The Michael Sussmann case moved to the defense team on Wednesday after the prosecution ended their presentation of evidence against the former federal prosecutor and a former partner at the law firm Perkins Coie. They immediately presented something not so shocking.
Michael Sussmann met with the FBI as a client representative of the Hillary Clinton Campaign weeks before his one-on-one meeting with the bureau’s top lawyer before the election in 2016.
The Courthouse News Service reported on yesterday’s activities in the Sussmann trial.
After prosecutors rested their case in the Michael Sussmann trial on Wednesday, a federal jury learned for the first time that he met with the FBI as the client representative for Hillary Clinton’s campaign just weeks before his infamous one-on-one meeting with the bureau’s top lawyer in 2016.
The government has repeatedly insisted that the bureau did not know that Sussmann was legal counsel for the campaign — in litigation related to Russian hacking groups’ accessing Democratic National Committee servers — when he met with then-FBI General Counsel James Baker in 2016 and gave him data files allegedly containing evidence of secret communications between then-presidential candidate Donald Trump and Russia’s Alfa Bank.
The government claims that if the FBI knew during the September 2016 meeting that Sussmann was representing the campaign in other matters, the bureau might have taken different steps in its investigation of the Trump-Alfa Bank information he brought, which he said was “not on behalf of a client.”
They were all in on it. It wasn’t just the Hillary team trying to fool the FBI. They worked together. Durham’s case rests on the argument that Sussmann came into James Baker’s office and provided Baker garbage on a Trump-Alfa Bank connection and that Baker was unaware that Sussmann worked for Hillary.
But Baker was Comey’s top lawyer at the FBI. They all knew who was working for who.
Sussmann’s evidence indicates that the FBI knew the information coming from Sussmann was garbage and they ran with it anyway. The FBI knew the information was coming from Hillary Clinton’s campaign. They were all in on it.