National Review Online
Wednesday, June 01, 2022
The usual suspects are taking the acquittal of
Democratic lawyer Michael Sussmann as proof that Special Counsel John Durham
never had a real case to investigate. Instead, it should put a spotlight on
what really needs investigating: the FBI’s role in the Trump–Russia “collusion”
farce.
In the case that Durham unwisely brought, the FBI played
the part of the victim. And there is no serious question that Sussmann lied to
it. He conveyed an allegation that Donald Trump, at the time the Republican
presidential candidate, had established a communications back channel with the
Kremlin through servers at Russia’s Alfa Bank. While the allegation was based
on misleadingly mined Internet data, the lie at issue in the trial was
Sussmann’s claim not to be representing a client. At the time, he was in fact
representing both the campaign of Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton, and the
tech executive who had compiled the data, Clinton partisan Rodney Joffe.
We have smoking-gun proof that Sussmann lied: a text
message he sent the night before his September 19, 2016, meeting with the FBI.
Sussmann — a former Justice Department cybersecurity lawyer — assured his old
friend James Baker, then the FBI’s general counsel, that he wanted to bring the
“sensitive” information only to “help the Bureau,” and not on behalf of any
client.
At the time of the indictment, though, Durham did not
have the text. Inexplicably, he did not obtain it until a few weeks before the
trial, which was after the five-year statute of limitations had elapsed. The
jury was thus told it could not find a false statement based on the text
standing alone. Given that the one-on-one meeting between Sussmann and Baker
was not recorded, and that Baker has given conflicting accounts of what was
said when questioned about it over the years, Durham had a weak case.
Still, the principal impediment to conviction was the FBI
itself.
Baker’s claim to have accepted Sussmann’s cover story
rang hollow. The FBI knew exactly who Sussmann was. He was well known for
representing top Democrats along with his then–law partner, Marc Elias (the
main lawyer for the Clinton campaign). Moreover, the DNC had retained Sussmann
earlier in 2016 to deal with the FBI in connection with its allegation that
Russia had hacked its servers. Under Sussmann’s guidance, the DNC had resisted
surrendering its servers to the FBI for forensic examination — instead hiring a
private contractor, Crowdstrike. The notion that, just six weeks before Election
Day, a top Democratic lawyer had no partisan motivation in bringing the FBI
derogatory information about Trump, and that information just happened to
support the Democratic smear of Trump as a Putin puppet, was laughable.
And sure enough, in the Sussmann trial’s most notable
testimony, Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook admitted that Hillary Clinton
had personally approved leaking the Trump–Putin back-channel tale, which the
campaign knew to be dubious, to the media. Once the media began running with
the Alfa Bank story, just days before the election, Hillary Clinton herself
(along with her aide Jake Sullivan, now Biden’s national-security adviser)
amplified the news in tweets that anticipated an imminent FBI investigation.
Sussmann had brought the FBI the Alfa Bank information
only after Joffe had curated it in conjunction with Fusion GPS: the same firm
the campaign’s lawyers had hired to dig up Russian dirt on Trump, and which
duly generated the infamous Steele dossier, which was also peddled to the FBI
in an effort to portray Trump as a clandestine agent of the Kremlin. As we now
know, thanks to an internal Justice Department investigation, the FBI used the
dossier’s tawdry claims of a corrupt Trump–Russia conspiracy, without verifying
them, in order to obtain spy warrants from a secret federal surveillance court.
The Sussmann trial showed the bureau engaging in similar
machinations regarding the Alfa Bank data.
After Baker took Sussmann’s information and briefed his
FBI superiors, they decided to assign agents to investigate the Alfa Bank data
but conceal Sussmann’s identity from the agents. This “close hold” helped to
keep a lid on news that the bureau had taken opposition research from a
patently partisan source in the stretch run of a political campaign. Cybercrime
agents had to assess the data without the key context of the source’s identity
and motivations.
The agents nonetheless quickly determined that the
information was bogus and that the source, if not incompetent, probably had an
agenda. Nevertheless, headquarters directed the agents to turn the case into a
counterintelligence probe (which, we’d note, is classified and thus a better
vehicle for keeping shoddy sources under wraps).
The FBI went even further in concealing the truth. Agents
claimed that the information provided by Sussmann had come from the Justice
Department — a false statement that none of the agents called to testify could,
or at least would, explain.
It is hardly shocking, all in all, that a jury would find the FBI was not really deceived — particularly a jury that included Democratic partisans whom the Obama-appointed judge declined to exclude. The media-Democrat complex, naturally, will cite the acquittal as a rationale for discrediting Durham’s investigation and dismissing his eventual report. But the trial shows that Durham must complete his work and provide a full accounting of the FBI’s misconduct in the pernicious Trump–Russia probe.
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