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Trump-era special prosecutor takes ex-Clinton campaign lawyer to trial -Breaking

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© Reuters. FILE PHOTO – A guest attending an event called U.S. Presidential Election Watch organised by U.S. Consulate reaches out for a badge. It displays photographs of Republican candidate Donald Trump as well as Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton in Sy

Jan Wolfe, Sarah N. Lynch

WASHINGTON (Reuters] – This week, a Hillary Clinton lawyer faces a criminal prosecution on lying to FBI. The charges relate to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign for the presidency. It is a vital test for a special prosecutor named during Donald Trump’s time.

The politically charged case of Michael Sussmann (an attorney) will see a jury sitting in District of Columbia on Monday. He is accused of lying to the FBI about the identity of the person he represented, when he provided since discredited information that tied Trump with a Russian bank.

On Tuesday, Sussmann’s attorneys will present opening arguments. They plan to claim that their client is innocent of the accusations against him and that they are not guilty of the grave FBI misconduct Republicans expected U.S. Special counsel John Durham to reveal.

This is Durham’s first case against him. He was appointed in 2019 by William Barr, the former Attorney General of the United States. The Justice Department of President Joe Biden has granted Durham permission to complete his work.

Trump is a Republican and has called the FBI’s 2016 investigation a witch-hunt against him. He repeatedly urged Durham, unsuccessfully and in vain to file criminal charges against him before Trump’s defeat to Biden, a Democrat, in Nov. 2020.

Sussmann’s prosecution centers on September 2016, when he presented evidence to FBI about possible cyber-links between Russia’s Alfa Bank and the Trump Organization.

After an investigation by the FBI, Alfa Bank was cleared of all suspicions.

Sussmann was a lawyer at Perkins Coie who served as a campaign attorney for Clinton in 2016.

Durham claims that Sussmann told a lie during the September 2016 meeting, claiming he wasn’t passing on information about Trump for any client.

According to indictment, Sussmann gave the FBI that information not because she was a good citizen, but rather as an attorney for Rodney Joffe (a U.S. technology executive) and Clinton’s presidential campaign.

Sussmann’s attorneys have stated that Sussmann never made any “material” or consequential misstatement to FBI.

Durham’s investigation into 2016’s presidential campaign resulted in three criminal charges being brought against Sussmann (former FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith) and Russian national Igor Danchenko.

Clinesmith was sentenced to a probation after he pleaded guilty in 2020 to falsifying a document as part of the bureau’s early-stage probe into whether Trump’s 2016 campaign colluded with the Russian government.

Danchenko, an analyst who contributed to a 2016 dossier of allegations regarding Trump’s ties to Russia, has pleaded not guilty to charges that he repeatedly lied to the FBI about his sources of information.

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