WASHINGTON – John H. Durham, the special attorney appointed by the Trump administration to examine Russia’s investigation, has told the Justice Department that he will ask a grand jury to charge a prominent cybersecurity lawyer accused of making a false statement in the FBI, said people familiar with the matter.
Any accusation by the lawyer – Michael Sussmann, a former federal prosecutor and now a member of the law firm Perkins Coie and representing the Democratic National Committee on issues related to the hacking of his servers in Russia in 2016 – is likely to attract significant political attention. .
Donald J. Trump and his supporters have long accused Democrats and Perkins Coie, whose political law group, a division separate from Sussmann’s, of Hillary Clinton’s party and campaign, of trying to wake up. unfair suspicions about alleged ties to Trump. Russia.
The case against Mr. Sussmann focuses on the question of who his client was when he conveyed certain suspicions about Mr. Trump and Russia to the FBI in September 2016. Among other things, investigators have examined whether Mr. Sussmann was working. Secret to Clinton Campaign – Denying It
An indictment is not a certainty: on rare occasions, grand juries reject prosecutors ’requests. But Sussmann’s lawyers, Sean M. Berkowitz and Michael S. Bosworth of Latham & Watkins, acknowledged Wednesday that they expected him to be charged, while denying that he made false statements.
“Mr. Sussmann has not committed any crime, “they said.” Any prosecution here would be unfounded, unprecedented and an unjustified deviation from the apolitical and principled way in which the Department of Justice is supposed to do its job. We are sure that if Mr. Sussmann is accused, he will prevail in the trial and claim his good name.
A spokesman for Attorney General Merrick B. Garland, who has the authority to overrule Mr. Durham, but is said not to have made any comments. Not even a spokesman for Mr. Durham.
The indictment against Sussmann focuses on a meeting he had on September 19, 2016 with James A. Baker, who was the FBI’s top lawyer at the time, according to people who knew the matter. They spoke on condition of anonymity.
Due to a five-year limitation period for such cases, Mr. Durham has a deadline for this weekend to file a charge for the activity as of that date.
At the meeting, Mr. Sussmann transmitted data and analysis from cybersecurity researchers who thought strange Internet data could be evidence of a covert communications channel between computer servers associated with the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank, a Russian financial institution linked to the Kremlin.
The FBI finally decided that these concerns had no merit. The special adviser who later took charge of the Russian investigation, Robert S. Mueller III, ignored the matter in his final report.
Sussmann’s lawyers have told the Justice Department that he sought the meeting because he and cybersecurity investigators believed the New York Times was about to publish an article on Alfa Bank data and wanted to head the FBI. . (In fact, The Times was unprepared to publish this article, but it did publish a mention of Alfa Bank six weeks later).
Mr Durham has used a grand jury to examine the Alfa Bank episode and appears to be looking for any evidence that the data has been collected or that the analysis of the data was deliberately biased, according to The New Yorker and other sources. for sale. So far, there has been no public sign that any such evidence has been found.
But Durham apparently found an inconsistency: Baker, the former FBI lawyer, is said to have told investigators he recalled Sussmann saying he did not meet him on behalf of any client. But in a statement to Congress in 2017, Mr. Sussmann stated that he sought the meeting on behalf of an unnamed client who was an expert in cybersecurity and who had helped analyze the data.
In addition, internal billing records that Durham obtained from Perkins Coie are said to show that when Mr. Sussmann recorded certain hours working on the Alfa Bank issue, though not in the meeting with Mr. Baker, billed time for Mrs. Clinton’s 2016 Campaign.
Another Perkins Coie partner, Marc Elias, then served as general counsel for the Clinton campaign. Mr. Elias, who did not respond to inquiries, left Perkins Coie last month.
In his attempt to put an end to any accusation, Sussmann’s lawyers are said to have insisted that his client represented the cybersecurity expert he mentioned in Congress and that he was not there on behalf of or in the direction of the campaign. Clinton.
