DNC REPRESENTED BY PERKINS COIE OF OBAMA BIRTH CERTIFICATE, TRUMP-RUSSIA FAME
by Sharon Rondeau
(Jul. 23, 2019) — On Tuesday Atty. Ty Clevenger, who represents Dallas businessman Ed Butowsky in two federal defamation lawsuits, posted on his blog that the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the private company Crowdstrike, which reportedly performed an analysis of the DNC server breached in 2016, refused to produce documents in response to dozens of subpoenas and requests.
The defendants’ briefs refusing to release any responsive documents are dated July 22, 2019.
Crowdstrike is represented by the Tyz Law Group, PC of San Francisco, while the DNC is represented by Perkins Coie, a mega-law firm with 16 U.S. offices and three overseas locations.
Former Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s March 2019 report declared “Russians” responsible for the DNC breaches and for allegedly transferring stolen emails to WikiLeaks, which began releasing them on July 22, 2016, just before the opening of the Democratic National Convention.
The server(s) affected by the intrusion were not analyzed by the FBI, former Director James Comey testified in January 2017, despite “multiple requests at different levels.”
“To my knowledge, the U.S. Department of Justice had never before handed off a computer crime investigation to a third-party contractor hired by the alleged victim,” Clevenger wrote on his website Tuesday. “Instead, the FBI (or some other law enforcement agency) had always investigated those crimes. Obviously, the DNC doesn’t want any independent investigation of its claims that Russian hackers — as opposed to a DNC employee like Seth Rich — were responsible for transferring DNC emails to Wikileaks.”
In the early hours of July 10, 2016, Rich was fatally shot as he made his way unaccompanied to his Washington, DC home. In the three years since his death, DC Metropolitan Police have reported no progress in locating Rich’s killer(s).
Against considerable media push-back, Rich’s name has been connected in some circles with the breaching of the DNC server and provision of the emails to WikiLeaks, an open-government advocate which has published classified information gleaned from whistleblowers providing government documents from around the world.
By the subpoenas, Clevenger was seeking to discover “whether DNC emails were leaked internally or hacked by Russians,” with the latter having been widely reported by such outlets as The Washington Post and Politico Magazine.
However, former NSA technical architect William Binney has said that the U.S. intelligence community has issued “deceptive statements” that the DNC servers were penetrated by an outside entity. Rather, Binney has termed the breach “an inside job.”
In July of last year, Politico reported that while meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, Finland, Trump “brought up a well-rehearsed conspiracy theory implying that after being hacked, the Democratic National Committee refused to help the FBI investigation, and that therefore all evidence implicating Russia in election meddling was shaky.”
Politico described Trump’s statement that the FBI “never took the server” as “unmoored from reality in several ways.”
“Why was the FBI told to leave the office of the Democratic National Committee? I’ve been wondering that,” NBC News quoted Trump as having said at the press conference in an article titled, “Fact check: Trump promoted conspiracy theories. Here’s the truth.”
Further, NBC wrote:
The FBI did not examine the DNC servers — after allegations that they had been hacked by the Russians — and says it was rebuffed by the DNC in efforts to do so. The DNC insists the FBI never asked to see the server.
The FBI had been warning the DNC that hackers were trying to compromise its servers for months, but DNC officials hired a private security firm to look into it, reportedly in hopes of handling the breach privately amid a presidential campaign and the FBI’s investigation into Clinton’s use of a private email server.
It is unclear what the president means when he says the FBI was asked to leave the DNC.
In the first of the two lawsuits and amended in late June, Butowsky is suing NPR; its reporter, David Folkenflik, and other parties for alleged defamation and a judgment of $57,000,000 for allegedly publishing a “fake story” about Butowsky on August 1, 2017. The second suit, amended on July 15, asserts that Butowsky, “his family, and his co-workers” were the victims of “false allegations that he conspired with White House officials to divert attention away from earlier (and equally false) allegations that President Donald Trump ‘colluded’ with the Russian government to ‘steal’ the 2016 Presidential election from Hillary Clinton.”
Folkenflik’s article, written about a lawsuit filed the same day against Butowsky, a Fox News reporter and “Fox News itself” by Douglas Wigdor on behalf of Rod Wheeler, reported, “The Fox News Channel and a wealthy supporter of President Trump worked in concert under the watchful eye of the White House to concoct a story about the death of a young Democratic National Committee aide, according to a lawsuit filed Tuesday.”
Wheeler’s suit was dismissed a year later for “failure to state a claim.”
