Former President Donald Trump, who is known to be quick to pull the trigger on filing a lawsuit, has filed a new suit against Hillary Clinton and several who served in her 2016 election campaign.
Trump, who has sued actors (Tom Arnold), networks, (NBC and CBS), newspapers (The New York Times), government officials (Harry Reid), and even a 92-year-old widow (Molly Forbes, who was critical of how Trump secured land for a Golf Resort near her home in Scotland), has now set his sights on his old nemesis, Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Reuters reports that following recent Durham investigation indictments, Declassified documents show that illegal wiretapping and computer surveillance work can be traced back to Clinton operatives.
Trump is suing, asserting that Hillary and her staff attempted to “rig the 2016 presidential election by tying his campaign to Russia,” according to the report.
Trump’s filing reads:
“Acting in concert, the Defendants maliciously conspired to weave a false narrative that their Republican opponent, Donald J. Trump, was colluding with a hostile foreign sovereignty.”
According to Reuters:
Trump said he was “forced to incur expenses in an amount to be determined at trial, but known to be in excess of twenty-four million dollars ($24,000,000) and continuing to accrue, in the form of defense costs, legal fees, and related expenses.”
On Tuesday, Special Counsel John Durham suggested that this week, the Department of Justice will release a “large volume” of classified materials pertaining to the so-called ‘Russiagate’ conspiracy. Materials pertain to former British spy Christopher Steele’s dossier, reportedly used to attempt to sabotage Trump’s 2016 election campaign and later, his presidency.
Durham stated in the filing: “To date, the government has produced over 60,000 documents in unclassified discovery. A portion of these documents were originally marked ‘classified’ and the government has worked with the appropriate declassification authorities to produce the documents in an unclassified format,”
“However,” Durham continued, as he prepared to ask for an extension in his investigation work, “recent world events in Ukraine have contributed to delays in the production of classified discovery. The officials preparing and reviewing the documents at the FBI and intelligence agencies are heavily engaged in matters related to Ukraine.”
“Nevertheless,” Durham added, “the government will produce a large volume of classified discovery this week and will continue its efforts to produce documents in classified discovery on a rolling basis, and no later than the proposed deadlines…”
The Washington Examiner adds:
The case revolves around Igor Danchenko, a Russian researcher based in the United States, who was charged in November with five counts of making false statements to the FBI in 2017 about the information he provided to Steele for his discredited dossier during the 2016 election.
Danchenko, who has pleaded not guilty, signed a waiver in December agreeing to be defended by the same law firm representing members of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign despite a conflict of interest concerns raised by Durham.
Steele was working for Oleg Deripaska, an oligarch linked to Russian President Vladimir Putin, before, during, and after his time targeting then-candidate Donald Trump.
The former MI6 agent was hired to put his anti-Trump dossier together by an opposition research firm, Fusion GPS, which was simultaneously working for Kremlin-linked lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya of the now-infamous June 2016 Trump Tower meeting. His research received funding from the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee.
Danchenko allegedly relied on a network of Russian contacts, undermined key Trump-Russia collusion claims when interviewed by the FBI, and had previously been investigated as a possible threat to national security due to potential Russian intelligence contacts.
According to Durham’s false statements charges, he anonymously sourced a claim about Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort to longtime Clinton ally Chuck Dolan, who spent many years, including 2016, doing work for Russian businesses and the Russian government.
In a report released in December 2019, Justice Dept. Inspector General Michael Horowitz concluded that the Steele dossier, now tied to the Hillary Clinton election campaign, played a “central and essential” role in the FBI’s decision to launch a counterintelligence operation against the 2016 Trump campaign.
The Steele dossier facilitated efforts to obtain wiretap orders against former Trump campaign associate Carter Page — efforts that were ultimately successful, but only after “serious missteps and errors” which included concealing “potentially exculpatory information from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court,” the Washington Examiner reported.
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