GOP Sen. Ron Johnson said the revelations coming out of former Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann’s federal trial are laying bare the level of corruption in Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, the DC swamp and the media.
In stunning testimony last week, Robby Mook, the campaign manager for Clinton, told jurors that she “agreed” to feed the since-debunked allegations connecting the Trump campaign to the Kremlin-linked Alfa Bank to the media.
“We’ve known for quite some time that the Hillary Clinton campaign paid for the Steele dossier. But now we are finding out that the whole Alfa Bank hoax … was all made up,” Johnson of Wisconsin told host John Catsimatidis on his WABC radio show on 770 AM.
“They used individuals who had contracts with our Defense Department to mine this data and develop some kind of inference that Trump was colluding with Russia so that they could report that to the FBI [which could then] … report that to the American public as an October surprise,” Johnson said in the interview that aired Sunday.
The testimony in special counsel John Durham’s case against Sussmann, which started last week, outlines a “major scandal,” he said.
“The fact that the Hillary Clinton campaign manufactured this entire Russian collusion hoax and the FBI … concluded that this is preposterous — it’s BS … And yet they set up the Mueller probe,” the Wisconsin senator said.
“What is being revealed to the American public is the corruption at the highest levels of, A: the Hillary Clinton campaign, and B: the FBI and the Department of Justice,” he said.
Johnson also said he has “doubts” about how involved the US intelligence community and people like former CIA Director John Brennan were because they briefed the Obama administration “that Hillary Clinton was going to approve of exactly this kind of operation.”
“The US government’s law enforcement agencies knew the Clinton campaign was up to this, and yet they put America through this … four-year political turmoil, which is all based on a lie developed by Hillary Clinton,” he said.
Sussmann is on trial in federal court in Washington, DC, for one count of lying to the FBI in September 2016.
Durham’s prosecutors say Sussmann denied he was working on behalf of the Clinton campaign or tech executive Rodney Joffe when he met with then-FBI general counsel James Baker and turned over data that purportedly showed a connection between the Trump campaign and Alfa Bank.
Johnson said the media are complicit for spreading Clinton’s campaign hoax and for getting President Biden elected.
“Hillary Clinton on the issue of Alfa Bank said, ‘I just heard about this on the news.’ No! Their campaign planted it in the news, and, of course, those news outlets that had the story,” he said on the radio show.
“They knew that what Hillary Clinton was saying was a lie. And yet they continued with this story, this hoax. Why? Because they are not journalists. They are advocates for the radical left. They did not want Donald Trump to get elected,” Johnson said.
He continued by saying that the media’s involvement in the scandal allowed Biden to defeat Donald Trump in 2020, leading to the current state of the nation, pointing out the immigration crisis, inflation at a 40-year high, and the “surrender in Afghanistan” that led to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
“Would that have happened if Trump was in office? I don’t think so,” Johnson said.
”The media has been complicit in this. They have given us this disaster [with the help of] the Democratic party. They need to be held accountable. … They’re going to continue to do everything they can to cover up for Biden, for Clinton, and for themselves,” he said.
“They are the ‘radical left information cartel.’ They are the ones who have been telling the lies. They are the ones who have been complicit with the Democrats and the radical left. They cannot afford to be proven wrong. So they will continue to cover up for themselves,” he said.