WASHINGTON – Michael Sussmann, a prominent Democrat-linked cybersecurity lawyer, was acquitted Tuesday of a felony he lied to the FBI because he had no clients in 2016 when he shared advice on possible connections between Donald J. Trump and Russia.
The verdict dealt a blow to special counsel John H. Durham, who was appointed by the Trump administration three years ago to investigate the Trump-Russia investigation into any crime.
Durham expressed disappointment with the verdict, but said he respected the jury’s decision, which he deliberated for about six hours.
“I also want to acknowledge and thank the investigators and the prosecution team for their efforts to seek truth and justice in this case,” he said in a statement.
The case focused on strange Internet data that cybersecurity investigators discovered in 2016 after it became known that Russia had hacked Democrats and Mr. Trump had encouraged the country to sign up for Hillary Clinton’s emails .
Researchers said the data could reflect a covert communications channel that uses servers for the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank, a Kremlin-linked bank. The FBI briefly examined the suspicions and ruled them out.
On September 19, 2016, Mr. Sussmann brought these suspicions to a senior FBI official. Prosecutors accused him of falsely telling the official that he was not there on behalf of any client, hiding that he was in fact working for both Mrs. Clinton’s campaign and a technology executive who had tipped her.
Mr. Durham and his trial team used court statements and trial testimony to detail how Mr. Sussmann, while working for a Democrat-linked law firm and devoting his time to the Clinton campaign, had been trying to get journalists to write about Alfa Bank. suspicions.
But trying to persuade journalists to write about these suspicions is not a crime. The guilt or innocence of Mr. Sussmann focused on a limited issue: whether he made a false statement to a senior FBI official at the 2016 meeting, saying he shared those suspicions on behalf of no one but himself.
Mr. Durham used the case to present a larger conspiracy: that there was a joint venture to incriminate Mr. Trump essentially for collusion with Russia by getting the FBI to investigate the suspicions for reporters to write about it, a scheme involving Clinton campaign. ; his opposition research firm, Fusion GPS; Mr. Sussmann; and a cybersecurity expert who brought him the strange data and analysis.
This insinuation moved supporters of Mr. Trump who share his view that Russia’s investigation was a “deception” and have tried to combine the actual investigation with sometimes tiny or dubious allegations. In fact, the Alfa Bank affair was a side show: the FBI had already opened its investigation for other reasons before Mr. Sussmann provided the information, and the final report of Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III made no mention of Alfa Bank Suspects.
But the case that Mr. Durham and his team used to float his broad innuendos was thin: a count of making a false statement in a meeting with no other contemporary witnesses or notes. The evidence and arguments that Chief Prosecutor Andrew DeFilippis and his colleagues put together fell to the 12 jurors, who voted unanimously to declare Mr. Sussmann is not guilty.
Some supporters of Mr. Trump had been preparing for this outcome, pointing to the District of Columbia’s reputation as a highly democratic area and proposing the possibility that a jury could have a political bias against a Trump-era prosecutor trying to convict a defendant who was working for the Clinton campaign.
The judge told the jury that they should not take into account any of their own political views when deciding the facts.
The defense, which presented prosecutors’ insinuations as “theories of political conspiracy,” had argued that Mr. Sussmann only took the matter to the FBI when he thought the New York Times was about to write an article on the matter, to give the office a warning not to get caught with a flat foot.
Clinton’s campaign officials said during the trial that she had not been told or authorized to go to the FBI, and that doing so was against her interests because they did not trust the office and could stop the publication of any article.
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