DNC Lawyer Michael Sussmann Fires Back At Special Counsel Durham
Hacks gonna hack.
On Friday, Special Counsel John Durham filed a Motion to Inquire Into Potential Conflicts of Interest between attorney Michael Sussmann and his counsel at Latham & Watkins. It’s been five months since Durham indicted Sussmann, a former Perkins Coie lawyer charged with one count of lying to James Baker, then the general counsel of the FBI, in 2016.
And yet it only just occurred to Durham to mention this conflict now. Out of the goodness of his heart.
Or perhaps not. A person given to less charitable interpretation might think that he larded the motion with a bunch of irrelevant, suggestive material, then dropped it the weekend before the Super Bowl to allow the right wing media ecosphere time to spin the story into the next Watergate before anyone else got around to debunking it.
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Durham says that Rodney Joffe, Sussmann’s client who examined the DNS traffic around politically sensitive entities in the way of the Russian hack of the DNC, “exploited this arrangement by mining the [White House]’s DNS traffic and other data for the purpose of gathering derogatory information about Donald Trump.” By way of background, Joffe’s firm Neustar was collecting bulk traffic data, and noticed weird contacts between Trump Tower and Russian servers and phones at the very moment Russians had hacked the DNC, were crawling all over our election infrastructure, and seeding our social media feeds with anti-Hillary memes. He brought the data to Sussmann, who brought it to the FBI.
Durham made further reference to a February 2017 meeting Sussmann had with the CIA, during which he accused Sussmann of telling the same “lie” he told Baker, i.e. that he was not there on behalf of a particular client when he was actually representing the Clinton campaign. (When was Trump inaugurated again?)
Immediately the right wing ecosphere went wild, accusing Clinton of paying Joffe to spy on Trump at the White House and in Trump Tower. Here’s Tucker Carlson last night baselessly accusing the Clinton campaign of stealing emails and text messages.
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By Sunday, Trump was braying for executions.
“In a stronger period of time in our country, this crime would have been punishable by death. In addition, reparations should be paid to those in our country who have been damaged by this,” he howled.
Literally none of that was true, since Joffe was the one who paid Sussmann, not the other way around. And in fact Joffe had legitimate access to the data, all of which predated Trump’s inauguration.
Here’s a footnote from Sussmann’s response, filed today:
For example, although the Special Counsel implies that in Mr. Sussmann’s February 9, 2017 meeting, he provided Agency-2 with EOP data from after Mr. Trump took office, the Special Counsel is well aware that the data provided to Agency-2 pertained only to the period of time before Mr. Trump took office, when Barack Obama was President. 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.
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Sussmann is now moving to strike language from Durham’s filing which is “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.”
“These allegations were not included in the Indictment; these allegations post-date the single false statement that was charged in the Indictment; and these allegations were not necessary to identify any of the potential conflicts of interest with which the Motion is putatively concerned,” Sussman writes of the allegations about his conduct in February of 2017. “Why then include them? The question answers itself.”
Noting that he’s well aware of whatever “conflicts” the Special Counsel purports to be concerned about and has already waived them, Sussmann urges the court to “strike the Factual Background portion of the Special Counsel’s motion pursuant to the Court’s inherent power to ‘fashion an appropriate sanction for conduct which abuses the judicial process.’”
But whether or not US District Judge Christopher Cooper agrees to Sussmann’s request, he can hardly halt the spread of Durham’s false narrative about the Clinton campaign. Because federal judges are powerful, but they can’t order toothpaste back in the tube. That damage is already done.
US v. Sussmann [Docket via Court Listener]
Elizabeth Dye (@5DollarFeminist) lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.