They are also said to have argued that the billing records are misleading because Mr Sussmann did not charge his client to work on the Alfa Bank issue, but needed to prove internally that he was working on something. He was discussing the matter with Mr Elias and the campaign paid a flat monthly withholding to the company, so Mr Sussmann’s hours did not involve any additional charges, they said.
Last October, while Mr. Durham was reduced to the question of Alfa Bank, the researcher who presented these concerns to Mr. Sussmann hired a new lawyer, Steven A. Tyrrell.
Speaking on the condition that the New York Times not name his client in this article, citing fear of harassment, Mr. Tyrrell said his client thought Mr. Sussmann represented him at the meeting with Mr. Baker.
“My client is an apolitical cybersecurity expert with a background in public service who was said to be required to share with police sensitive information provided to him by DNS experts,” Tyrrell said, referring to the “Domain Name System “, a part of how the Internet works and generated the data that was the basis of Alfa Bank’s concerns.
Tyrrell added: “He sought legal advice from Michael Sussmann, who had advised him on unrelated matters in the past, and Mr. Sussmann shared this information with the FBI on his behalf. He did not know that the law firm of Mr. Sussmann had a relationship with the Clinton campaign and was simply doing the right thing. “
Mr. Trump’s supporters have long been wary of Perkins Coie. On behalf of the Democrats, Elias commissioned a research firm, Fusion GPS, to examine Mr. Trump’s ties to Russia. This led to the so-called Steele Dossier, a notorious compendium of rumors about Trump-Russia ties. The FBI cited some dossier information in faulty wiretapping applications.
Some of the questions Durham’s team has been asking in recent months, including the testimonies he cited before a grand jury, according to people familiar with some of the sessions, suggest he has been following the theory that the Durham campaign Clinton used Perkins Coie to send dubious information to the FBI about Russia and Mr. Trump in an effort to increase investigative activity to hurt his 2016 campaign.
Apparently, Durham has also weighed in on the possibility of initiating some sort of action against Perkins Coie as an organization. The firm’s external attorneys recently met with the special attorney’s team and reviewed the evidence, according to other people familiar with their discussions, arguing it wasn’t enough for any legal sanction.
Perkins Coie’s attorneys and the firm’s managing partner did not respond to phone calls or emails seeking comment.
Sussmann and his company have been particular targets for Mr. Trump and his supporters.
In October 2018, a Wall Street Journal columnist attacked Mr. Sussmann, calling him “the main man in the firm’s DNC and Clinton campaign accounts,” apparently combining him with Mr. Elias. Perkins Coie responded with a letter to the editor saying it was not Mr. Sussmann’s role and that the unnamed client on whose behalf he spoke to the FBI had “no connection to either the Clinton campaign or the DNC or any other client of the political group. ”
Four months later, Mr. Trump attacked Mr. Sussmann in a couple of somewhat confusing Twitter posts, trying to link him to the Clinton campaign and the Steele dossier.
Raising the spectrum of politicization in the Durham investigation, Mr. Sussmann’s lawyers are said to have argued before the Justice Department that Baker’s memory was erroneous, immaterial and was too weak a basis for a charge of false statements. . There were no other witnesses to the conversation, people who knew the subject said.
In a statement to Congress in 2018, Mr. Baker said he did not remember Mr. Sussmann “specifically saying he was acting on behalf of a particular client,” but he also said Mr. Sussmann had told him “that he had cyber-experts who they had gotten some information that they thought should get into the hands of the FBI. ”
However, the Durham team is said to have found handwritten notes made by another senior FBI official at the time, whom Baker reported on the conversation with Mr. Sussmann, who supports the idea that Mr. Sussmann said he was not there. on behalf of a customer. It is unclear whether these notes would be admissible during the trial under the so-called rule of rumors.
An attorney for Mr. Baker declined to comment.
Durham has been under pressure to get some results from his lengthy investigation, which began when then-Attorney General William P. Barr assigned him in 2019 to investigate Russia’s investigation. Out of office and exiled from Twitter, Mr. Trump has issued statements about “Where is Durham?”