OPINION:
On Oct. 31, 2016, Jake Sullivan, then senior policy adviser for Democrat Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, issued a press statement citing a Slate report purporting to show that the Trump Organization had a secret server registered to Trump Tower that was covertly communicating with Russia.
“This could be the most direct link yet between Donald Trump and Moscow,” Mr. Sullivan, who is now President Biden’s national security adviser, warned ominously. “This secret hotline may be the key to unlocking the mystery of Trump’s ties to Russia. … This line of communication may help explain Trump’s bizarre adoration of Vladimir Putin and endorsement of so many pro-Kremlin positions throughout this campaign.”
“We can only assume that federal authorities will now explore this direct connection between Trump and Russia as part of their existing probe into Russia’s meddling in our election,” Mr. Sullivan concluded.
We now know from Special Counsel Robert Mueller, as well as Special Counsel John Durham’s ongoing investigation, that the entire Trump-Russia-server narrative was a scam — originating from fake opposition research created by the Clinton campaign and disseminated to reporters without any hard evidence to back it up.
Happily for Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Sullivan, the Trump-hating mainstream media gobbled up the narrative, creating a storyline that plagued Mr. Trump’s entire administration and ultimately led to the House of Representatives impeaching him. After losing the election, Mrs. Clinton refused to acknowledge Mr. Trump’s win was legitimate, and The New York Times went on to win Pulitzers for their Russia “collusion” reporting.
Democrats today like to talk about Republican “threats to democracy,” and “misinformation,” but what the Clinton campaign did to their political rival in 2016 is perhaps the gravest threat to our democratic republic since the country’s inception. Mr. Durham’s investigation contends that Mrs. Clinton’s campaign paid lawyer Michael Sussmann to collect whatever negative information he could on Mr. Trump’s fictitious Russian ties for use in the campaign.
According to Mr. Durham’s filings, Mr. Sussmann worked with “Tech Executive-1,” who has been identified by CNN as Rodney Joffe, then a senior vice president and security chief technology officer at Neustar Inc., a Reston, VA-based internet-services company that provides products to more than 8,000 commercial and government clients worldwide.
Mr. Joffe, who retained Mr. Sussmann as his lawyer in 2015, told his researchers to “mine internet data to establish ‘an interference’ and ‘narrative’ tying then-candidate Trump to Russia,” Mr. Durham stated in a Feb. 11 court filing.
“In connection with these efforts, Tech Executive-1 exploited his access to non-public and/or proprietary internet data,” the filing said. “Tech Executive-1 also enlisted the assistance of researchers at a U.S.-based university who were receiving and analyzing large amounts of internet data in connection with a pending federal government cybersecurity research contract.”
Mr. Sussmann then compiled this stolen — and most likely illegal information — into documents he fed to the FBI, which then got leaked to the press, of whose reports the Clinton campaign used to further their Russian-collusion narrative, as in Mr. Sullivan’s 2016 statement.
Mr. Sussman has denied any wrongdoing, but the whole episode brings us back to Mr. Sullivan, who is now one of the lead negotiators within President Biden’s inner circle trying to head off a Russian invasion of neighboring Ukraine.
On the surface, Mr. Sullivan in 2016 knowingly spread Russia-linked misinformation (really, doing Russia’s bidding, sowing chaos in the U.S. presidential election) at the behest of the Clinton campaign. Was it intentional or was he too naive to understand what was going on? Neither scenario reflects well on our current national security adviser.
After Mr. Durham’s filing came out on Friday, not one reporter asked Mr. Sullivan on the Sunday political talk shows about his Russia-gate role. Instead, the mainstream media focused on White House reports a Russian invasion of Ukraine is imminent — based again on no evidence supplied by Mr. Sullivan’s NSC, just White House assurances — much like they ran with the debunked Steele dossier and phony Trump-Russia bank connections.
Nobody has learned any lessons, nor has there been any accountability.
It is not unreasonable that Mr. Biden would like to avoid talking about unpleasant topics, such as skyrocketing inflation, crime, the invasion of our southern border — and Mr. Durham’s findings. The Ukrainian crisis is a nice way of diverting the American public’s attention. If no attack materializes, it can be spun into a win for the Biden administration; if something does come of it, Mr. Biden’s domestic failures will fade into the background.
The American public needs to know if Mr. Sullivan is a master of media misinformation, or just an ill-informed innocent doing his boss’s bidding. Either way, he must go.
If Republicans win the House in November, there must be accountability. Mr. Sullivan and his role in the Russia hoax should be among the first agenda items for investigation for the new Congress in 2023.
We know the press won’t hold him to account. Congressional Republicans must.
• Kelly Sadler is the commentary editor at The Washington Times.