In a bombshell revelation made in Clevenger’s July 15 amended filing against several law firms, reporters, and a Democratic public-relations firm, Butowsky claimed that journalist Ellen Ratner informed him in 2016, following Rich’s death, that in a meeting with Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, Assange told her that Rich was the source of the DNC emails and that he wished her to communicate to Rich’s parents, Joel and Mary Rich, that fact so they would have the necessary information to bring his murderer to justice.
On Sunday evening, Clevenger tweeted a link to a video of Ratner speaking at a post-election conference in which she related Assange’s reported statement that the DNC emails were not provided by the Russians.
Mueller’s report attempts to make the case that Assange was untruthful when he stated that Russia had no involvement in supplying him with the emails.
Because her late brother had represented Assange, Ratner asked Butowsky if he would relay Assange’s message to Joel and Mary Rich, which Butowsky said he eventually did on December 17, 2016.
In the summer of 2016, a Perkins Coie attorney, Michael Sussmann, met with then-FBI General Counsel James Baker to inform him of claims that a computer in Trump Tower was in communication with one at Russia’s Alfa Bank, according to Baker’s closed-door testimony to members of Congress last fall.
According to an article at The Washington Times via the AP in January:
The Clinton campaign’s operation to spread a now-debunked story on a Russian bank-Donald Trump computer linkage went further than previously known, according to new congressional testimony.
It turns out that at least two Clinton operatives went inside the Justice Department to sell the allegation.
The Democrat-pitched narrative went like this: The Trump Organization maintained a secret computer server at Trump Tower directly tied to Moscow’s Alfa Bank, whose partners are linked to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
But cybersleuths traced the server’s IP address not to Moscow, but to a spam operation outside Philadelphia that spit out hotel marketing pitches, including the Trump Organization’s.
On the morning of April 27, 2011, then-White House Counsel Robert Bauer, who co-founded Perkins Coie’s “Political Law practice,” told reporters in a closed-door presser that then-Obama personal attorney Judith Corley, also of Perkins Coie, traveled to Honolulu, HI to retrieve two certified copies of Obama’s “long-form” birth certificate from the Hawaii Department of Health (HDOH).
Following the press conference, an image was uploaded to the White House website said to be a PDF scan of one of the certified copies obtained from then-HDOH Director Loretta Fuddy, to much media fanfare.
Beginning early that year, it was none other than Donald Trump who challenged the White House to release Obama’s original birth record to prove that he was eligible to serve as president under the Constitution’s “natural born Citizen” clause. Trump was excoriated by the media for promulgating the “birther conspiracy,” but the brash businessman proudly took credit for the release of the image during a visit to New Hampshire that Wednesday morning.
A press release dated May 15, 2018 announced Bauer’s departure from the firm he co-founded, a move he reportedly made to “devote more time to teaching and writing.” “Bauer’s continuing private practice will include select clients, including The Obama Foundation, The Biden Foundation, and he is a personal counsel to former President Barack Obama. Bauer also will work on a number of ongoing representations with Perkins Coie as co-counsel,” the press release states.
As has the major media, in a column published in The Atlantic in March, Bauer excoriated Trump for “racism” in his questioning of Obama’s constitutional eligibility, which he termed “birtherism.” In the editorial, Bauer wrote, in part:
A reasonable response to the question might have been that Trump’s mendacious, race-based hectoring did not merit a response from the president of the United States. Trump had not raised a legitimate question because there was no such question to be raised. He had just stated and tweeted unsupportable suggestions that the president had been born overseas and was covering it up. Trump rested what passed for allegations on “what somebody told me,” or what he knew from “people who have been studying [the birthplace],” or the belief of “many people” that the official certificate was not genuine. He declared in March 2011 that “a lot of facts … are emerging.” Replace facts with lies in that sentence, and he would have at long last told a truth. And he was the leading liar, the most notorious and well covered of the lot.
The Post & Email’s subsequent request for an interview with Bauer received no response.
A 5+-year criminal investigation into the birth certificate image conducted between August 2011 and December 2016 by then-Maricopa County Cold Case Posse leader Mike Zullo concluded in its early stages that the image is a “computer-generated forgery” posted “with the intent to deceive.”
Also found to be fraudulent is Obama’s purported Selective Service registration form, which the Obama White House did not attempt to address.
Although since entering political life, Obama has claimed he was born in Honolulu on August 4, 1961, Zullo reported last year that two U.S. intelligence figures confirmed to him that it remains “an open secret” in Washington, DC that Obama was born outside of the country.