Jeff Carlson & Hans Mahnke, Epoch Times: Breaking Down the Flurry of Legal Filings by Clinton Campaign Associates in Durham’s Prosecution of Michael Sussmann
The overarching problem with all these claims of privilege is that by legal necessity they have to be based on legal advice. If the task at hand wasn’t about legal advice—such as Fusion pushing false stories about Trump to the media—then there is no attorney-client privilege.
With that backdrop in mind, Fusion GPS claimed in its filing that it was retained by then-partner Elias at Perkins Coie to “assist in providing legal advice to its clients, the Hillary for America Campaign Committee and the DNC during the 2016 presidential campaign. As we noted earlier, Elias’s own submission mirrored this claim.
But there’s a huge problem when we compare these new claims with an Oct 24, 2017 letter from Perkins Coie, which officially detailed its retention and hiring of Fusion on April 11, 2016.
Matthew Gerringer, general counsel for Perkins Coie, noted that Fusion approached Perkins Coie in early March 2016. Gerringer stated that Fusion expressed an interest in its continuation of “research regarding then-Presidential candidate Donald Trump,” research that “Fusion GPS had conducted for one or more other clients during the Republican primary contest.”
And it wasn’t just Perkins Coie that was saying this. In their 2019 book, Fusion’s owners told a very similar story, specifically that they had pitched the idea to Elias that they would continue to collect opposition research on Trump on Elias’s behalf. There was never any mention from either Fusion or Elias of legal services or legal advice.
Read the rest here.
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