Posted on 09/16/21
| News Source: The Hill
A federal grand jury on Thursday indicted attorney Michael Sussman on a charge of lying to the FBI during the 2016 campaign, marking the second prosecution brought by John Durham, the special counsel tapped by former President Trump to investigate the FBI's probe into Russian interference.
The indictment alleges that Sussman, an attorney at the firm Perkins Coie with ties to the Democratic Party, misrepresented who he was working for when he presented evidence to the FBI in 2016 of a link between the Trump Organization and the Russian financial company Alfa Bank.
Prosecutors in Durham's office say that Sussman falsely claimed to investigators at the time that he was not acting on behalf of any client when he had actually been representing Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign and an unnamed tech executive.
"Sussman's false statement misled the FBI General Counsel and other FBI personnel concerning the political nature of his work and deprived the FBI of information that might have permitted it more fully to assess and uncover the origins of the relevant data and technical analysis, including the identities and motivations of Sussman's clients," the indictment reads.
The FBI investigated the allegations and determined that there was insufficient evidence to link Trump's business with Alfa Bank, and the former special counsel Robert Mueller did not address the issue in the report on his investigation.