In the first trial of Special Counsel John Durham’s inquiry into what started the probe into Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, former Hillary Clinton campaign attorney Michael Sussmann was found not guilty of lying to the FBI.
It’s one of just two indictments issued as part of Durham’s three-year investigation into the origins of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, which was sparked by allegations that Trump’s 2016 campaign received Russian assistance.
A jury rejected Durham’s argument that Sussmann lied to federal officials when delivering them dirt on Trump’s supposed ties to Russia after only six hours of deliberation.
‘I told the truth to the FBI, and the jury clearly recognized that with their unanimous verdict today. I’m grateful to the members of the jury for their careful, thoughtful service,’ Sussmann said outside of the courthouse on Tuesday.
‘Despite being falsely accused, I’m relieved that justice ultimately prevailed in my case.’
He said the past year had been ‘difficult’ on him and his family.
‘But right now we are just grateful for the love and support of so many during this ordeal and i look forward to getting back tot he work I love,’ the attorney said.
Prosecutors claimed that Sussmann misrepresented himself to former FBI General Counsel Jim Baker when he asked for a meeting in 2016, where he then presented purported evidence connecting the Trump Organization and a top Russian bank.
Durham claimed the attorney posed himself as a concerned citizen when in reality he was working on behalf of Hillary Clinton and a tech executive named Rodney Joffe.
Baker told a jury earlier this month that denying acting on behalf of ‘any particular client’ was ‘part of [Sussmann’s] introduction to the meeting’
He said knowingly meeting with a campaign operative would ‘raise very serious questions’ in his mind ‘about the credibility of the source and the veracity of the info,’ according to the New York Post.
‘I think I would have said: Meet with case agents associated with the Hillary Clinton email investigation. Meet with the ‘Midyear Exam’ folks,’ Baker said.
The special counsel also claimed in an April court filing that Sussmann worked with Joffe and his company and ‘numerous cyber researchers, and employees at multiple Internet companies’ to access damaging information about Trump.
Durham’s filing alleges that Sussmann met with ‘the author of a now well-known dossier regarding Trump,’ believed to be Christopher Steele, at the offices of ‘Law Firm-1,’ believed to be Perkins Coie, his former employer.
Steele’s dossier had been seized upon by Democrats as proof that Trump was under the Kremlin’s influence but the former British spy’s purported evidence has since widely been questioned and discredited.
It was also used as the basis for the FBI to launch an investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia, which led to the Mueller probe.
That investigation did not find collusion between Trump’s team and Moscow but uncovered Russia did make efforts to tip the scales in the ex-president’s favor.
Sussmann’s lawyers denied that he lied to the FBI, and argue that his alleged misstatement would not have had any bearing on the bureau’s actions either way.
Durham had been appointed by Trump’s Attorney General Bill Barr. His team indicted Sussmann in September 2021.
Barr criticized Mueller’s Russia investigation in a recent episode of conservative talk host Glenn Beck’s podcast.
‘I think whatever you think of Trump, the fact is that the whole Russiagate thing was a grave injustice. It was a – it appears to be a dirty political trick that was used first to hobble him and then potentially to drive him from office,’ Barr said.
Asked by Beck if he believed the probe was ‘at least seditious’ if not ‘treason,’ Barr responded: ‘I believe it is seditious, yes.’
Durham’s probe faced a setback late last month when a judge refused to allow Clinton’s past tweets accusing Trump of working with Russia to be entered into the record.
Judge Christopher Cooper had ruled that the social media posts constituted hearsay and were ‘duplicative of other evidence.’
The GOP-appointed special counsel had tried to get a pair of tweets dated October 31, 2016 into the record ahead of Sussmann’s trial.
In one, Clinton linked a Slate article detailing alleged communication between Trump’s real estate business and Alfa Bank.
‘It’s time for Trump to answer serious questions about his ties to Russia,’ the Democrat captioned her post.
The additional follow-up tweet read: ‘Computer scientists have apparently uncovered a covert server linking the Trump Organization to a Russian-based bank.’