U.S. Special Counsel John Durham has released an indictment [pdf here] of Perkins Coie lawyer Michael Sussmann for lying to federal investigators in 2016 about the people and motives behind his FBI contact. He failed to tell them his intent was to spread a false Alfa Bank conspiracy theory on behalf of the Clinton campaign.

Working for the Perkins Coie law firm, while under contract with Hillary Clinton’s campaign, partner Michael Sussmann contacted FBI Legal Counsel James Baker to pitch evidence that a Russian bank was in digital communications with servers in Trump Tower. The Alfa Bank allegation was one of the key components for the ridiculous Trump-Russia narrative put together by the Hillary Clinton campaign. Sussmann wanted the FBI to investigate Donald Trump, so that Hillary Clinton could push a political fabrication about Donald Trump working with Russians to steal the presidential election.
According to the indictment, Sussmann failed to tell the FBI that he was giving them this information on behalf of the Clinton campaign. The FBI investigated the claims and found nothing; however, it was the appearance of the investigation that Clinton needed in order to leak/push the Trump-Russia story to the media and stir up the controversy. There had to be something to the “Trump-Russia” story, because the FBI was investigating it. That fabricated smear served its intended purpose, and the media ran with it.
The NSA scoops up all the metadata, but the scale of data is too challenging to filter and review – even with modern algorithms assisting them. So the Fourth Branch – NSA,CIA, DIA, ODNI etc. work with the data providers to prefilter, flag, monitor and 
People keep sending me emails about a Wall St Journal article [
The intelligence apparatus, including the DOJ/FBI and aligned agencies, in addition to the DOJ officials within the Mueller probe, previously exploited their surveillance access to records and communication of Donald Trump and his administration. Those intelligence operatives then spun and leaked parts of those records in order to build a fictitious Trump-Russia narrative and simultaneously distract from the prior unlawful surveillance.
First, Andrew Weissmann comes from the DOJ-National Security Division (DOJ-NSD). More specifically, in that division Andrew Weissmann was in charge of the section that used FARA (Foreign Agent Registration Act), or FARA-951 as a weapon against their political enemies.