‘Should Be Held Fully Accountable’: Republicans Hammer Clinton For Peddling False Russia Collusion Claims

GOP lawmakers hammered former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton after her former campaign manager revealed her central role in disseminating false claims about former President Donald Trump and Russia’s Alfa-Bank during the 2016 presidential election.

Court testimony in the trial of cybersecurity attorney Michael Sussmann revealed that Clinton personally approved the dissemination of later-debunked claims of a secret backchannel between the Trump Organization and Russia’s Alfa-Bank to the press. Clinton’s 2016 campaign manager, Robby Mook, said that the Clinton campaign’s evidence of the backchannel was dubious, but Clinton approved sending it to reporters anyway.

“Hillary Clinton and Jake Sullivan knew the Trump-Russia collusion dossier was false but pretended to play dumb with the American people,” Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) said. Sullivan, currently the White House national security adviser, worked on Clinton’s 2016 campaign as a senior policy adviser.

“Everyone involved in cooking up the false Trump-Russian collusion narrative should be held fully accountable — including Hillary Clinton,” she added.

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) said in a radio interview over the weekend that Mook’s testimony is a “major scandal” and has shown that Clinton’s involvement in the origins of the Trump-Russia collusion conspiracy theory is greater than previously known, according to The New York Post.

“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.

Special counsel John Durham has argued that Sussmann went to the FBI on behalf of the Clinton campaign to generate a federal investigation into Trump’s alleged connections to Alfa-Bank, and in the process, make the Alfa-Bank story more palatable to reporters. Sussmann, charged with lying to the FBI about representing the Clinton

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