A federal grand jury indicted a former attorney for the Democratic National Committee Thursday, alleging that he falsely claimed to the FBI that he was not advising Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign when he raised concerns about purported ties between the Trump Organization and a Russian bank.
The case against Michael Sussmann, a cybersecurity lawyer at powerful Democratic firm Perkins Coie, is just the second prosecution brought by special counsel John Durham, who was tasked by then-Attorney General Bill Barr in May 2019 with looking into how the FBI’s investigation into claims Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign coordinated with Russian government officials came to be.
Sussmann is accused of a single count of making a false statement to federal authorities on Sept. 19, 2016. The indictment was returned just three days short of the expiration of the five-year statute of limitations.
According to the indictment, Sussmann met with then-FBI General Counsel James A. Baker on that date to pass along information indicating that servers at the Trump Organization were communicating with servers at Alfa-Bank, a Moscow-based financial institution.
The bank is not named in the indictment, but the allegations were the subject of several contemporaneous media reports ahead of the 2016 election.
During their conversation, Sussmann allegedly told Baker that “he was not acting on behalf of any client, which led the FBI General Counsel to understand that Sussmann was conveying the allegations as a good citizen and not as an advocate”.
“In fact …” the indictment states, “in assembling and conveying these allegations, Sussmann acted on behalf of specific clients,” including the Clinton campaign.
Sussmann, the indictment says, had been retained by the Democratic National Committee in April 2016 to represent it after its email servers were hacked by groups affiliated with the Russian government. “In or around the same period,” the document says, “Sussmann was also advising the Clinton campaign in connection with cybersecurity issues.”
The indictment also claims that Sussmann had “coordinated and communicated” about the Alfa-Bank allegations “during telephone calls and meetings” with an unidentified tech executive who had passed him the purported server data in the summer of 2016 and the Clinton campaign’s general counsel, Marc Elias — then a Perkins Coie partner.
Those calls and meetings, the document alleges, were billed by Sussmann to the Clinton campaign.
The FBI investigated the purported link between the Trump Organization and Alfa-Bank and found insufficient evidence to support it. The indictment notes that the server in question “was not owned or operated by the Trump Organization, but, rather, had been administered by a mass marketing email company that sent advertisements for Trump’s hotels and hundreds of other clients.”
Following his meeting with Baker, the indictment claims, Sussmann attempted to shame a New York Times reporter into writing about the Alfa-Bank allegation. According to the document, Sussmann sent the reporter an email on Oct. 10, 2016 that included a link to an opinion piece accusing the paper of not thoroughly investigating then-candidate Trump.
The subject line of the email was “for your editors”. Sussmann added the message, “You should send this link to them”.
The claims about the servers were mentioned in a Times writeup published on Oct. 31 of that year that detailed the progress of the FBI’s Russia investigation. However, the article noted that the FBI had concluded that “there could be an innocuous explanation, like a marketing email or spam, for the computer contacts.”
The Gray Lady is not named in the indictment, but the document quotes from the paper’s Oct. 31 story about the investigation.
The Alfa-Bank server allegations were not mentioned in the final report on the Russia investigation released by then-Special Counsel Robert Mueller in March 2019. That report stated that investigators failed to establish that members of the Trump campaign “conspired or coordinated” with the Russian government in Moscow’s meddling in the 2016 campaign.
However, the Mueller report did state that the Kremlin “interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion” and the Trump campaign had “welcomed” the release by Wikileaks of hacked emails meant to damage the Clinton campaign.
Fox News initially reported Wednesday that Durham was seeking an indictment of Sussmann ahead of the statute of limitations expiring.
Sussmann’s lawyers, Sean Berkowitz and Michael Bosworth, said in a statement responding to the report that their client “had committed no crime.”
“Any prosecution here would be baseless, unprecedented, and an unwarranted deviation from the apolitical and principled way in which the Department of Justice is supposed to do its work,” they said.
Prior to Thursday’s indictment of Sussmann, the only other criminal case brought by Durham was against Kevin Clinesmith, an FBI lawyer who altered an email related to the surveillance of Trump campaign adviser Carter Page to obscure the nature of Page’s pre-existing relationship with the CIA.
Clinesmith pleaded guilty to a charge of falsifying documents in August of last year and was sentenced to probation.
The future of the Durham investigation is unclear. It has lasted longer than the Mueller investigation that precipitated it, and its funding is due to run out at the end of this month.
The Justice Department has not said whether Attorney General Merrick Garland would allow Durham’s probe to continue or had approved a budget for fiscal year 2022. During his confirmation hearing in February, Garland told senators that he had “no reason to think” Durham should be removed as special counsel, but stopped short of promising to only dismiss the prosecutor for cause.
Another loose end is the lack of a final report from Durham, which the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday is expected to be “long and detailed, with few sweeping conclusions.”
Garland also declined to commit to releasing a full report if and when it comes, telling senators in February that he would “have to talk with Mr. Durham and understand the nature of what he’s been doing.”
With Post wires