Defense attorneys for Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann have portrayed their client as the paragon of patriotic professionalism.
Yet to believe his defense to the felony false-statement charge brought by Russiagate special counsel John Durham, you’d have to conclude that Sussmann is the most unethical lawyer in Washington, DC.
Sussmann is accused of insisting that he was not representing any client in September 2016 — the stretch run of the heated presidential campaign — when he peddled to the FBI bogus evidence of a supposed communications backchannel between Donald Trump and the Kremlin. Sussmann was bringing the information only because he wanted to “help the bureau” protect the country, he told the FBI’s then-general counsel, James Baker, in a text message.
Sussmann has no real defense to the charge. The evidence is so overwhelming that he was representing the Clinton campaign at the time of his meeting with Baker that Sussmann does not challenge it. Moreover, the information he provided to the FBI — Internet data explained by white papers — was compiled by another client, tech executive Rodney Joffe, who was hoping for a cybersecurity job in the anticipated Hillary Clinton administration. Joffe worked on the materials in conjunction with Fusion GPS, the information outfit retained to dig up dirt on Trump by top Clinton campaign counsel Marc Elias, who was then Sussmann’s law partner.
It’s obvious that Sussmann was representing the Clinton campaign and Joffe when he said he wasn’t representing anyone. For conviction, prosecutors must show that a statement was not only false but also material. On this, though, the evidence is also irrefutable.
For obvious reasons, the FBI needs to know the motivations of people who proffer information. As a former longtime Justice Department lawyer, Sussmann knew this. Indeed, he lied precisely because he knew that if he had honestly told Baker the information was partisan opposition research he was providing to the FBI on behalf of the Clinton campaign, his gambit would have been dismissed as a ploy to enmesh the bureau in electoral politics.
So what is Sussmann’s defense?
He claims that, although he may technically have been representing the Clinton campaign during that time frame, he was not really representing the campaign in connection with the FBI meeting.
He insists that campaign officials would have been opposed to his bringing the Trump-Russia information to the bureau because they wanted it to be promoted by the media — a strategy Hillary Clinton personally approved. Going to the FBI, on this rationalization, would have been counterproductive because the bureau would lean on the press to delay publishing until agents had time to investigate.
Consequently, we’re to believe that Sussmann went to the FBI against his client’s interests, because of his own patriotic concerns for national security.
This is a laughable defense. Enticing the FBI into investigating the Trump-Russia allegations would have made the story more attractive to the media and more explosive for the “October surprise” objective of the Clinton campaign — an election-eve story that the FBI suspected Trump of being a Putin plant.
But put that aside. Under professional ethics standards, a lawyer has a duty of fealty to his client. Thus, as the American Bar Association’s rules put it, “the lawyer’s own interests should not be permitted to have an adverse effect on representation of a client.”
Fucking lawyers.
Scum of the earth.
I had a lawyers license yanked for a year, in NYS, for lying to me. I had a “tape recorder answering machine” and submitted his lies, on tape, to the NY State committee on professional standards. I could never find a NY State lawyer to recover my lost fee from the crook.
“For obvious reasons, the FBI needs to know the motivations of people who proffer information.”
If the FBI was unaware of Sussman’s connections and allegiance to the Clintons, then they’re complete imbeciles.
THEY lied to the FISA court, not Sussman.
The FBI perjured themselves, sullied themselves, and aided and abetted the sworn enemies of the United States of America (the “Deep State” and the Demonrats) to subvert the Constitution and undermine the electoral process – thus – committing Treason (with the support and protection of the DoJ, by the way).
mortem tyrannis
izlamo delenda est …
“…his gambit would have been to enmesh the bureau in electoral politics.”
As if they wouldn’t have gone along willingly. Any bets that the upper echelons were asked the best way to involve the FBI in a way to make it appear they didn’t know what was going on?
Shit’s really taking it on the chin this morning!