"This entire case was a clunker right from the start and landed with a thud. Over three years- longer than Mueller's investigation - and only one trial with acquittal. There was never any there, there." - Danya Perry, former NY prosecutor last night on ALL In.
Tuesday was a star-spangled day for truth in American democracy - as my Revolutionary War ancestors would even attest. A federal jury found Michael Sussmann, an attorney for Democrats including the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, not guilty of lying to the FBI. This was after he brought them allegations against Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential race.
This whole case had the stench of political opportunism, grandstanding and deliberate conspiracy mongering from the outset, e.g.
The Durham Indictment Fuels the Real Russia Hoax
and playing into the depraved hands of the traitors like Trump, while calumniating Hillary, former MI6 spook Christopher Steele and the FBI. All based on an ideation that Hillary, the FBI, Fusion GPS, Steele and Sussmann somehow contrived to harm poor Traitor Trump during his term.
This has been the odious claim of Durham, the Trump--Barr mole at DOJ, whose name will now live in infamy for having directed such a distraction from the real rats trying to upend the longest experiment in democracy. People may well forget that Durham's disgusting charade has already gone on far longer than Special Counsel Robert Mueller's fully justified investigation into the Trump campaign conspiracy with the Russians. Also, unlike Mueller's probe which produced actual, tangible convictions, including: Michael Flynn, who pleaded guilty to making false statements to the FBI, Paul Manafort sentenced to a combined seven and a half years for his crimes, and Roger Stone- convicted on all counts after a November, 2019 trial. In addition Mueller produced indictments for 12 GRU officers related to the hacking of Democratic emails in 2016.
[Read the indictment here.]
All told, Mueller's team indicted or secured guilty pleas from no fewer than 34 people and three companies. Mueller's mistake was in not finalizing in his report the connections, the conspiracy between the Russians and Trump campaign officials see e.g.
paving the way for Trump's AG Barr to issue his own bogus "summary" of Mueller's report, i.e.
And setting the stage for Trump to confirm his guilt by pardoning Stone, Flynn and Manafort. While Durham, the Barr puppet, could go after the investigators after being made special prosecutor by Barr, e.g.
Never mind. By contrast, Durham's political circus has produced nothing, nada. Ok, wait, one fricking show trial in over three years. Can we now finally say fishing expedition, or better, a real witch hunt to try to appease Trump and invent a counter conspiracy to the one the Mueller investigators hung on Trump (Essentially embedded in Vol. I of Mueller report).. That is THREE-plus years of time-wasting, money -resource squandering distraction when the focus ought to have been on Trump's inciting the insurrection and his connections to the Russkies, e.g.
Trump and His Associates Had More Than 100 Contacts With Russians Before the Inauguration
Make no mistake, as the lead story in the WaPo noted, this verdict "was a major setback for Special Counsel John Durham, who was appointed during the Trump administration and has spent three years probing whether the federal agents who investigated the 2016 Trump campaign committed wrongdoing."
Sussmann was the first person charged by Durham to go to trial. Another person charged in the investigation is due to face a jury later this year. Jurors were tasked with answering a fairly simple legal and factual question — whether Sussmann lied about his client and whether that lie was relevant to the FBI investigation. Prosecutors argued Sussmann’s lie was just one part of a larger scheme by Clinton loyalists to use the FBI and news reporters to launch a damaging, last-minute revelation against Trump that would tip the election to Clinton.
But as I pointed out in a previous post, this whole case was built on flimsy crap and Durham's primary "gotcha guy" Baker was only one witness, but he took no notes, Further, he gave testimony to Congress that suggested he did not remember what Sussmann had told him about whom Sussmann was representing at the meeting.
Worse, the specious Durham "case" turned in large part on a relatively obscure evidentiary rule that allowed the prosecution lawyers to “refresh the recollection” via "notes" presented to their sole witness. This is usually when he cannot remember something. Now, those notes are not admissible evidence themselves — they reflect multiple levels of hearsay — but if you are on a witness stand, your lawyer (Durham's lawyer in this case) can show you the notes, and then, having had your recollection “refreshed,” you can testify about it. This hypothetical sounds a lot like what the government claims happened with Baker.
