The Biden administration’s latest hire to the Department of Justice is a CNN analyst and Obama administration alumna with a history of spreading baseless conspiracy theories and disparaging the investigation into the federal government’s surveillance abuse of members of the Trump campaign.
Susan Hennessey, who on Monday was appointed as the DOJ’s new general counsel, deleted thousands of tweets prior to her appointment, a move her colleagues says was routine and a result of an auto-delete feature rather than an attempt to hide her past statements. Hennessey was one of the biggest purveyors in the conspiracy theory that President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign colluded with Russia to steal the election, an allegation that was disproven after a two-year special counsel investigation. Hennessey was so prolific in her spreading of what has come to be known as the Russiagate hoax that journalist Glenn Greenwald called her “one of the most deranged Russiagate conspiracists of the last 4 years.”
As Fox News’ David Rutz reported, Hennessey’s since-deleted tweets include: “a widely panned one blaming the United States in part for Iran shooting down a Ukrainian passenger plane in 2020. Also gone are comments on the sprawling Russia probe, including a dismissal of the 2018 Republican memo casting aspersions on surveillance warrant abuses by the Justice Department and one from 2017 asserting a ‘concrete allegation of Trump team collusion.’”
The 2018 Republican memo Hennessey referred to ended up being proven correct by Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe.
When the Russia-collusion narrative fell apart, Hennessey, like much of the media that breathlessly repeated anonymous sources claiming evidence of a crime, memory-holed the entire ordeal. As Rutz reported, she spent an entire podcast discussing the Mueller investigation report, focusing on the areas that seemed to find wrongdoing from the Trump campaign, but ignored an Inspector General report that found the DOJ abused the FISA court to spy on members of the Trump campaign.
The Washington Free Beacon’s Chuck Ross reported that after the collusion narrative was debunked and Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney John Durham to investigate the origins of the narrative, Hennessey dismissed that probe as “partisan silliness.”
“Durham has made abundantly clear that in a year and a half, he hasn’t come up with anything. I guess this kind of partisan silliness has become characteristic of [then-Attorney General William] Barr’s legacy, but unclear to me why Durham would want to go along with it,” Hennessey tweeted after Durham had been appointed special counsel.
Durham was made special counsel so that he could continue his investigation even after Trump left office, meaning Hennessey may have to work with him in her new role.
Beyond that tweet, Hennessey also disparaged Durham’s investigation in an interview with The Guardian in 2020, saying, “The Durham investigation presents the opportunity for bad actors to make a lot of mischief, but the lack of clarity makes it difficult for observers to criticize.”
So far, Durham has secured only the guilty plea of former FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith, who altered an email to make it look like the CIA said it had no prior relationship with former Trump campaign aide Carter Page. Unlike the Mueller probe, which had Democrat consultants and anonymous “inside” sources selling media outlets on alleged inside information, little to no information is known about what is happening with the Durham investigation, leading many to believe he has found nothing.