Sussman Was Acquitted Because of a Partisan DC Jury.
And Because the FBI Colluded With Sussman From the Beginning.

Yes, as mentioned earlier, the jury was stacked with literal Hillary Clinton donors who no doubt realized that Hillary herself would be in legal peril if one of her underlings were convicted of a felony while acting as her minion.

And one of the jurors was Sussman's daughter's crew team-mate, which the Democrat judge said "Seems fine to me" about.

But, as Jonathan Turley points out, Sussman was acquitted because he had friends in high places --the 7th floor of the FBI headquarters, to be specific.

During the trial, Clinton campaign general counsel Marc Elias and campaign manager Robby Mook both said the campaign trusted the media to push the story. They were right: Slate quickly ran it, and then Clinton and one of her aides, Jake Sullivan (now President Biden's national security adviser), released statements expressing alarm about the claim as if it were news to them.

The Clinton campaign similarly pushed the infamous Steele dossier into the news, too, after secretly helping to fund it. And both the Steele dossier and the Alfa Bank claim was pushed to friends in the FBI.

Regardless of what the jury decides regarding Sussmann, the combined record of the Steele dossier and the Alfa Bank claim makes the FBI look like an unindicted co-conspirator.

Let me interrupt to point out that the only witness to the fact that Sussman represented that he was not working for any client, but was only a concerned citizen bringing a tip to the FBI out of his own sense of conscience, was James Baker.

And James Baker had been... inconsistent in whether Sussman had in fact represented that he was acting on his own.

Possibly... deliberately inconsistent? Like maybe he had some gaps in memory because he didn't want Sussman to get into trouble, because Michael Sussman is (as he admits below) "his friend"?

Now, there was a smoking gun piece of evidence that Sussman represented that he was acting alone: A text from Sussman to Baker.

But Baker -- the top lawyer to the FBI -- never produced that text to Durham until it was too late for Durham to introduce it at trial.

Again, was this deliberate?

Let's see Baker's answer as to why this top lawyer for the FBI and DOJ employee withheld key evidence until it was no longer damaging to his "friend" Michael Sussman:

On the witness stand in Sussmann's trial, for example, FBI general counsel James Baker was asked why it took him so long to turn over the most damaging evidence -- a text message to him in which Sussmann said he was not representing any client in pushing the Alfa Bank claim to FBI officials. Baker explained that Sussmann was his friend and told prosecutors that "this is not my investigation. This is your investigation."

Did he just... admit he deliberately withheld key evidence from his employer the FBI and the DOJ to protect his friend?

In other words, there was no reason for the Justice Department to expect that Baker, a former top Justice lawyer, would help to make the case against Sussmann.

There was no reason for a DOJ employee to cooperate with a DOJ investigation??!!

I guess that is clarifying. It's not about whether it's a DOJ investigation or not, it's whether it's aligned with the Democrat Ruling Class cabal or against them.

It did not help the optics when Baker left the Justice Department and joined Brookings Institution, liberal think tank linked to key figures who framed the early Russian collusion claims. For some, it seemed like not just friends but "friends with benefits."

Jonathan Turley notes that liberal demanded that Mueller write and publicize a report on Russiagate, even though he'd failed to discover any crimes. They wanted a report to allege crimes that could not be proved.

Turley very much doubts there will be a similar demand for Durham to write such a report -- in fact, there will be shrieking if he does endeavor to write a report about what he believes might have happened.

If Durham does not issue such a report, much of the true story behind the Russia collusion scandal could be buried. Indeed, even if control of Congress were to flip to Republicans in November, the Justice Department could refuse to turn over investigatory material and information. That is precisely what many in Washington undoubtedly would like to happen.

Yet, after the glimpses offered in Sussmann prosecution of still undisclosed evidence, the public deserves to have a full Durham report on how these scandals were conceived and crafted among "friends."

A week ago I wrote about the fact that the leadership of the FBI was concealing the name of the informant -- Michael Sussman -- from the agents assigned to investigate the tip.

The agents wanted the name because sometimes that information is useful to evaluating the tip. It would have been highly useful in evaluating this tip -- they would immediately have said, "Hillary Clinton's lawyer? Trash" and began wrapping up the investigation into the already-preposterous-seeming tip.

And that's exactly why the leadership of the FBI withheld that vital name from the agents -- they wanted them to keep investigating the bullshit claim. They didn't want them to realize it was a bullshit politically-motivated oppo-research bit of nonsense and dismiss it. They wanted the probe into Trump to keep going and going and going.

So here's the thing:

Sussman's lawyers then argued at trial that his lie about acting alone couldn't have been "material" -- couldn't have actually impacted the investigation -- because, obviously, the leadership of the FBI, Strzok, Comey, and Baker, all knew the truth and knew exactly who Sussman was and exactly who he was really working for.

They were hiding that from the agents, yes. But they themselves knew. "The FBI" as a corporate institution knew the truth.

Therefore, the lie was not "material," which makes it a non-criminal lie.

Was he wrong about that?

Probably not. The FBI's corruption has the side-effect of rendering its co-conspirators immune from prosecution.

Victoria Taft at PJM:

Both sides in the trial have taken aim at the FBI. John Durham's special counsel prosecutors have argued that the same FBI that took Hillary's so-called oppo research and used it to frame Trump were somehow duped into believing this tripe. Testimony showed that the line agents were forced to investigate when they knew the information was partial garbage but were ordered to keep going by the 7th-floor executive suite.

At the same time, Sussmann's attorney argued that those FBI executives weren't duped at all! He dismissed the FBI investigation into his client as "shoddy" and "an embarrassment." They knew for whom Sussmann worked--Hillary, the DNC, and his tech executive who helped make up the lies. Notwithstanding Durham's evidence against Sussmann to the contrary, he argued that nobody at the FBI was duped because they knew he worked for Hillary's campaign, he argued. Indeed, "Mr. Sussmann had DNC and HFA [Hillary for America] tattooed on his forehead, they (FBI) assumed that's where the information came from," he told jurors. And that means, he reasoned, Sussmann may have lied and said he didn't come on behalf of any client, but it wasn't a big, material lie because they should have known he was lying.

In other words: Sure, there was a lie here. And that lie was told by the senior leadership of the FBI. Blame them, not Sussman.

Can't say that argument is without merit.

At some point, the system becomes so corrupt it becomes incapable of producing outcomes that are anything other than corruption. That's where we are now.

That's a lot of Blackpill stuff. Here's Margot Cleveland to argue that some good came of this-- notably, the exposure of the deep rot and fundamental unreformability of the FBI and DOJ themselves.

And, of course:

Durham Proved the Collusion Hoax Was a Hillary Clinton Enterprise

and:

Killing the Alfa Bank Hoax For Good

But did it do either of those?

The left, as personified in the ugliness of Jonathan Chait, is already claiming that the acquittal proves that the Alfa Bank Hoax was really all just a right-wing conspiracy theory, and it's still a very real, very plausible theory to claim that Trump had a secret computer talking with a Russian bank.

posted by Ace at 06:18 PM

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