Sussmann’s team has responded to Durham’s latest filing.
Some quotes:
Rather, the Special Counsel has again made a filing in this case that unnecessarily includes prejudicial—and false—allegations that are irrelevant to his Motion and to the charged offense, and are plainly intended to politicize this case, inflame media coverage, and taint the jury pool.
Further—and contrary to the Special Counsel’s alleged theory that Mr. Sussmann was acting in concert with the Clinton Campaign—the Motion conveniently overlooks the fact that Mr. Sussmann’s meeting with Agency-2 happened well after the 2016 presidential election, at a time when the Clinton Campaign had effectively ceased to exist. Unsurprisingly, the Motion also omits any mention of the fact that Mr. Sussmann never billed the Clinton Campaign for the work associated with the February 9, 2017 meeting, nor could he have (because there was no Clinton Campaign). See Dkt. No. 35 at 3-4. And the Special Counsel persists in alleging that Mr. Sussmann billed the Clinton Campaign for his meeting with the FBI in September 2016, when that is false as well.
In so doing, the Special Counsel featured grossly misleading excerpts of emails among Tech-Executive-1 and other researchers, omitting statements that showed the researchers agreed with the findings and otherwise operated in good faith.
For example, the Special Counsel has alleged that Mr. Sussmann met with the FBI on behalf of the Clinton Campaign, but it was not until November 2021—two months after Mr. Sussmann was indicted—that the Special Counsel bothered to interview any individual who worked full-time for that Campaign to determine if that allegation was true. It is not.
The Sussman lawyers’ response seems somewhat weird in that it makes a big deal of denying things that Durham is not actually alleging.
For example, Durham did not allege that Sussman billed the Clinton campaign for the February 2017 meeting, nor - AFAICT - for the September 2016 meeting. Durham claims that Sussman billed the Clinton campaign extensively “for his work on the Russian Bank-1 allegations”, but he does not appear to allege that he billed for this specific meeting. The idea seems to be that Sussman was being paid by the Clinton campaign to push those particular allegations, and therefore when he met Baker, it was in service of this project, regardless of whether he billed for this meeting specifically. (I don’t know if billing practices necessarily worked meeting-by-meeting, but the point would stand regardless.)
Similarly, the response points out that the period covered by the DNS data does not cover after Trump was in office. But that was not anywhere in Durham’s filing, which only said that the lookup data ostensibly showed that “Trump and/or his associates were using supposedly rare Russian-made phones in the vicinity of the White House and other locations”.
I would guess that the Sussman lawyers are aware that this has gotten considerable media attention in right wing circles and are trying to tamp down somewhat via this filing.
They state that outright that they believe Durham is intentionally inflaming media coverage and they give several examples of the frothy, inaccurate, media coverage that followed Durham’s filing.
That’s how the right wing outrage machine works. Misleading or false claims, often using cherry picking and removing context gets reported in right wing media, right wing social media picks it up in unison (it’s amazing how synchronized this is when it happens, you’ll see almost the same verbiage and outrage coming from all right wing corners), then right wing media and politicians hammer it and hammer it saying “many people are talking about it”, when in reality it’s all an illusion created by a falsehood. Lather rinse repeat for 30 years and you have the Fox News Republican outrage creation paradigm. This is just the same thing again.
Here’s an example of Durham misleadingly quoting things and leaving out context. In the original indictment of Sussmann he is trying to give the impression that Joffe (Tech Executive-1) and the researchers were just trying to come up with something “plausible” so that the FBI would launch an investigation and apparently grabs every use of the word “plausible” to try to make this case.
On or about September 15, 2016, Originator-1 responded to Tech Executive-1, stating, in part, that the paper’s conclusion was “plausible” in the “narrow scope” defined by Tech Executive-1 .
That sounds kind of wishy washy and Originator-1 sounds pretty guarded. Also note that Durham quotes exactly three words of the response.
Fortunately, Originator-1 is a woman named April Lorenzen and she has copies of her own emails.
Here are the complete sentences from her response that include the words Durham quoted.
In the narrow scope of what you have defined above, I agree wholeheartedly that it is plausible. If the white paper intends to say that there are communications between at least Alfa and Trump, which are being intentionally hidden by Alfa and Trump I absolutely believe that is the case.
The researchers really did believe that something suspicious was going with national security implications and took that info to the FBI.
Durham is straight up gaslighting the American people and federal judge in the Sussmann indictment.
IANAL, but I don’t think the underlying crimes involved would be among the exemptions to the 5 year statute of limitations.
Major fraud 18 USC 1031has an extended statute of limitations - 7 years-, but “major” is defined financially, the fraud has to involve money or property worth more than 1 million dollars. I don’t think anyone is alleging any financial fraud.
I think any charges they drum up would be likely to fall under 18 USC 287 False, fictitious of fraudulent claims or conspiracy to defraud the United States 18 USC 371.
