A federal grand jury on Thursday indicted lawyer Michael Sussmann, who represented the Democratic National Committee in 2016 and long was a promoter of Democrat politicians including Hillary Clinton, on a charge of lying to the FBI.
The Huffington Post obtained documents that charged Sussman lied when he “stated to the General Counsel of the FBI that he was not acting on behalf of any client in conveying particular allegations concerning a presidential candidate, when in truth, and in fact, as the defendant well knew, he was acting on behalf of specific clients, namely, Tech Executive-1 and the Clinton Campaign.”
He was turning over to the FBI claims about Donald Trump, then a candidate for president.
Just a day earlier, a report from the New York Times said that special counsel John Durham, who was assigned to investigate – and charge as needed – people who fabricated the entire “Russia collusion” hoax Democrats used against President Donald Trump for years, was seeking the indictment.
Just the News said Sussman worked at a Democrat-allied legal shop that represented Clinton’s failed 2016 campaign.
There have been reports that Clinton launched the now-debunked claims that Trump’s campaign was “colluding” with Russia in order to divert the public’s attention from her own scandal, in which she was caught keeping U.S. national secrets on her own, home-based and unsecure, email system.
The allegations were propped up by the also now-debunked Steele Dossier, a long list of wild accusations assembled, using his own Russia sources, by former British agent Christopher Steele, whose bill for the work was paid by Democrat interests.
The Times reported the charge apparently is connected to an alleged false statement to the FBI about a client’s identity while Sussmann was pushing the false claims “about secret communications between Russia’s Alfa Bank and the Trump Organization in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election,” Just the News said.
The Times report charged Durham, “told the Justice Department that he will ask a grand jury to indict a prominent cybersecurity lawyer on a charge of making a false statement to the FBI.”
Previous reports have suggested Sussman, of the leftist law firm Perkins Coie, gave claims about the Alfa server to then-FBI General Counsel James Baker in fall 2016.
“Baker has told investigators Sussman told him his approach was not on behalf of any client. But Sussmann told Congress he made the approach on behalf of a computer security client,” Just the News explained. The Times report said Durham got records revealing Sussmann billed work on the Alfa matter to the Clinton campaign.
Sussman’s lawyers claimed, “Mr. Sussmann has committed no crime. Any prosecution here would be baseless, unprecedented and an unwarranted deviation from the apolitical and principled way in which the Department of Justice is supposed to do its work.”
The Times explained that any indictment of Sussmann would get “significant political attention.”
The Perkins Coie legal team long has had a reputation of advocacy for Democrats.
“On behalf of Democrats, [former company employee Marc] Elias commissioned a research firm, Fusion GPS, to look into Mr. Trump’s ties to Russia. That resulted in the so-called Steele dossier, a notorious compendium of rumors about Trump-Russia ties. The F.B.I. cited some information from the dossier in botched wiretap applications,” the Times reported.
“Some of the questions that Mr. Durham’s team has been asking in recent months — including of witnesses it subpoenaed before a grand jury, according to people familiar with some of the sessions — suggest he has been pursuing a theory that the Clinton campaign used Perkins Coie to submit dubious information to the F.B.I. about Russia and Mr. Trump in an effort to gin up investigative activity to hurt his 2016 campaign,” the Times reported.
It was only weeks ago that an analysis by constitutional expert Jonathan Turley, the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University, warned an expected report from Durham has those in the Beltway “rattled.”
One former FBI agent already has confessed that evidence was manipulated in order to try to damage Trump.
The DOJ’s inspector general earlier had released a long list of offenses that were committed during the targeting of then-candidate Trump by the Barack Obama administration, and the FISA court, which was convinced to authorize spying on the Trump campaign with evidence that apparently was made up, has rescinded some of his authorizations.
Turley had noted Durham was looking at evidence “against FBI agents and possibly others in the use of false information or tips at the start of the Russia investigation in 2016.”
“Those ‘others,'” Turley warned, “could include a virtual who’s who of Washington politics, and even if they are not indicted, Durham could implicate some of the most powerful figures in politics in his final report, expected in the coming months.”
He explained what it known: “It was disclosed in October, for instance, that President Obama was briefed by his CIA director, John Brennan, on July 28, 2016, on intelligence suggesting that Hillary Clinton planned to tie then-candidate Donald Trump to Russia as ‘a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server.’ The date was significant because the Russia investigation was initiated July 31, 2016, just three days later.”
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