‘Privileged’ Clinton lawyer lied to feds in ‘plan’ to smear Trump: prosecutor

WASHINGTON — Former Hillary Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann lied to the FBI in a bid to use it as a “political tool” for an “October surprise” against Donald Trump before the 2016 election, a member of special counsel John Durham’s team told jurors on Tuesday.

Sussmann, 57, ignored proper protocol and instead reached out directly to a friend — then-FBI general counsel James Baker — to hand over since-debunked Internet data that purportedly linked a Trump Organization computer server to Russia’s Alfa Bank, prosecutor Deborah Brittain Shaw said.

“It was a plan to create an October surprise on the eve of the presidential election,” she said.

Sussmann is accused of misleading Baker into believing he was merely acting as a “good citizen” because he knew that if the bureau knew he was working for Clinton’s campaign, it “might not meet with him right away, let alone open an investigation,” Shaw said during opening statements at his trial in Washington, DC, federal court.

“He told a lie that was designed to achieve a political end, a lie that was designed to inject the FBI into a presidential election,” she said.

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The prosecutor described Sussmann’s alleged lie as “part of a bigger plan carried out in concert with two clients, the Clinton campaign and Rodney Joffe,” a tech executive and Sussmann client who told him about the data.

“A plan that used and manipulated the FBI. A plan that the defendant hoped would trigger news outlets and trigger an FBI investigation.”

Who’s who in the case

Shaw added: “A plan that largely succeeded.”

But the FBI’s investigation of the data Summann provided didn’t live up to his billing, she said, and was instead found to involve nothing more than a “spam email server” used for marketing purposes.

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Shaw said the prosecution would show that Sussmann’s Sept. 19, 2016, meeting with Baker at the FBI headquarters in Washington, DC, was the culmination of a three-pronged plan involving him, the Clinton campaign and Joffe.

The first step was to have Joffe and other technology experts look for data that could smear Trump, to then leak the findings to the press and for Susmann to finally bring the information to the FBI, she said.

Shaw also portrayed Sussmann as a powerful, connected lawyer “who thought he could lie to the FBI without consequences” because “normal rules didn’t apply” to him.

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“This is a case about privilege,” she said. “No one should be so privileged as to have the ability to walk into the FBI and lie for political ends.”

Durham’s team potentially faces an uphill battle with jurors in Washington, DC — where voters favored Clinton over Trump, 90.9% to 4.1%, in 2016 — and Shaw invoked the notion of nonpartisan justice in saying that the FBI “should never be used as a political pawn.”

“We are here because the FBI is our institution that should don’t be used as a political tool for anyone — not Republicans, not Democrats, not anyone,” she said.

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“Whether we are Democrats or Republicans, whether we hate Donald Trump or love him, we have to believe some things are above politics.”

Earlier, Durham was greeted from the bench by federal Judge Christopher Cooper, who was nominated by former President Barack Obama.

“Good morning, Mr. Durham,” Cooper said.

Defense lawyer Michael Bosworth denied during his opening statement that Sussmann lied to the FBI, saying that neither he nor Baker took notes during their meeting and that Baker’s memory of what was said is now “clear as mud.”

Bosworth also said the bureau was well aware that Sussmann “represented partisan clients.”

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”The FBI knew that he represented the Clinton campaign that summer. The FBI knew that he was an attorney for the [Democratic National Committee], the Democratic Party itself,” he said.

Bosworth also contended that Sussmann reached out to the FBI “to give them a heads up that this story is coming so they’re not caught off guard,” adding, “He wants to help the bureau, which is exactly what he did.”

The prosecution’s first witnesses were both FBI agents, with one, Scott Hellman, noting that the official “chain of custody” for two thumb drives of data that Sussmann gave Baker showed they went to then-agent Peter Strzok, who initially led the “Crossfire Hurricane” Trump-Russia probe.

Strzok was later removed from the investigation after text messages surfaced showing that he and then-FBI lawyer Lisa Page bashed Trump while carrying on an affair.

The testimony of the first witness, FBI agent David Martin, appeared to have been scaled back in response to a defense motion last week that said Durham was apparently planning to have Martin “cast doubt on the specific data and conclusions that Mr. Sussmann presented to the FBI.”

During his time on the stand, Martin wasn’t asked anything about the possibility that the data had been “spoofed” to disguise its origins, which was among the subjects to which Sussmann objected.

Sussmann’s trial is the first to result from Durham’s three-year probe of potential crimes committed in connection with the investigations of purported Trump-Russia connections by the FBI and former special counsel Robert Muller.

He’s charged with a single count of lying to the government, which carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison.

A former FBI lawyer, Kevin Clinesmith, previously pleaded guilty and was sentenced to probation for falsifying an email to renew a wiretap against former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.

Russia analyst Igor Danchenko also faces trial in October for allegedly lying to the FBI about the sources of information that he passed along to former British spy Christoper Steele and which wound up in the largely discredited “Steele dossier” against Trump.