https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/15/us/politics/durham-michael-sussmann-trump-russia.htmlJohn Durham's oversight probe into the probe into the 2016 election is said to be about to indict a top lawyer at Perkins Coie, Michael Sussmann, on charges he lied to the FBI.
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The case against Mr. Sussmann centers on the question of who his client was when he conveyed certain suspicions about Mr. Trump and Russia to the F.B.I. in September 2016. Among other things, investigators have examined whether Mr. Sussmann was secretly working for the Clinton campaign — which he denies.
They've empaneled a grand jury to seek the indictment, and grand juries indict 100% of the time unless the prosecutors are literally telling the grand jury not to indict him, so its a given.
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The accusation against Mr. Sussmann focuses on a meeting he had on Sept. 19, 2016, with James A. Baker, who was the F.B.I.’s top lawyer at the time, according to the people familiar with the matter. They spoke on condition of anonymity.
Because of a five-year statute of limitations for such cases, Mr. Durham has a deadline of this weekend to bring a charge over activity from that date.
At the meeting, Mr. Sussmann relayed data and analysis from cybersecurity researchers who thought that odd internet data might be evidence of a covert communications channel between computer servers associated with the Trump Organization and with Alfa Bank, a Kremlin-linked Russian financial institution.
The F.B.I. eventually decided those concerns had no merit. The special counsel who later took over the Russia investigation, Robert S. Mueller III, ignored the matter in his final report.
Mr. Sussmann’s lawyers have told the Justice Department that he sought the meeting because he and the cybersecurity researchers believed that The New York Times was on the verge of publishing an article about the Alfa Bank data and he wanted to give the F.B.I. a heads-up. (In fact, The Times was not ready to run that article, but published one mentioning Alfa Bank six weeks later.)
Mr. Durham has been using a grand jury to examine the Alfa Bank episode and appeared to be hunting for any evidence that the data had been cherry-picked or the analysis of it knowingly skewed, The New Yorker and other outlets have reported. To date, there has been no public sign that he has found any such evidence.
But Mr. Durham did apparently find an inconsistency: Mr. Baker, the former F.B.I. lawyer, is said to have told investigators that he recalled Mr. Sussmann saying that he was not meeting him on behalf of any client. But in a deposition before Congress in 2017, Mr. Sussmann testified that he sought the meeting on behalf of an unnamed client who was a cybersecurity expert and had helped analyze the data.
Moreover, internal billing records Mr. Durham is said to have obtained from Perkins Coie are said to show that when Mr. Sussmann logged certain hours as working on the Alfa Bank matter — though not the meeting with Mr. Baker — he billed the time to Mrs. Clinton’s 2016 campaign.
Any of this give you stinky parallels to the 2020 election? Donald Trump's lawyers pushing bullshit stories of election rigging and voting machine tampering and whatnot, trying to bullshit their way through the courts, and then facing repercussions for pushing their BS? Except in this case, Hillary Clinton's team wasn't content to just sow their bullshit seed in the fertile grounds of the media that welcomed it, they wanted to stir up the FBI and push the russiaburger narrative to dog Trump as part of crossfire hurricane, to use the FBI to spy on him and obstruct his campaign and later presidency.
But here we are: They kept the receipts. Hillary Clinton's little gambit to cast doubt on the election and spread misinformation through proxies was exposed because folks like Sussman don't work for free. He billed it right to Hillary Clinton.
That's the thing about Hillary's little opposition research
manufacturing (since they couldn't find real dirt) operation with the Steele Dossier. She tried to give herself a distance with financial obfuscation to the point of plausible deniability, but her minions wouldn't work for free, so the money trial leads right back to #1. Contacts in the Kremlin being paid with Clintonbucks, lawyers pretending they are just conducting apolitical conversations with the FBI to feed their investigation into Trump, except they're still being paid in Clintonbucks by the hour.
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Mr. Durham has also apparently weighed bringing some sort of action against Perkins Coie as an organization. Outside lawyers for the firm recently met with the special counsel’s team and went over the evidence, according to other people familiar with their discussions, arguing that it was insufficient for any legal sanction.
The lawyers for Perkins Coie and the firm’s managing partner did not respond to phone calls and emails seeking comment.
Honestly, this is the kind of operation Durham should throw the book at. Bring the hammer down, take them to Chinatown.
Perkins Coie was little more than a veneer of legal titling thrown over a political hatchet job operation, a group of political operatives who tried to misreport their activities as "legal services" so they wouldn't be accountable to the FEC and public disclosure rules. As long as anyone can claim they are a lawyer providing legal services, they can go conduct all the dirty ops on behalf of a political campaign and not have to report where the money goes. That legal fiction needs to be brought down and made an example of.
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