How sweet is that for the quasi prosecution? But fortunately the jury was perceptive enough to see through it. That jury had begun deliberating Friday weighing the testimony of current and former Clinton campaign advisers, former FBI officials and technology experts. The last desperate card played by Durham's team was to claim Sussmann "believed he had a license to lie to the FBI at the height of the 2016 presidential campaign." A trope easily knocked down in an earlier article in Mother Jones, which also called into question Durham's motives, e.g.
Is John Durham Deliberately Stoking Right-Wing Conspiracy Theories
Noting therein:
Researching DNS lookups is not hacking a server. It is tracking the pattern of connections between servers and computers or smartphones. Much of this information—DNS logs—is not private. The researchers examining the DNS data were not infiltrating anything. Lawyers for Joffe and David Dagon, a Georgia Institute of Technology data scientist who helped develop the research Sussmann shared with the CIA, have challenged Durham’s representations. Dagon’s attorneys note that the DNS logs examined related to the Russian phone service came from the time of Barack Obama’s presidency. That appears credible, given that Sussmann’s meeting with the CIA was only three weeks after Trump had taken office. And they told the New York Times that Dagon and associates were using “nonprivate” DNS data and “were investigating malware in the White House, not spying on the Trump campaign.
The Sussmann attorneys, given this, correctly framed Durham's bogus case as "built on a political conspiracy theory" - which view evidently the jury shared. As one New Yorker Intelligencer contributor noted prior to the trial, "the very conduct of Durham's team provides further reason to maintain skepticism toward any claims it makes that have yet to be tested in an adversarial setting."
In the wake of the verdict, Durham whined:
"While we are disappointed in the outcome, we respect the jury’s decision and thank them for their service,”
Then wrap it up now! As former NY prosecutor Danya Perry noted on 'ALL In' last night, all Durham has produced is "bupkiss" and "with a great waste of government resources." The jury forewoman - outside the courtroom afterwards - perhaps best summed up what she and the other jurors had been subjected to by the self-righteous clown: "We felt our time could have been more wisely used."
So we need an end to this 'wild goose chase' and if Durham has sense he will scrap the other show trial of Danchenko scheduled for October. Besides, as Perry observed, Durham's DOJ "lease" has expired, and "even Mueller knew when his time was up.". Time for Garland to show him the Exit as his "special counsel" role is now officially on fumes. No more fishing expeditions to try to prove conservo creds to FOX News or the WSJ anti-Hillary trolls- like Holman Jenkins Jr.. Otherwise, it's time Merrick Garland put this garbage of disinformation and distraction to final rest.
In the meantime, look for the usual stable of WSJ trolls and hacks to either distort and misrepresent the outcome (like Holman Jenkins Jr. did in his column today), or howl like stuck pigs how Trump will never get his just dues. Well, he would if some one with guts - like my Revolutionary War ancestors - came back to hang his sorry orange ass.
See Also:
by Heather Digby Parton | June 2, 2022 - 7:26am | permalink
And:
A clever effort to try to de-Putinize Trump
Excerpt:
Well, that was a quick acquittal! The Michael Sussmann prosecution brought by Trump administration special counsel John Durham tried to generate a Clinton-conspiracy bang but ended with a not-guilty-verdict whimper...The jury saw through the fog of misdirection and innuendo in the indictment’s overstuffed allegations and quickly returned a not-guilty verdict.
And:
Excerpt:
Michael Sussmann, a prominent cybersecurity lawyer with ties to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, was acquitted on Tuesday of lying to the F.B.I. in 2016 when he shared a tip about possible connections between Donald J. Trump and Russia.
The verdict was a significant blow to the special counsel, John H. Durham, who was appointed by the Trump administration three years ago to scour the Trump-Russia investigation for any wrongdoing.
But Mr. Durham has yet to fulfill expectations from Mr. Trump and his supporters that he would uncover and prosecute a “deep state” conspiracy against the former president. Instead, he has developed only two cases that led to charges: the one against Mr. Sussmann and another against a researcher for the so-called Steele dossier, whose trial is set for later this year. Both consist of simple charges of making false statements, rather than a more sweeping charge like conspiracy
And:
The new gambit: Claiming key Russia probe data was ‘made up’ - The Washington Post
Excerpt:
"Barr had an obviously subjective intent: proving that the Russia investigation writ large was an effort to attack Trump and little more. In recent weeks,
Durham’s thrust has become more clear. He apparently hopes to prove that Clinton’s team intentionally deceived the government to impugn Trump with allegations of ties to Russia."
And:
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