So How Many Besides James Baker Have Flipped?
And What Other Prosecutions Might Baker Be Assisting Durham With?
The past two days of this week saw some pretty significant developments in the Durham Special Counsel investigation.
Two things happened very quickly together:
First, it was announced publicly - and I’ll comment about it being a public announcement in a minute - that the Durham SCO would be calling former FBI General Counsel James Baker as a witness for the prosecution should this case against former Perkins Coie lawyer Michael Sussmann go to trial.
It’s a very significant development that Durham’s office **publicly announced** it would be bringing Baker in as a witness against Sussmann.
Some people might not understand why Durham unveiling Baker as a key SCO witness is such a bombshell. Allow me to briefly explain.
Durham runs a very tight ship when it comes to security against leaks; virtually nothing has gone public from his investigation unless he wants that information to go public.
Which means that at this time, Durham **wanted** certain people to know that Baker is cooperating. By openly revealing that the SCO would be bringing the FBI’s former General Counsel to testify, Durham is sending a message to some people. He wants these people to clearly see that Baker is cooperating in Sussman’s prosecution.
Baker appearing as a witness against Sussman instantly leads to the question of what **other** prosecutions might Baker assist the SCO with?
You see, as the FBI’s General Counsel, Baker isn’t just the guy that Sussmann happened to approach with the Alfa Bank hoax. As the top legal eagle for the agency, Baker was also in many key meetings as the Crossfire Hurricane team hashed out it’s strategy for pursuing it’s targets. He was intimately involved in discussions around the legal issues that arose with the FISA warrant on Carter Page.
As with top corporate legal teams that keep abreast of any new business venture being undertaken to check the work for legal issues, Baker was kept informed and up-to-date on what Peter Strzok, Joseph Pienkta, Stephen Somma and other FBI personnel were doing as they pursued their Trump-related targets.
The second thing that happened this week is that Durham let something else out from behind the curtain: Sussmann was meeting with Durham and a new witness, according to a report by Harris Falkner at Fox News.
Once again, I’ll reiterate: people are only finding this out because Durham wanted them to. So what’s going on here?
Durham questioning Sussmann after the grand jury testimony, after the indictment was unsealed, after Sussmann’s ‘not guilty’ plea looks unusual if Sussmann is a hostile witness determined to beat any charges in court. Sussmann would likely have to appear voluntarily, as this is before the trial. He is not under arrest and had been released on bond.
What’s likely happening is that after wading through 81,000 pages of discovery with his lawyers for the past three weeks, and upon hearing that Baker would be testifying against him at trial, Sussmann is seeking a meeting to discuss a deal and potential cooperation.
If that’s what’s happening, it would not be unusual. Many smart defendants put on the brave face at their arraignment after being indicted, plead not guilty, and then wait for the government’s discovery in order to huddle with their legal team and assess the odds of a favorable verdict at trial.
When the defendants and their legal counsel come to the conclusion they don’t have a realistic shot to beat the state’s case in court, that’s when you see the defendant switch their plea from ‘not guilty’ to ‘guilty’, and begin cooperating.
Based on what we all saw in Sussmann’s indictment, Durham can not only prove the false statement charge, but also the criminal conspiracy charge, that the Clinton campaign, lawyers at Perkins Coie, tech researchers at Georgia Tech, and Roland Joffe at Neustar all conspired among themselves to manufacture a fake Trump/Russia collusion hoax and then proffer it to federal officials. Durham has the billings records, phone calls, text messages, emails and other documents to make this case convincingly.
So, Sussmann could very well already be in the process of hammering out a plea deal with the Special Counsel where he cooperates in exchange for a reduced sentence.
Who Else Flipped?
At what point Baker made the decision to begin cooperating with the Special Counsel is currently unknown. No documentation or record of that has been released.
And, of course, Durham’s Special Counsel’s Office never made any public announcement this had happened. There was no ‘atta boy!’ press conference where members of the prosecution team crowed, “Yay, we just flipped James Baker!”
Now that Baker has been publicly revealed, the only real question now is…who **else** among the RussiaGate cast of characters is also cooperating with Durham?
There are several intriguing candidates for flipped SpyGate plotters who may have accepted heretofore secret plea deals and have been cooperating for some time.
FBI Special Agent Joseph Pienkta
I’ve been writing about the mysterious phantom Pientka for going on three years now, ever since his name first surfaced as being the **other** FBI agent from the Crossfire Hurricane team who interviewed newly installed Trump National Security Advisor Lt. General Michael Flynn at the White House on Jan. 24, 2017.
