‘Hillary’ lawyer gets indicted
Lied to FBI amid Trump-Russia: feds
A federal grand jury indicted a former attorney for the Democratic National Committee on Thursday, alleging that he falsely claimed to the FBI that he was not advising Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign when he raised concerns about purported ties between the Trump Organization and a Russian bank.
The case against Michael Sussmann, a cybersecurity lawyer at Perkins Coie, is just the second prosecution brought by special counsel John Durham.
Sussmann is accused of a single count of making a false statement to federal authorities on Sept. 19, 2016. The indictment was returned just three days short of the expiration of the fiveyear statute of limitations.
According to the indictment, Sussmann met with then-FBI general counsel James A. Baker on that date to pass along allegations that servers at the Trump Organization were connected to servers at AlfaBank, a Moscow-based financial institution. During their conversation, Sussmann allegedly told Baker that “he was not acting on behalf of any client, which led the FBI General Counsel to understand that Sussmann was conveying the allegations as a good citizen and not as an advocate.”
“In fact . . .” the indictment states, “in assembling and conveying these allegations, Sussmann acted on behalf of specific clients,” including the Clinton campaign.
The FBI investigated the purported link between the Trump organization and Alfa-Bank and found “insufficient evidence” to support it. The indictment notes that the server in question “was not owned or operated by the Trump Organization, but, rather, had been administered by a mass marketing email company that sent advertisements for Trump’s hotels and hundreds of other clients.”
Durham, a former Connecticut US Attorney, was tasked by then-Attorney General Bill Barr in May 2019 with looking into the origins of the FBI’s investigation into claims Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign coordinated with Russian government officials.
Lawyers for Sussmann, a partner in a law firm that has represented the Democratic National Committee, told Fox News that he is a “highly respected national security and cyber security lawyer” who “served in the Justice Department during both Republican and Democrat administrations.”
“Mr. Sussmann has committed no crime,” the lawyers said in a statement.
“Any prosecution here would be baseless, unprecedented, and unwarranted deviation from the apolitical and principled way in which the Department of Justice is supposed to do its work.”
Afederal grand jury Thursday handed up an indictment requested by special counsel John Durham — and it’s fresh proof the whole Russiagate “scandal” was manufactured by Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Durham, the federal prosecutor tasked with investigating the origins of the investigation, is targeting lawyer Michael Sussmann for lying about his client when he met with an agent to share dubious suspicions of a link between the Trump Organization and Kremlin-connected Alfa Bank.
The FBI later disproved the claim during the two-year Russiagate investigation, as special counsel Robert Mueller’s team found itself unable to verify any allegations.
Sussmann’s in trouble because he told the agent he had no client in the matter, then later in a 2017 deposition told Congress he did it on behalf of an unnamed client and cybersecurity expert. Sussmann wasn’t on that account — but his firm, Perkins Coie, reportedly billed his hours working on Alfa Bank to the Clinton campaign.
Again, the entire Russiagate scare was launched by the Clintonites, who not only paid Perkins Coie to hire the Beltway smearspecialists of Fusion GPS to draw up and promote the Steele allegations but also gossiped about the supposed conspiracy, prompting allies in and out of government to pass their own hysterical tips in to the bureau.
Fellow travelers in the Obama administration, such as CIA chief John Brennan, also helped fan the flames. Indeed, Team Obama basically turned the gossip (which is all Steele or anyone ever offered) into a solidseeming case. But it was all a setup.
Can you imagine the outrage if Republicans had weaponized the FBI and the intel community for political purposes — all on the basis of a lie? It would have launched endless New York Times and Washington Post coverage.
But political party shouldn’t matter — this was an outrageous, crooked dirty tricks campaign. And most of the people involved are getting away with it.