Hillary Clinton got some bad news from the judge on Thursday. So far, Sussmann’s team has been doing a reasonable job of damage control but they weren’t quite good enough. John Durham will get his hands on 22 internal emails.
Judge okay’s disclosure
On Thursday, May 12, Judge Christopher Cooper ordered Sussmann’s lawyers to fork over the batch of hotly contested emails about Hillary Clinton, her 2016 campaign, and the plot to frame her political opponent by weaponizing the justice department.
Fusion GPS and their Perkins Coie counsel are downplaying the result, claiming “the emails don’t show any wrongdoing.” If they were so harmless, why did the defense team fight so hard to keep them out? Everyone wonders. Especially Special Prosecutor John Durham himself.
Durham asked for the emails fair and square with a subpoena. Judge Cooper agreed that they should be allowed to see them and use them in court. Michael Sussmann is headed to a very public trial next week on charges of lying to the FBI.
Why he dropped a tip in the bureau’s lap is just as important as what it was. The real story is that he purposely engineered fake evidence and fed it to the FBI to help Hillary Clinton win the election. The embarrassing part is that even though the fix was in, she still lost.
From what’s already known, these particular emails are from one Fusion employee to another. The judge let them in because they “pertain to their efforts to plant news coverage about Trump’s supposed ties to Russia.”
It would soon morph into what James Comey liked to call “Crossfire Hurricane.” Conservatives like to call it a plot that makes the Watergate break-in look like a third rate burglary.
Win some lose some
The judge didn’t hand John Durham a total victory. His mustache is still bristling that another 16 related emails won’t see the light of day in open court. He could have used those to make Hillary squirm even more.
Those, Cooper insists, are “shielded under attorney-client protections.” That’s exactly why everyone hires lawyers. Clinton’s told Fusion that they wanted some help with legal work. The only problem is that attempting to frame a presidential candidate is illegal work.
The judge will soon get to hear Durham’s version of how Sussmann and his ilk started the Trump-Russia collusion fantasy and how Hillary Clinton’s allies “peddled” that information all over Washington.
The Federal Bureau of instigation and department of just us weren’t above forging evidence and lying to the FISA court to get what they wanted. As long as it kept Donald Trump out of their way, all the options were on the table.
Sussmann was smack in the middle of the marketing operation just before the 2016 election where a “tip about strange cyber links between Trump and a Russian bank” was fed to the FBI, who figured out soon that it was bogus but decided to use it anyway. Judge Cooper isn’t buying the story cooked up by the defense.
“It is clear that Fusion employees also interacted with the press as part of an affirmative media relations effort by the Clinton Campaign.” That’s more than a little above and beyond your basic attorney client relationship.
