The Steele Dossier was a pack of lies, but the Clinton campaign attorney who promoted it to the FBI didnt lie.
By John Kiriakou / Original to ScheerPost
Michael Sussmann, an A-list attorney who was a senior advisor to Hillary Clintons 2016 presidential campaign, was acquitted by a jury in the federal District Court of the District of Columbia on Tuesday. Sussmann had been accused of lying to the FBI, a crime widely considered to be a process felony or a throwaway felony, something the Justice Department charges you with when they cant get you for anything else. Even though the federal sentencing guidelines called for 0-6 months in prison had Sussmann been convicted, the loss of his law license and the humiliation of a felony conviction would have been a far worse punishment.
But that didnt happen. Sussmann was acquitted after the jury had deliberated for only six hours, two of which were spent eating lunch. After the trial was completed, two jurors, including the foreperson, told the Washington Post that the verdict was not a close call or a hard decision. The foreperson added, Politics were not a factor. Personally, I dont think it should have been prosecutedThe government could have spent our time more wisely. The second juror said, Everyone pretty much saw it the same way.
The verdict raises several differentand importantquestions. First, how did this happen? The evidence against Sussmann was pretty straightforward, at least if you take the FBIs word for it. Ill give you the details in a minute. Second, why did this happen? The jury foreperson said that politics was not a factor. But was any prosecution of a senior Clinton campaign official even possible in a jurisdiction where Hillary Clinton beat Donald Trump 91-4? Third, was this more a reflection on the incompetence and unpopularity of the FBI? And finally, was it because people still believe the false narrative of the Steele Dossier, that the Russians got Donald Trump elected President of the United States.
This case began with the Steele Dossier. That document, compiled on behalf of the 2016 Clinton campaign by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele, made a number of very serious accusations against Donald Trump, his company, and the Trump campaign. Some of these accusations, if they had been true, would have constituted major crimes.
The allegations in the Steele Dossier included that the Russians had:
Literally nothing in the Steele Dossier was demonstrably true. Thats the problem with raw intelligence. Its just a collection of unvetted rumors. Christopher Steele, being a career intelligence professional, knew that. He saw his job as putting all the rumors he could collect from his Russian contacts in one document and then send it to the Clinton campaign. But the Clinton people, including Sussmann, were not intelligence professionals. They accepted the revelations as fact, which is what got them into trouble in the first place.
Sussmanns role in this was that when the Clinton campaign received the Steele Dossier, which had also alleged that the Trump Organization was communicating with Russias Alfa Bank using a private encrypted server, he texted a contact at the FBI, former FBI General Counsel James Baker, saying, I have a time-sensitive (and sensitive) issue that I need to raise with you. Im coming on my ownnot on behalf of a client or companywant to help the Bureau.
That text essentially kicked off the case. Sussmann wasnt going to speak to the FBI as a private citizen. He was going as a representative of the Clinton campaign. At least, that was special prosecutor John Durhams contention. And Durham thought he had proved that because when Sussmann got back to his office, he billed the Clinton campaign for the time he took to talk to Baker. The billing document was entered into evidence as a prosecution exhibit.
This is where there was an odd twist in the case. The Justice Department didnt charge Sussmann with lying to the FBI in the text message. Its unclear why, and DOJ has never explained it. Instead, Sussmann was charged with lying to Baker in their actual meeting. Baker testified that he was 100 percent confident that he said that (that Sussmann was acting as a private individual) in the meeting. Michaels a friend of mine and a colleague, and I believed it and trusted that the statement was truthful. Prosecutors alleged that when Baker then sent the information about Alfa Bank and the Trump Organization to FBI agents for investigation, he could not tell them that the Steele Dossier was a piece of opposition political research from the Clinton campaign. As a result, FBI agents wasted their time investigating the allegations. For their part, the FBI agents conducting the investigation said that all they knew was that the information had come from the General Counsel, so it must have been reliable.
Sussmanns attorneys countered that Baker was mistaken. They found a note from a meeting at the Justice Department in March 2017 attended by Baker, senior Justice Department officials, and FBI agents, which mentioned the Alfa Bank investigation and said the information was brought to the FBI by an attorney on behalf of client (sic). Baker said that he had only a vague memory of that meeting and that he had no recollection that anybody had said anything about Sussmanns client. Baker, however, had to admit that he had not taken any notes in the original meeting with Sussmann and that he was relying only on his memory, a violation of the FBIs standard operating procedure for meetings with people outside the FBI.
The case against Sussmann was clearly weak from the start. It was also very poorly timed. The decision to prosecute the attorney was taken while the FBI was still reeling over allegations that it, not the Russian government, was the one responsible for giving the country Donald Trump. Remember, former FBI Director James Comey said in July 2016, four months before the presidential election, that he was recommending to the Attorney General that Hillary Clinton not be charged for mishandling classified information by using a private email server. But on October 28, 2016, just days before the election, Comey felt compelled to send a letter to Congress saying that he was considering reopening the investigation against Clinton. The act caused a political earthquake, and the Washington Post reported that a senior Justice Department official speaking on the condition of anonymity said, Director Comey understood our position (on the Clinton investigation.) It was conveyed to the FBI, and Comey made an independent decision to alert the Hill. He is operating independently of the Justice Department. And he knows it. Clinton was livid. And she has always blamed Comey for the fact that she lost the election.
Another of the Sussmann defense points was that neither he nor the Clinton campaign would have gone to the FBI if they had wanted to spread rumors about Trump. They didnt trust the FBI, after all. Instead, they said they would have gone to the media. And go to the media they did. Clinton campaign manager Marc Elias said during the trial that it was Clinton herself who ordered senior campaign officials to leak the claim that the Trump Organization had a secret channel to the Kremlin through Alfa Bank. She had the information sent to Slate, which published it immediately. The campaign then followed up with a statement expressing alarm, as if this were some sort of new revelation they had never heard before. It was a false narrative that the Clinton campaign circulated for political gain.
The New York Times, though, even now that the trial is over, continues reporting from an alternative reality. Journalist Charlie Savage, who covered the Sussmann trial for the paper, wrote the day after the verdict that the trial centered on odd internet data after it became public that Russia had hacked the Democrats. A logical conclusion was that the information in the Steele Dossier was true because Mr. Trump had encouraged the country to target Mrs. Clintons emails. Savage continued that, Trying to persuade reporters to write about such suspicions is not a crime.
Nobody ever said it was a crime. Thats not why Sussmann was charged in the first place. He was charged because the FBI believed he had lied to them. And there was never any evidence that Russians had hacked Democrats, by the way.
None of that matters anymore. Its all over. Sussmann is free to go. The FBI looks like a bunch of incompetent boobs. John Durham wasted millions of dollars of the taxpayers money. And the New York Times will have to spin a different story.
Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that Salon was the recipient of a Clinton campaign leak about t he Trump-Alfa Bank rumors in 2016. That story appeared in Slate.
John Kiriakou is a former C.I.A. analyst and case officer, former senior investigator for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and former counterterrorism consultant. While employed by the C.I.A., he was involved in critical counterterrorism missions following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, but refused to be trained in so-called enhanced interrogation techniques. After leaving the C.I.A., Kiriakou appeared on ABC News in an interview with Brian Ross, during which he became the first former C.I.A. officer to confirm that the agency waterboarded detainees and label waterboarding as torture. Kiriakous interview revealed that this practice was not just the result of a few rogue agents, but was official U.S. policy approved at the highest levels of the government.
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John Kiriakou: The Steele Dossier and Lying to the FBI Not Guilty as Charged - Scheerpost.com
