Michael Sussman is acquitted
If you follow Marcy Wheeler, you knew this was probably a foregone conclusion because John Durham’s endless investigation was ridiculous from the start and this ridiculous case was a mess:
A federal jury found Michael Sussmann, a lawyer for Democrats including the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign,not guilty of lying to the FBI when he brought them allegations against Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential race.
Tuesday’s verdict was a major setback for Special Counsel John Durham, who was appointed during the Trump administration and has spent three years probing whether the federal agents who investigated the 2016 Trump campaign committed wrongdoing.
Sussmann was the first person charged by Durham to go to trial. Another person charged in the investigation is due to face a jury later this year.
The Sussmann jury began deliberating Friday, weighing the testimony of current and former FBI officials, former Clinton campaign advisers, and technology experts. In closing arguments, prosecutors told the jury that Sussmann thought he had “a license to lie” to the FBI at the height of the 2016 presidential campaign. Sussmann’s defense lawyers countered that the case against Sussmann was built on a “political conspiracy theory.”
Over two weeks of testimony, the case rehashed some of the bitter controversies from the Donald Trump-Hillary Clinton presidential contest. Sussmann was charged with a single count of lying to the FBI when he delivered allegations of a secret communications channel between the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank, which is based in Russia. Specifically, Durham alleged that Sussmann claimed he did not bring the information to the FBI on behalf of any client, when he allegedly did so on behalf of two clients: the Clinton campaign and a tech executive, Rodney Joffe.
The jury ultimately rejected those claims, apparently swayed by the argument from Sussmann’s lawyer, Sean Berkowitz, who said the prosecution was tryingto turn a brief 30-minute meeting more than five years ago into a “giant political conspiracy theory.”
Jurors were tasked with answering a fairly simple legal and factual question — whether Sussmann lied about his client and whether that lie was relevant to the FBI investigation. Prosecutors argued Sussmann’s lie was just one part of a larger scheme by Clinton loyalists to use the FBI and news reporters to launch a damaging, last-minute revelation against Trump that would tip the election to Clinton.
“You can see what the plan was,” Assistant Special Counsel Andrew DeFilippis told jurors in D.C. federal court. “It was to create an October surprise by giving information both to the media and to the FBI to get the media to write that there was an FBI investigation.”
Despite the trial’s frequent references to Clinton, Trump and other political figures, the prosecutor insisted that “this case is not about politics, it’s not about conspiracy, it’s about the truth.” Sussmann lied, DeFilippis said, because if he’d told the FBI that he was acting on behalf of Clinton, the FBI was less likely to consider his evidence or open an investigation.
The FBI investigated the Alfa Bank allegations and decided they were unfounded.
“While we are disappointed in the outcome, we respect the jury’s decision and thank them for their service,” Durham said in a statement. “I also want to recognize and thank the investigators and the prosecution team for their dedicated efforts in seeking truth and justice in this case.”
Prosecutors showed the jury emails, law-firm billing records and even a Staples receipt for thumb drives to tie Sussmann to the Clinton campaign. But Berkowitz said much of the witness testimony showed that the Clinton campaign did not want the Alfa Bank allegations taken to the FBI, because they preferred to see a news story about the issue and feared an investigation might complicate or delay such stories.
“There is a difference,” Berkowitz said, “between having a client, and doing something on their behalf.”
He ridiculed prosecutors for painting as nefarious efforts to dig up damaging information about Trump for a campaign.
“Opposition research is not illegal,” he said, adding that if it was, “the jails of Washington, D.C., would be teeming over.”
Berkowitz readily conceded that Sussmann talked to reporters as part of his job, including journalists for The Washington Post and Reuters. He said prosecutors brought the case because they suffered from “tunnel vision” over news articles in Slate and the New York Times that appeared on Oct. 31, 2016, and — he argued — had little impact on the campaign.
“That’s the story? That’s the leak? That’s the conspiracy? Please,” Berkowitz said.
The key witness of the trial was James Baker, who was the FBI’s top lawyer when he met with Sussmann on Sept. 19, 2016. Baker told the jury he was “100 percent confident” that Sussmann insisted to him he was not acting on behalf of a client and that if he had known, he would have handled the conversation differently and perhaps not even agreed to the meeting at all.
Since Sussmann did not testify, Baker gave the only direct witness account of the conversation. Sussmann’s lawyers repeatedly challenged Baker’s credibility, noting that in one earlier interview, Baker said Sussmann was representing cybersecurity clients; in another, he seemed to say he didn’t remember that part of the talk. In response to questions on the witness stand, he said he couldn’t remember 116 times, according to Berkowitz.
Baker, who now works for Twitter, testified that Sussmann told him a major newspaper — he later learned it was the New York Times — was preparing to write about the allegations. That apparently worried Baker, whosaid he knew a news story would probably cause any suspicious communications to stop, so he wanted the FBI to be able to investigate before an article appeared. Prosecutors say it was Sussmann himself who had provided the allegations about Trump information to the Times.
The jury did their work very quickly, too. They deliberated for four hours on Friday, came back this morning, asked for a couple of exhibits, one of which was a taxi receipt showing that Sussman did not bill the Clinton campaign, deliberated for two more hours and that was that.
If anything this case may have revived interest in that Alfa Bank story which has always been very strange and, if anything, the FBI bungled its investigation of it. I doubt anything will ever come of it but it will certainly be one of history’s more intriguing footnotes when all is said and done.
Trump must be fuming today. I’m sure he’ll be claiming the Deep State rigged the jury.