Techno Fog, The Reactionary: Michael Sussmann has been acquitted
The acquittal is no surprise. This is a DC jury, after all. In the Roger Stone case, for example, we documented how a juror lied to get on the panel. (That judge didn’t care.) Making matters worse, the Sussmann judge wrongly allowed for a woman to remain on the jury, despite the fact that her daughter and Sussmann’s are on the same high school crew team. One can’t help but think that juror had her own daughter’s interests in mind – the cohesion of the crew team – when she reached a decision.
After the verdict was announced, the jury’s forewoman held court before the media and expressed her displeasure that the Special Counsel prosecute a false statement case: “There are bigger things that affect the nation than a possible lie to the FBI.”
What does Sussmann's acquittal mean? The indictment seemed a brilliant move at first. When John Durham charged Michael Sussmann for lying to the FBI — for saying that he was not representing any clients when met with the FBI — he seemed to open a can of worms for Hillary Clinton. Sussmann was trying get an investigation started based on his supposed evidence of a secret communications link between Donald Trump and the Russian bank, Alfa Bank. In his court filings John Durham described a "joint venture," otherwise known as a conspiracy, to frame Trump for colluding with Russia to get himself elected president.
Durham had evidence. He could show that the Clinton campaign paid Sussmann for his efforts. He could show that the evidence of a communications link was weak, if not fraudulent.
The significance of the FBI’s lies was accentuated this week at Sussmann’s trial when Scott Hellman, an FBI cyber analyst, testified that he knew right away in September 2016 that Sussmann’s data did not suggest any covert communications between Trump and Russia. Hellman added that he wondered if the person who put together the data was suffering from a mental disability.
Hellman’s testimony is the clearest evidence yet that the FBI knew from the start that one of the two major components of the Trump Russia collusion narrative – the Alfa Bank data – was false. As the March 6 notes show, they concealed this fact from their DOJ superiors.
But Durham just barely beat the statute of limitations. This was made clear when a text message came into Durham's possession in which Sussmann made the same false statement to James Baker that he later said in person. In both instances Sussmann said he was acting on his own behalf, doing his patriotic duty as a private citizen, while billing his time to the Clinton campaign. But Durham could not base his indictment on the text message because it didn't come into his possession until the statute of limitations expired.
The Durham investigation uncovered a multi-pronged effort to push the phony Trump/Alfa Bank link to the FBI, the CIA, and the media.
[T]he prosecution of Sussmann made public email communications between the Clinton-campaign-funded Fusion GPS and prominent reporters at The New York Times, Washington Post, Reuters, Yahoo! News, ABC News, and Slate. Those emails exposed the supposed journalists collaborating closely with the opposition researchers working at Fusion GPS for the Clinton campaign during the 2016 election.
In one email, Fusion GPS’s co-founder Peter Fritsch pushed ABC News’s Matthew Mosk to run the Alfa Bank story, telling him, “Dude this is huge.” Fritsch took a more aggressive stance with Reuter’s Mark Hosenball, venting in a mid-October 2016 email, “Do the fucking alfa bank secret comms story,” telling him, “it is hugely important.”
When Hosenball pushed back that he lacked the technical expertise to evaluate the data, Fritsch told Hosenball to “call David Dagon at Georgia Tech.” Of course, thanks to the Sussmann trial, it is now public knowledge that, far from being a disinterested expert, Dagon worked with Joffe to craft the Alfa Bank tale sold to the media and the FBI. Dagon was also rabidly anti-Trump.
Sussmann's lies were material. FBI analysts testified that they would have approached their analysis differently had they known that the Clinton campaign was behind it all. In the end the jury disagreed. The forewoman summed it up. So what. “There are bigger things that affect the nation than a possible lie to the FBI.”
No one expected a DC jury to do otherwise.
But where do we go from here? My fear is, we go nowhere, and corruption reigns supreme. Durham has exposed corruption and conspiracy, but for now, all that has been done about it are minor cases of lying and falsifying evidence. Durham failed to make his case against Michael Sussmann. When Kevin Clinesmith pled guilty of falsifying evidence presented to the FISA court, he was disbarred. But then he was reinstated in next to no time.
Rodney Joffe remains under investigation, Igor Danchenko will face trial this year, but it looks doubtful that anyone of consequence will be held accountable. If this is it for Durham's investigations, we can expect more swamp inspired investigations designed to help Democrats, more dishonest reporting by the media on behalf of Democrats, more FBI plots to entrap ordinary Americans and to be prosecuted as "domestic terrorists."
I hope John Durham proves me wrong, but I'm not holding my breath.
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