The Sussmann Verdict A jury acquits the Clinton campaign lawyer, but the case revealed a lot about the Russia collusion dirty trick.
A Washington, D.C., jury on Tuesday acquitted Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann of lying to the FBI, and the verdict is no doubt a disappointment for special counsel John Durham. But the case did perform a public service by exposing a major part of the 2016 Russian collusion dirty trick that hadn’t been previously told.
The evidence was strong enough to bring an indictment, and it was reinforced by a text message in which Mr. Sussmann had told FBI general counsel James Baker that he represented no client. In truth he represented the Clinton campaign, as billing records showed. But Mr. Durham had charged Mr. Sussmann with lying to Mr. Baker in person, not in the text message, which the special counsel only obtained after he had filed the original indictment.
The jury may also have been persuaded by the defense claim that the FBI already had ample reason to know that Mr. Sussmann was working for the Clinton campaign. Mr. Sussmann was certainly known to the FBI—enough so that we learned at the trial that he had his own pass to the FBI building.
The verdict is less important than what we learned about the false Clinton claims about the ties between the Trump campaign and Russia’s Alfa Bank. The story was a concoction from the start, spread to the press by investigators-for-hire Fusion GPS and Clinton sources. We learned that Hillary Clinton personally approved leaking the false claim to a reporter, and the campaign and Mrs. Clinton then tweeted the press report approvingly.
Mr. Baker handed off the claim for FBI agents to investigate, though he withheld from the agents that Mr. Sussmann was his source. The agents quickly found the charges weren’t credible. But the Alfa Bank story nonetheless became part of the fog of collusion claims that bedeviled the Trump Presidency for more than two years.
Mr. Durham isn’t finished, and later this year he will bring a separate case that will tell us more about another side of the collusion tale—the Christopher Steele dossier. He has indicted Igor Danchenko, the alleged source of Mr. Steele’s information in the dossier, on five counts of lying to the FBI. Mr. Danchenko has pleaded not guilty.
Evidence at that trial should reveal more details about the origins of the dossier smear and the role of the Clinton campaign and the media in spreading it. Special counsel Robert Mueller was supposed to have investigated all of this long ago, but he ducked the role of the Clinton campaign. Mr. Durham’s task has been to tell us the rest of the dirty tale.
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