before Durham’s grand jury.  These people then rushed to spin their version of Durham’s actions to sympathetic stenographers in the fake news media. 

Durham, of course, will remain completely silent in the face of these leak stories, which allows his investigation’s targets to sell their take on his activity while he spends no time trying to defend himself in the press. 

[I discussed in a column entitled “Why They Can’t Find Special Counsel John Durham” the reason he keeps an amazingly low profile despite an intense amount of interest in his investigation].

It appears the only time Durham is going to ‘talk’ is when he issues an indictment.  Note that there was no press conference with Durham or anyone from the DOJ where a statement about the indictment was read before questions were taken from reporters.  The indictment was unsealed, Sussmann appeared in court, entered his plea of not guilty, and left.  That was it.

Now everybody has gone back to waiting. I can’t help but wonder if this is the pattern of how things are going to unfold for any subsequent indictments by the Durham Special Counsel?

As part of the defensive narrative, the Durham leak stories pointed to a supposed ‘building consensus’ that Attorney General Merrick Garland needs to get this rogue Special Prosecutor under control. 

You have to step back from the daily news cycle and take the 30,000 foot view of all of this. 

Many People Still Have No Idea of the Scope of What Durham Is Managing

The investigation Durham is running is unprecedented. There’s never been anything even close to being like it in U.S. history. 

Durham is leading a huge office of hundreds of personnel with the assistance of several US Attorneys, all of whom are engaged in a massive undertaking.  It is the combining of a dozen of the most severe federal crimes ever committed inside the U.S. government with some of the most serious national security breaches in U.S. history. 

Both of these federal criminal and national security investigations Durham is managing span a truly historic scale.  From the DOJ itself to the FBI, the CIA, the State Dept., the Pentagon, the Mueller Special Counsel, Perkins Coie, Fusion GPS, the Clinton campaign, the Clinton Foundation, as well as certain activity by foreign intelligence services in Italy, the U.K., Australia, and other countries, it is truly and remarkably epic in scope.

I’ve laughed at the idea for going on 3 years now that Durham was investigating something this massive while being just an ordinary US Attorney with ordinary US Attorney powers. I’ve written several times about how I suspect Durham was functioning as a de facto Special Counsel long before former Attorney General William Barr made it official by writing a letter and formally announcing it last October. 

C.S. Lewis wrote about people who’s God is too small, that they try to keep in a box that won’t fit Him.

Many have this same problem with Durham. He really doesn’t fit in the box they made for him, and even as he doing things they claimed were impossible, they make statements that show they are still in denial.

I said for 9 months Durham hadn’t been shut down. Now I’ll tell you something else: he fully intends to indict every dirty trickster that was involved in not only the Alfa Bank shenanigans, but also in the far more serious Steele Dossier fraud.

And you can quote me on that.