Making Sense of the Latest Clinton-Trump-Russia Court Filing

Special Counsel John Durham raises a new question and prompts plenty of bluster.

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If you’d nearly forgotten about the ongoing work of Special Counsel John Durham, you’re not alone. The lawyer was appointed by Attorney General William Barr in 2019 to review the origins of the Russia investigation that bedeviled the early years of Donald Trump’s presidency. Durham has been steadily plugging away at his investigation for years but has made few public moves: His most significant charge so far came last year against Michael Sussmann, a former attorney for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, for one count of lying to the FBI.

That changed last weekend, though, when a new filing from Durham electrified conservative media. In a routine motion concerning conflicts of interest in the Sussmann case, Durham had seemingly revealed new details about the Clinton campaign’s efforts both to suss out supposed connections between Trump’s campaign and Russia and to wheedle federal law enforcement to start trying to do the same.

Much of the story had already been told by Durham in Sussmann’s indictment last September, but it’s worth going over in full again. When in September 2016 Sussmann took to the FBI a bundle of information supposedly linking Team Trump to Russia, he falsely told FBI General Counsel James Baker that he was not doing so on behalf of any client, Durham alleges. In reality, according to the indictment, Sussmann was doing so on behalf of both the Clinton campaign and Rodney Joffe, then senior vice president at the information services firm Neustar.

It’s this alleged lie—which Sussmann denies—that forms the basis of Durham’s charge against him. But it’s the details of what came before that meeting—of how that bundle of information came to be—that have provoked the latest bout of controversy.

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  1. Avatar photo
    Ben Connelly

    “ This may be a reductive and oversimple way to view the world. But it’s easy to see how people come by it when you see a story like this, which features a tech executive hoping to land a job with an incoming candidate’s administration, working with that candidate’s lawyer and exploiting government connections to collect dirt on that candidate’s opponent—with an assist from some university researchers for good measure, just to round out the illustration—and then laundering that dirt through chummy relationships with a credulous press. And that’s not even to consider the repeated attempts to get federal law enforcement involved in a wild goose chase.

    Of course it wasn’t worse than Watergate. Why would it have been? There’s no need for criminal dirty tricks when you already know all the right people.”

    I think that’s the most clear-eyed assessment I’ve ever heard. Thanks for covering this Andrew. Now I’m going to go back to forgetting everything about Perkins Coie and DNS servers until four years from now when some new complicated revelation comes to light.

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  2. Lorenzo’s Oil

    I welcome the backstory to help explain why conservative media is going nuts over nothing. As noted, “there’s little evidence to suggest any of these actions were illegal.” However, it’s the next sentence that troubles me: “But who can look at them without disgust.” I can because there is no other comparison to the level of disgusting actions than Trump, and your team consistently covers them so I appreciate it.

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    Kurt Hollasch

    So, there was only a little spying ,I understand. Unfortunately, I consider spying a binary condition.

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    DougAz

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/02/18/how-right-embraced-false-claim-clinton-spied-president-trump

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  5. Katie Pires

    I have been struggling to make sense of the latest filing. Thank you for this concise and easy to understand breakdown!

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    PaulH

    As I wrote elsewhere, I am surprised that Neustar has not taken more heat over this. While the company had the right to access the data, they certainly weren't supposed to be analyzing it in order to benefit the personal and political aspirations of one their executives. That analysis is almost certainly a contractual violation even if it is not a crime. What client would want to work with a company (that is supposed to be in the security business) that allows their executives to snoop through the client's data for his own benefit?

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    Show Jay Janney the 🚪!

    Sussmann was known as a Clinton supporter working for a law firm with deep ties to her. Didn't anyone at the FBI ponder if his motives might be suspect? Or was that simply a cover story now gone awry?

    Are they so clueless Jonathan Swift wants to write a sequel about them: "𝗚𝘂𝗹𝗹𝗶𝗯𝗹𝗲'𝘀 𝗧𝗿𝗮𝘃𝗲𝗹𝘀"? The real question is who at the FBI wanted to believe this enough to overlook his obvious conflict of agenda.

    I don't think the Ivy Leagues are sending the FBI their best.

