Lawyer asks judge to dismiss case in Durham probe

Lawyer asks judge to dismiss case in Durham probe
UPI

Feb. 17 (UPI) — A lawyer accused by special counsel John Durham of lying to the FBI about his ties to Hillary Clinton filed a motion Thursday asking to have his case dismissed.

Michael Sussmann asked a federal judge to dismiss his single charge of making a false statement during a September 2016 meeting with the FBI. At the interview, he presented federal investigators with evidence he said connected the Trump Organization with Kremlin-linked Alfa Bank via a computer back channel.

Former Attorney General William Barr tasked Durham in 2020 with investigating the origins of the Justice Department’s two-year investigation into links between the Trump campaign and Russia.

Durham indicted Sussmann in September for allegedly not telling the FBI he was acting on the behalf of the Clinton presidential campaign when he gave them the evidence.

The legal firm Sussmann worked for at the time, Perkins Coie, was under retainer by the Clinton campaign.

In his court filing Thursday, Sussman said the FBI lawyer he met with — James Baker — was aware the Democratic National Committee was a client of his. Sussmann also argued the FBI would have investigated the suspicious computer activity even if it had come directly from Clinton, herself.

“Allowing this case to go forward would risk criminalizing ordinary conduct, raise First Amendment concerns, dissuade honest citizens from coming forward with tips and chill the advocacy of lawyers who interact with the government,” the filing said.

The FBI under special counsel Robert Mueller investigated the alleged links between the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank and determined there wasn’t enough evidence of a secret back channel. Both companies have also denied any collusion.

Durham, meanwhile, filed a motion Friday alleging a conflict of interest because Sussmann is being represented in the case by Latham & Watkins LLP, which has had other clients involved in the investigation.

The filing also revealed new allegations, saying Sussmann presented updated evidence to a federal agency in 2017 showing an alleged link between then-President Trump and Russia. Sussmann said “Trump and/or his associates were using supposedly rare, Russian-made wireless phones in the vicinity of the White House” and other locations, according to the Durham filing.

Evidence of the allegations purportedly included domain name system, or DNS, lookups, in which a log is created when a computer or smartphone prepares to connect with a server.

Sussmann’s filing didn’t identify the federal agency involved in the 2017 meeting, but CNN identified it as the CIA.

The special counsel said his team “identified no support” for the allegations about the cellphones.

In a rebuttal Monday, Sussmann said he didn’t tell federal investigators this information and since the meeting happened after the 2016 election, it wasn’t an attempt to undermine Trump’s campaign on behalf of Clinton.

Sussmann’s filing last week caused an outcry from Trump and among right-wing news outlets that keyed in on a few sentences they misconstrued to push the idea that the Clinton campaign paid to spy on Trump.

The court document said Sussmann obtained the information about the cellphones from a technology executive, Rodney Joffe, whose company Neustar worked on Internet servers in the White House. Durham said Joffe “exploited this arrangement” to gather the information.

The filing, though, never said the Clinton campaign paid Joffe or his company, nor did it say the information about cellphones came from Trump’s time at the White House.

According to lawyers for David Dagon, a data scientist who helped develop the analysis that detected the Russian-made cellphones’ attempts to connect to networks at the White House, the data came during the presidency of Barack Obama.

“What Trump and some news outlets are saying is wrong,” lawyers Jody Westby and Mark Rasch told The New York Times. “The cybersecurity researchers were investigating malware in the White House, not spying on the Trump campaign, and to our knowledge all of the data they used was non-private DNS data from before Trump took office.”

In a statement, Trump suggested those involved deserve to be executed.

Durham’s filing “provides indisputable evidence that my campaign and presidency were spied on by operatives paid by the Hillary Clinton campaign in an effort to develop a completely fabricated connection to Russia,” Trump said in a statement.

“This is a scandal far greater in scope and magnitude than Watergate and those who were involved in and knew about this spying operation should be subject to criminal prosecution. In a stronger period of time in our country, this crime would have been punishable by death. In addition, reparations should be paid to those in our country who have been damaged by this.”

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