John Durham, the special counsel, was dealt a huge blow in court Tuesday when a federal jury found Michael Sussmann innocent of materially lying about the FBI at a September 2016 meeting.
The jury, which returned Tuesday for its first full day of deliberations after being charged with the case Friday afternoon, came to its decision in less than a day.
Witnesses testified that Sussmann brought the Hillary Clinton-commissioned scam (to wit, that Trump had a Russian agent who used a super-secret server with Vladimir Putin’s Alfa-Bank) to the FBI to launch an investigation into the Republican presidential nominee. The investigation continued for two more years during Trump’s presidency.
However, the quick jury response means that jurors did not buy that Sussmann’s lies were relevant to the case. This means that Sussmann’s lie that he was bringing false information out of duty, and not for Hillary Clinton, didn’t alter the FBI’s ability to do its job.
As I reported, Sussmann’s lawyer argued for exactly such a result:
… Sussmann’s attorney argued that those FBI executives weren’t duped at all! He dismissed the FBI investigation into his client as “shoddy” and “an embarrassment.” They knew for whom Sussmann worked—Hillary, the DNC, and his tech executive who helped make up the lies. Notwithstanding Durham’s evidence against Sussmann to the contrary, he argued that nobody at the FBI was duped because they knew he worked for Hillary’s campaign, he argued. Indeed, “Mr. Sussmann had DNC and HFA [Hillary for America] tattooed on his forehead, they (FBI) assumed that’s where the information came from,” he told jurors. And that means, he reasoned, Sussmann may have lied and said he didn’t come on behalf of any client, but it wasn’t a big, material lie because they should have known he was lying.
Although Sussmann’s conviction would have been unexpected in Washington, D.C.’s political climate, the Durham team made sure that the trial was not a waste. John Durham revealed that Hillary Clinton had given her green light to the Trump-Russia Collusion scheme. This admission was made by her 2016 campaign manager.
FBI officials and his cronies admitted to using them to spread Trump conspiracy theories and seeded lies throughout the FBI, CIA, and media. It was also clear in the trial that FBI officials gave the title Confidential Human Source to friends so they could use their information to launch an investigation into the man they loathe.
Andy McCarthy, a former prosecutor, predicted that Sussmann would walk on his podcast. McCarthy summarized the fraud in his book “Ball of Collusion”: How to Rig an Election, Destroy a Presidency.
“That is the Ball of Collusion. Counterintelligence is a pretext for a criminal investigation in search of a crime. A criminal investigation, is a pretext for impeachment, without an impeachable offense. An impeachable inquiry as a pretext for rendering Donald Trump un-reelectable and all of it designed as a straightjacket around his presidency.”
Durham isn’t done, but this PR setback is to be sure.
This acquittal highlights once again the fact that the Left seems to always get a jury made up of its peers in Washington D.C.