Those crimes carry the standard 5 year statute of limitations, although conspiracy charges may provide opportunity for extension - as long as any part of the conspiracy lies within the statute of limitations, all earlier crimes that are part of the same conspiracy can be charged.
Well the MSM sold the Russian collusion for four plus years… if they admitted they were WRONG. Oh dear. Things are adding up and no matter what… this is worse than Watergate!
Why would they “admit they were wrong” when there is a ridiculously large amount of actual evidence pointing to close coordination between Russia and the Trump campaign, and to efforts by Trump and his associates to cover it up?
That’s actually pretty interesting, and I would think Durham would have been better off avoiding that sort of thing. But that said, I think while the full quote from the email significantly changes the story in terms of whether anyone ever believed there was a Trump-Alfa connection to begin with, that’s not really central to Durham’s case against Sussman.
Durham doesn’t need to make the case that the entire Alfa Bank thing was concocted from thin air by Sussman and his associates. He is prosecuting him for allegedly misrepresenting himself to Baker as a neutral concerned citizen (WRT this issue) when in reality he was acting as a heavily vested player with an ax to grind. The fact that Lorenzen was agreeing the paper is plausible “in the narrow context of what you have defined above” supports that case, because it suggests that the parameters were carefully drawn in order to support that finding, which is at odds with the “neutral concerned citizen” image that Sussman allegedly presented to Baker.
Since Lorenzen is saying that she “absolutely believe[s]” that “there are communications between at least Alfa and Trump, which are being intentionally hidden by Alfa and Trump”, then her first clause is obscure. What is the “narrow scope” that she refers to and that her assessment relies on? But in any event, regardless of what it was, the very statement that the paper was based on having a defined narrow scope suggests less than the type of candor that one would expect from a guy just coming forward as a concerned citizen, which is all Durham is trying to prove here.
That’s the point. Much of what Durham has put in the indictment and subsequent filings is not central to Durham’s case against Sussmann. Much of it has nothing to do with it at all.
The narrow scope is contained in the email Lorenzen is responding to. Durham quotes it in the indictment.
Please read as if you had no prior knowledge or involvement, and you were handed this document as a security expert (NOT a dns expert) and were asked: ‘Is this plausible as an explanation?’ NOT to be able to say that this is, without doubt, fact, but to merely be plausible. Do NOT spend more than a short while on this (If you spend more than an hour you have failed the assignment). Hopefully less.
He’s asking whether a security expert reading the whitepaper would find the hypothesis plausible as opposed to asking them to do a more lengthy detailed technical review. That’s the narrow scope. The paper didn’t have a narrow scope, the review he was asking for had a narrow scope.
Perhaps more importantly, the he in the preceding paragraph is Joffe not Sussmann. This exchange doesn’t involve Sussmann at all. It has literally nothing to do with Sussmann’s meeting with Baker.
Why then is Durham misleadingly summarizing these emails in the Sussmann indictment? He’s not trying to convict Sussmann of lying to Baker (he has no chance of this). He’s cherry picking things to push a narrative, and doing so in a pretty clumsy manner. Don’t fall for it.
Well yes he is, but not in court, but only in public. He knows that he has nothing at all that could be legally actionable, but he also knows that he is putting out these tidbits where they will be picked up by right wing propaganda machine.
I didn’t read it that way because “the narrow scope of what you have defined above” (emphasis added) sounds more like a definition-type issue, which would indicate the way the paper was being structured. What you’re saying would be more like “the narrow scope of your request” or something like that. But it could be that you’re right and she was being imprecise.
I don’t see this. Durham is alleging that Sussman and Joffe were working together on this; in fact, that Joffe was Sussman’s client. If Joffe was just trying to come up with some way to hang something on Trump, then Sussman was too. (Unless Sussman is going to claim that Joffe fooled him as to what he was doing.) So the nature of what Joffe was up to is highly relevant to Durham’s filing.
No. She is referring to what was above. Would a security expert, looking at the paper for an hour, find the hypothesis plausible? That was what was above, and that is the narrow scope. No other reasonable interpretation exists when things are looked at in context.
That’s not how the law works. Even if Joffe was single-mindedly out to get Trump at all costs (he wasn’t), it doesn’t even suggest Sussmann lied to Baker. It won’t even be admissible as evidence.
If Durham was charging Sussmann with something related to misleading the FBI by giving them a whitepaper that he knew contained a made-up story, maybe Joffe’s emails about reviewing the paper might be relevant.
Durham is going on and on about uncharged behavior and doing so in a misleading manner. He’s not trying to secure a conviction. He’s telling a fairy tale.
What you write here is completely correct, ISTM. But that’s not what Durham is doing.
What Durham needs in order to convict Sussman is two things. 1) he needs to show that Sussman lied to Baker. 2) he needs to show that that lie was material. What he’s saying about Joffe relates to 2) and not to 1).
What he’s saying is that the lie about not representing anyone is material because had the FBI known that Sussman was representing clients with an interest in pushing these allegations, they would have been more skeptical and would have looked more closely at what Joffe was doing and how that paper was produced.