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      JohnF

      They asked him that specific question during their meeting with him. He denied it. That's what he's been indicted for. There's no indication in the indictment that says they believed him (it just says they might have put even less effort into this if they'd known up front).

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        Greenknight

        Considering that the Sussman indictment is based on third-party hand-written notes of a second-hand conversation that was never recorded or had contemporaneous notes taken when it occurred, and that Durham never once asked Sussman for an on-the-record statement before indicting him, it’s obvious that even he (Durham) isn’t serious about this investigation. The entire thing is legal cosplay to feed the right-wing outrage machine.

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          JohnF

          Just read through Sussmann's lawyer's Motion to Dismiss (filed today). https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/21235260/us-v-sussman-mtd-1.pdf
          What I find interesting is that the defence motion ignores the entire circus that's developed around this and just focuses on the fact that the only thing that Sussman has actually been charged with is not telling the FBI who his client was. If that stays the case, then if this thing ever goes to Trial it's going to hinge on whether or not that omission was material or not (whether his failure to disclose the information affected an actual government decision). Since the only decision that was being made at that time was whether or not to investigate Sussmann's information, Durham is likely going to have to prove that the FBI would not have investigated if it had known who Sussmann's client was. Otherwise, he's going to have to prove that the alleged false statement was material enough on its own to really be considered a violation of the law.
          Unfortunately, unless anyone involved with all of the background technology stuff is ever charged with a crime, it's possible that Sussmann's trial won't cast any more light on these things (in which case, Durham's allegations will enter into the "Russia Hoax" lore where they will be given an honored place next to the Steele Dossier).

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          JohnF

          I hadn't heard that. Where was that reported?

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            Greenknight

            I heard it on either CNN or MSNBC where they reported on the indictment.
            The story was that Sussman spoke with Gates (who did not record or take notes on the conversation) with the DNS data... Gates then spoke with another FBI agent at a later time (I can't remember if it was days or weeks after the conversation with Sussman), for which that agent took written notes.

            These notes say that Sussman told Gates that he wasn't acting on behalf of a client, and Durham, without ever asking Sussman for an on-the-record statement, issued the indictment based on Durham's belief that Sussman was working for Clinton at the time (which Sussman denies) based on the fact that Sussman has previously billed the Clinton campaign for other, unrelated work.

            The whole indictment is nonsense.

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    Mick Staton

    Interestingly, none of what Durham is alleging, which is pretty weak sauce, changes the fact that the Russians hacked Podesta and the DNC. None of it changes the fact that Don, Jr, Manafort, and Kushner, met face to face with a Putin asset who offered them dirt on Clinton. None of it changes the fact that Roger Stone coordinated with Wikileaks on releasing the stolen emails.

    Yet if you listen to the Trump apologists you would believe that all of this was just a dirty trick concocted by the Clinton campaign.

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      PaulH

      On the other hand, what was finally shown in the Mueller report (which certainly included some unacceptable and illegal behavior by the Trump team) was pretty weak sauce compared to the treasonous collusion narrative propounded in the Steele Dossier.

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    BrettH

    Enjoyed the read, thanks Andrew.

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  10. Brook

    A 74 y.o. fellow with virtually no tech savviness, I have been trying to understand just what happened here. Thanks to Andrew’s lucid explanation, I now have a good grasp of what happened. I had previously read accounts in both the WP and WSJ, and they did not come close to matching the clarity of Andrew’s explanation. Again, TD to the rescue.

    Anyone even remotely familiar with my previous comments knows that I yield to no one in my disdain for Trump. But, I must say the actions on the part of Sussman, Joffe, et al stink to high heaven. And, as Andrew observed, this crap is precisely the kind of cozy, know-the-right-people machinations that get populist demagogues like Trump elected. This is beyond disgusting.

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      Kizedek

      If you think it's "beyond disgusting", then I hope you aren't on Facebook and don't use Google to search for anything.

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      Aylene Wright

      Andrew has been very good at putting the appeal of Trump to his followers in context, in a way many fellow Trump critics who just default to "it's a CULT", etc., haven't. Although this article isn't, like some of his past ones, focused on Trump supporters, it does show he continues to have that ability.

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