A few drops of troubling inside information just dripped out of the big black box known as the John Durham Special Investigation. The leak involves Justice Ministry adviser Margaret Goodlander and a potential conflict of interest she has. The name of her husband, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, popped up in the indictment against Clinton crony Michael Sussmann.
No Durham probe problem
While Ms. Goodlander, or Mrs. Sullivan or whoever she is, may have a conflict of interest because of the special Obamagate probe, it isn’t a problem for John Durham or his team. As part of the regime change, Merrick Garland is now Minister of Justice. Goodlander is one of his “top advisers.”
That only matters because Garland is supposed to be in charge of the investigation into how the Russiagate sedition started. Everybody knows he’d kill it in a heartbeat if he had half a chance.
It’s not clear if she has anything at all to do with the Durham probe but it looks like a real good idea for her to recuse herself from anything to do with it, if she hasn’t already. Garland oversees the investigation, controls the budget purse-strings, and “the release of a report.”
Sullivan married Goodlander in 2015. He’s been “referenced in Durham’s indictment of a cybersecurity lawyer who worked for the Clinton campaign.” The lawyer was Michael Sussmann.
At this point, there’s nothing at all to suggest that Sullivan is a “target” of the Durham investigation, it looks real likely that he’ll be called as a witness. Especially because he “was a foreign policy adviser to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.”
When it finally sees the light of day, “Durham’s report could also reveal embarrassing details about Sullivan’s work on the campaign to dig up dirt on Donald Trump’s possible links to Russia.”
She has no role
A justice ministry spokesunit assures the public that Goodlander “has no role in the investigation.” There are rumors swirling through the media that it’s “not clear if she has formally recused herself from it or if the probe by Durham is outside of her DoJ responsibilities.”
Her usual job is “to advise Garland on matters concerning antitrust and international issues.” Despite the denials, there are some high profile calls for her to step back a little.
Conservative Iowa Senator Charles Grassley has been watching the Durham inquiry closely. He agrees with watchdog organization Empower Oversight that she should publicly recuse herself from any and all involvement, whether she has any or not.
“The Justice Department’s standing guidance calls for employees to avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest, especially when it comes to ongoing criminal investigations,” the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee reminds palace officials.
Jason Foster, founder and president of Empower Oversight, backs that up. It’s “critical that decisions about Special Counsel Durham’s investigation are insulated from the political biases and personal interests of senior DOJ officials.” When Sullivan was working shoulder-to-shoulder with Hillary Clinton, he “had contact with the campaign lawyers who commissioned the Steele dossier.”
The Sussman indictment notes, “Sussmann’s former Perkins Coie partner, Marc Elias, in September 2016 briefed Sullivan and others on the Clinton team about his firm’s efforts to investigate the Alfa Bank data. Sullivan days before the election issued a statement that cited the Alfa-Trump allegations as evidence of collusion.” We know now it was a total setup.
