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Special prosecutor John Durham’s case against Michael Sussmann, a former Hillary Clinton campaign lawyer charged with lying to the FBI, was sent to the jury on Friday.
According to reports, jurors will continue deliberating the evidence on Tuesday, following the Memorial Day holiday. The verdict, which is expected to be a key test of Durham’s nearly three-year investigation, should come next week, The Wall Street Journal reported.
“It wasn’t about national security, it was about promoting opposition research against the opposition candidate, Donald Trump,” prosecutor Jonathan Algor said in closing the prosecution’s case before the jury Friday morning.
In response, a lawyer for Sussmann, Sean Berkowitz, said: “This is a case about misdirection,” claiming that prosecutors used sleight of hand to transform a short meeting his client had with the FBI’s general counsel into a “giant political conspiracy theory.”
This is the first case that Durham has brought that has actually gone to trial. He got a guilty plea from former FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith, who falsified a document filed with Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in connection with a surveillance warrant to spy on a 2016 Trump campaign adviser.
The FBI fired Clinesmith afterward and he was disbarred; however, he was reinstated by the DC Bar Association in December 2021.
The WSJ reports:
In September, the special counsel’s office obtained an indictment of Mr. Sussmann that accused him of misrepresenting his motivation for providing information to the Federal Bureau of Investigation about a purported secret computer connection between a server connected to Mr. Trump’s company and a Russian bank. Mr. Sussmann’s lie, prosecutors allege, is that he said he was turning the material over to the bureau out of civic concern rather than on behalf of his clients, which included the presidential campaign of Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.
FBI investigators dismissed the server allegations within weeks in 2016, but the episode has continued to reverberate for years. Mr. Sussmann pleaded not guilty and has maintained he provided the information to the FBI based on genuine U.S. national-security concerns, even though he had separately worked on the research on behalf of the Clinton campaign. “Mr. Sussmann is a serious national-security lawyer,” Mr. Berkowitz said in his closing arguments, adding his client had felt compelled to pass on “what he believed to be credible data” from a top expert.
Lawyers for Sussmann have also argued that there is evidence indicating that FBI officials were aware of his Democratic affiliations since he had interacted with the agency several times over the summer of 2016 on behalf of Democratic groups.
But Republicans say that Durham’s allegations exposed actions they argue as having inappropriately undermined Trump’s time in office.
“A lot of Americans are concerned with the fact that a campaign lawyer for the Clinton campaign could go to the FBI and provide information to the FBI that led to an investigation of the opposite party, and it seems to not have held much water,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) said at a hearing with FBI Director Christopher Wary this week.
They also point to a text message that Sussmann sent to then-FBI general counsel James Baker informing him that he had something sensitive to discuss, which turned out to be a false claim that Trump had a secret backchannel link to a Kremlin-aligned bank in Moscow. Sussmann told Baker he was not acting on behalf of any client, but Durham’s prosecutors have argued that in fact, he came to see Baker on behalf of the Clinton campaign.
He went on to meet Baker in September at the FBI general counsel’s office in the J. Edgar Hoover Building.
“Mr. Baker didn’t take notes of the meeting but he briefed two other officials soon after, and both of them jotted down that Mr. Sussmann didn’t bring in the information for a client. One of them also noted that he represented Democrats,” the WSJ reported.
“Neither official remembered those conversations with Mr. Baker when they testified this week, and jurors saw and heard conflicting evidence and testimony about what FBI officials believed about the source of the information and how important knowing the source was,” the paper added.
Baker testified last week he was “100 percent confident” Sussmann told him he was not providing the information on behalf of a client, which lead the agency to treat the information more seriously that it otherwise would have.
