When FBI supervisory agent Scott Hellman got a good look at the tip which Hillary Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann hand delivered to the bureau personally, he was convinced “it must have been written by a nutjob.” It was literally “laughable.”
FBI in stitches
The evidence shoved down the throat of FBI general counsel James Baker supposedly proved that then candidate Donald Trump had been sneaking around with Russians on the sly.
The problem is that it “was so weak that an agent joked it must have been written by a nutjob,” the New York Post writes. The explosive quotes blasted out of John Durham’s long awaited trial of Michael Sussmann on Tuesday.
The subject came up during cross-examination. Scott Hellman was a supervisory agent for the FBI at the time he was handed a “paper and two thumb drives of data.” He wrote an email about his opinion of it, which he was confronted with in court.
“It feels a little 51-50ish,” Hellman observed. When defense attorney Sean Berkowitz opened the door by asking what he meant by that, Hellman kicked it in. “I thought perhaps the person who drafted this document was suffering from a mental disability.”
The FBI agent was referring to Section 5150 of California’s Welfare and Institutions Code. That’s the one which “allows authorities to involuntarily hospitalize mentally ill people for up to 72 hours.”
It’s general slang in the locality. He was implying that whoever wrote that crap needed a mental health checkup, quick.
Numerous red flags
Berkowitz was in damage control mode when he cross-examined agent Hellman. The FBI Information Tech specialist had just finished saying some interesting things under direct interrogation. For instance, he testified that the material “was marked by numerous red flags.”
The fishy nature of the evidence started with the chain of custody. Deputy Assistant Director Peter Strzok was part of that chain. He used the obviously manufactured misdirection to open the Crossfire Hurricane investigation.
Hellman knew it was fake from the first thing he saw. The “internet domain name assigned to the server” was a “a dead giveaway to the FBI that nothing nefarious was going on,” because the word “Trump” was in the name. If Russia did it, they would have wiped away the fingerprints. “We believe Russia would have a much more technical capability to hide organizations. It wouldn’t be so overt and direct.”
When he read the paper, it was crap. Hellman “did not agree with the conclusion in the paper” he reviewed.
“I felt that whoever had written that paper had jumped to some conclusions that were not supported by the technical data.” Not only that, the FBI expert “did not feel they were objective in the conclusions they came to. The assumption is so far-reaching it just didn’t make any sense.”
It looked to him like “whoever authored the report simply searched for ‘Trump’ on a dataset of email servers” to make the “since-debunked connection.” The thing that really made Hellman suspicious is the fact nobody would tell him where the stuff came from. The “incomplete record shows that Baker passed the drives to then-agent Peter Strzok.” Strzok gave it to someone else who gave it to Hellman.
