Womp womp, liars.
Womp womp.
Indeed.
Best news of the day so far! And a very just outcome, IMO.
And it was a unanimous verdict, to boot.
All Federal trials require unanimity.
(you’d think there would be more hung juries, but it’s actually fairly rare)
Charlie Savage covered the trial for the NYT. Here’s his summary:
Overall it’s a good summary, but this is perhaps the most important part:
In reality, the Alfa Bank matter was a sideshow: The F.B.I. had already opened its inquiry on other grounds before Mr. Sussmann passed on the tip, and the final report by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, made no mention of the Alfa Bank suspicions.
Turned out it was a weak case. Any comment, Sam?
Wow. It wasn’t even close:
"The verdict, coming after less than a full day of deliberations spread over parts of Friday and Tuesday, was not a close call or a hard decision, two jurors told The Washington Post.
“Politics were not a factor,” the jury forewoman said. “We felt really comfortable being able to share what we thought. We had concise notes and we were able to address the questions together,” she said, declining to give her name as she left the courthouse."
and
"Personally, I don’t think it should have been prosecuted,” she added, saying the government “could have spent our time more wisely.” A second juror told The Post that in the jury room, “everyone pretty much saw it the same way.”
A politically motivated prosecution makes Durham look like a political hack. I’ll call it a win for the judicial system.
Now onto Hunter Biden’s laptop.
The judge hamstrung the prosecution by not allowing evidence of Democrats’ nefarious deeds and it’s a Washington DC jury and we all know what that means.
I couldn’t help but note that the jury got the case quite late on Friday and had a verdict almost instantly this morning. So I knew it wasn’t a difficult verdict.
Yet another US Attorney’s reputation goes down in the flames of Trumpism.
I suppose it doesn’t matter anymore, but is this what happened?
Sussman went to the FBI with information or suspicions about Alfa Bank and the Trump Campaign. He may or may not have lied about whether he was doing that on behalf of a client. He said then that he wasn’t doing it for a client, but that may have been a lie. The case was about whether he lied and whether the lie was material.
The FBI stated that they assumed what he was reporting was on behalf of a client back then (even though maybe he said he wasn’t), and assumed it was politically motivated, but they went ahead and investigated anyway. Meaning they would have investigated whether he had lied or not.
That seems to mean that the lie, if he did lie, was not material, since it didn’t affect what the FBI did next anyway. Further, the evidence that he did lie was based upon one witness’s testimony, whose statements have changed over time.
This case has been impossible to follow for me. People on the left can’t even seem to tease out what it was for, and people on the right are calling it some serious crime.
That just shows how deep the deep state goes. Even “random” citizens from the DC area selected for jury duty are part of it. Or maybe everybody in DC is part of it, I’m not sure. I need a screaming head to tell me what to think.
You’ve got it about right.
In order to see it as a “serious crime,” you first have to buy into the RW time-honored approach of tainting everything through a political lens. I’m sure you’ve noticed it’s the first thing they do to any situation requiring analysis of right and wrong.
So from their perspective, it’s not that Sussman did the correct thing to bring potentially suspicious evidence to the FBI for further investigation. Which, of course, is what we’d expect any responsible citizen to do, even if their job is to occasionally be a lawyer for Democrats. It’s that he was doing it as a Democrat who has at times worked for Democrats! And thus it is tainted in the minds of the right wing.
Did Sussman lie about whether he was bringing the evidence on behalf of the Clinton campaign? Immaterial. Did it matter? No. Did the FBI treat the information the same as if Sussman had an ulterior motive? They did.
What matters is whether the evidence he brought merited further investigation. It did. Was it ultimately determined that the fruits of the investigation rose to the level of prosecution, or even being noteworthy by Mueller and his team? They did not.
There is not even evidence that Sussman lied. He may have misremembered, but there is zero evidence that he was advancing the information with an ulterior motive.
That seems like a reasonable understanding.
True, but it bears emphasis since there’s been a lot of bleating about “but but but the jury had 3 Hillary Clinton donors.”
I actually don’t know how anyone could know how many jurors were Clinton supporters, but that would be mooted by the fact of the unanimous jury (who apparently had no problem returning an extremely speedy verdict).
John Durham has had a long and (rightfully) respected legal career.
His (failed) prosecution of Sussman is a black mark on it, both for its obvious political nature and its waste of government resources on a patently obvious loser of a case. The only real reason you would bring such a poor case to trial is for political / PR reasons, which is not the role of a special counsel.
I believe AG Garland should seriously consider removing Durham from office shortly.
Interesting. Maybe one of the more right-wing posters (@SpacemanSpiff_II?) could come in and correct my misunderstandings. Because if I had it right, there doesn’t even seem to be the possibility of a conviction.
When the FBI said they treated it as though he were politically motivated anyway, that seems to remove the materiality of the lie. Without the lie being material, I don’t think there’s a crime (assuming for the sake of argument that he did lie, which itself doesn’t seem to be beyond a reasonable doubt).
Well, according to conservative savant Mike Lindell, he has enough evidence to put 300 million Americans in jail. So pretty much everyone, given a population of 258 million adult Americans.
Fox News is on the case!
Can he do that?
This would be a terrible idea from several perspectives. First, special prosecutors should enjoy a very high level of independence. Setting a precedent like this–in which party A appoints a prosecutor to investigate a member of party B, and then party B gains the White House and removes the prosecutor–is not wise at all. It should be saved for egregious occasions; and while this is very poor form on Durham’s part, it’s not egregious.
Second, from a political perspective, when your opponent is making themself look like an idiot, stay out of the way.