The first unusual fact about Pientka is that by the time mid-2017 rolled around, the guy had turned into an actual ghost. He just simply vanished. Supposedly he was moved to the FBI’s San Francisco office, but it’s hard to tell. He’s never showed up anywhere. Unlike Peter Strzok, who was brought out for a very public and very contentious Congressional hearing back in July of 2018, Pientka was treated very differently: out of sight, out of mind. In hours and hours of research I managed to track down only **one** picture that is purported to be Pientka, and I’m still not sure that’s even him.
After all my years of Spygate research, I’d be willing to lay a sizable bet that Pientka was the very first of those ‘present at the creation’ of RussiaGate to flip and agree to cooperate with Durham - and this happened long before they ever took Durham’s Spygate-related investigations public in May of 2019.
FBI Deputy Assistant Director for Counterintelligence Peter Strzok
At the aforementioned 2018 congressional hearing, Strzok really did himself no favors with his bizarre behavior. He came across as supremely unlikable, arrogant and entitled, vociferously defending all his actions in the Crossfire Hurricane probe.
Besides the fact most people don’t like Strzok’s attitude, what I would focus on is that, just like Pientka, he’s there throughout the entire creation of the Crossfire Hurricane team. Strzok was actually leading the team, making key decisions. Flipping him into a cooperating witness would mean he can give the investigators insights into the knowledge and activities of his superiors: Bill Priestap, Andrew McCabe, and James Comey.
Strzok also took key notes on two occasions that have proven highly problematic for his fellow conspirators now that they are in Durham’s hands.
The first set of notes is found in the recent Sussmann indictment:
Although he’s only identified by his title as the Assistant Director of the Counterintelligence Division, there’s no doubt the person Baker met with here who took these notes is Strzok.
Later, on January 4 of 2017, Strzok was in the White House for a key meeting where he once again took notes, and this time he detailed how then-Vice President and current President Joe Biden introduced the idea of pursuing Donald Trump’s incoming NSA, General Flynn, by using the Logan Act.
Saying that Strzok was a key player in the crafting of the RussiaGate hoax is a massive understatement. So if the SCO was able to flip him, that would spell absolute doom to the higher ups at the agency to whom he was directly reporting: James Comey and Andrew McCabe.
FBI counsel Lisa Page
Page will forever be tied to Strzok as one half of the infamous “FBI Lovebirds”, who exchanged thousands of very revealing text messages with each other that ended up becoming public. Those messages were a window into an FBI culture that was rotten to the core. Page also turns out to have played an instrumental role in the alteration of the key 302 interview form from the January 24, 2017 interview of General Flynn by Strzok and Pientka.
Though she was not present at the interview, Page made editorial changes to the 302. Strange events abounded around that 302 form, something that SpyGate researchers have well documented over the years. If either Strzok or Page flipped - or they flipped together along with Pientka, that would mean the entire process by which a fake crime was invented out of thin air to charge General Flynn with can be fully exposed by the Durham SCO.
FBI Director of Counterintelligence Bill Priestap
Peter Strzok’s boss at the FBI, Priestap was running the Counterintelligence Division during the entire course of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation.
Like Strzok, Priestap is an excellent notetaker. Priestap helpfully wrote down notes at a White House meeting on January 22, 2017 where both FBI Director James Comey and Deputy Director Andrew McCabe was present. The notes Priestap wrote blew up the false statement case the Crossfire Hurricane team and the Mueller Special Counsel had built against General Flynn. These notes were exculpatory evidence that the Muller Special Counsel was hiding, and they did not publicly surface until US Attorney Jeffrey Jensen found them and gave them under seal to Flynn defense counsel Sidney Powell.
The strategy to pursue Flynn on a ludicrous violation of the Logan Act in order to try to get him fired as Trump’s NSA and maybe even prosecuted for some crime they would invent came straight out of that meeting.
Although there are other lower level people involved who’s flipping would help Durham make criminal cases, these 4 would have the biggest impact, and would be able to give the SCO the greatest amount of leverage on the higher-ups involved.
Of course, if any of these four people actually have flipped as Baker did, then it was handled just as quietly as Baker’s flipping was handled, with no leaks.
And people told you nothing was happening.
You keep me sane Brian.
Thank Yoi
Love love love your articles. Your writing is superb. Let’s go Brandon!