Clinton Campaign Attorney Indicted For Lying To FBI In Trump-Russia Investigation

An attorney who represented Hillary Clinton’s most recent failed presidential campaign in 2016 was indicted on Thursday for allegedly lying to FBI officials, as part of U.S. Special Counsel John Durham’s probe into the origins of the FBI’s investigation of supposed ties between Russia and former President Donald Trump’s campaign.

“Michael Sussmann, a partner with Perkins Coie who also represented the Democratic National Committee in connection with Russia’s hack of the organization, is accused of making false statements during a Sept. 19, 2016 meeting with former FBI General Counsel James Baker,” Reuters reported. “This marks the second criminal case Durham has filed so far since former Attorney General William Barr tapped him in 2019 to investigate U.S. officials who probed the Trump-Russia contacts.”

According to the New York Times, Biden administration Attorney General Merrick B. Garland has the authority to overrule Durham but declined to.
“Donald J. Trump and his supporters have long accused Democrats and Perkins Coie — whose political law group, a division separate from Mr. Sussmann’s, represented the party and the Hillary Clinton campaign — of seeking to stoke unfair suspicions about Mr. Trump’s purported ties to Russia,” the New York Times reported. “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.”

“According to the indictment, Sussmann ‘lied about the capacity in which he was providing the allegations to the FBI’ when he met one-on-one with FBI General Counsel James Baker,” the Daily Mail explained. “That prompted to Baker to assume he was acting merely as a ‘good citizen’ rather than as a ‘paid advocate or political operative.’ He stated falsely that he was not doing the work ‘for my client,’ according to the indictment. Sussmann had handed over three ‘white papers’ as well as computer files containing evidence of the reported secret channel.”