A federal grand jury has returned an indictment against Hillary Clinton’s campaign attorney and lawyer for Perkins Coie, Michael Sussmann.
Special counsel John Durham logged a second indictment in his investigation of the Trump-Russia investigators on Thursday.
A grand jury returned a 26-page indictment charging Michael Sussmann , a lawyer for Perkins Coie who had worked on behalf of Democratic clients numerous times, with intentionally lying to the FBI’s top lawyer in September 2016 about who he was working for when he passed along controversial allegations of secret communications between Russia’s Alfa Bank and the Trump Organization.
“Sussmann lied about the capacity in which he was providing the allegations to the FBI,” the indictment says. “Specifically, Sussmann stated falsely that he was not doing his work on the aforementioned allegations ‘for any client,’ which led the FBI General Counsel to understand that Sussmann was acting as a good citizen merely passing along information, not as a paid advocate or political operative. In fact … this statement was intentionally false and misleading because, in assembling and conveying these allegations, Sussmann acted on behalf of specific clients, namely, a U.S. technology industry executive at a U.S. internet company, and the Hillary Clinton Presidential Campaign.”
Baker testified in 2018 that Sussman, a former DOJ colleague, shared the Alfa Bank claims with him during a September 2016 meeting. Notes from DOJ official Bruce Ohr’s December 2016 meeting with Glenn Simpson show the Fusion GPS co-founder said the New York Times was wrong to doubt the story that Alfa Bank and the Trump Organization were communicating through secret servers.
Catherine Herridge had more:
communications channel between the Trump Organization + a Russia-based bank. Sussmann, who had previously represented the DNC in connection with a cyber hack, falsely stated to the GC that he was not bringing these allegations to the FBI on behalf of any client.”
— Catherine Herridge (@CBS_Herridge) September 16, 2021
Here is a close up of the indictment:
Free Beacon investigative reporter Chuck Ross expanded on the importance of this indictment:
The FBI opened an investigation of Alfa Bank based on the info that Michael Sussmann gave to James Baker, even though Sussmann knew the info was bogus. As Durham notes, the FBI wasted its time and resources chasing that false lead pic.twitter.com/r5zcURtwKO
— Chuck Ross (@ChuckRossDC) September 16, 2021
Sussmann billed the Clinton campaign for the time he spent meeting with reporters to plant the phony Alfa Bank story pic.twitter.com/npUvss9vVT
— Chuck Ross (@ChuckRossDC) September 16, 2021
