Former FBI official James Baker’s testimony on Thursday buried former Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann. The charge against Sussmann is that he lied to the FBI, specifically Baker, telling him that he wasn’t acting on behalf of any client when he told Baker about the false Alfa Bank allegations, supposedly showing a back channel between the Trump organization and Russia.
Baker testified that he was “100 percent confident” that Sussmann denied working “on behalf of any particular client” to him.
“I think it was pretty close to the beginning of the meeting. Part of his introduction to the meeting,” former FBI general counsel James Baker told jurors in Washington, DC, federal court. [….]
According to his indictment, the cybersecurity lawyer was allegedly acting on behalf of the Clinton campaign and Rodney Joffe, a tech executive and client who told him about computer data that purportedly revealed a secret back channel between a Trump Organization server and Russia’s Alfa Bank.
“He said that he was not appearing before me on behalf of any particular client,” Baker recalled.
The prosecution also entered a text from Sussmann himself, which backed up Baker’s testimony, because in it, Sussmann explicitly claimed he was coming to talk to Baker not on behalf of any client.
— Dr. Nickarama (@nickaramaOG) May 19, 2022
Because of that, Baker treated Sussmann as a confidential source and didn’t even tell FBI agent Scott Hellman where he got the thumb drives of information from that he got from Sussmann. “I do remember I was frustrated at not being able to ID who had provided these thumb drives to Mr. Baker. He was not willing to tell me,” Hellman said.
Hellman said it was obvious to him that the the information wasn’t valid.
“I felt that whoever had written that paper had jumped to some conclusions that were not supported by the technical data,” he said.
“I did not feel they were objective in the conclusions they came to. The assumption is so far-reaching it just didn’t make any sense.”
Hellman speculated that whoever authored the report simply searched for “Trump” on a dataset of email servers to make the since-debunked connection.
Baker said Sussmann told him a reporter was working on a story about the information, which Baker said made it more urgent to investigate the information because if a story came out, the information might then be buried or done away with before he could determine whether or not it was valid.
Baker told Bill Preistap, the assistant director of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division, immediately about the information, and that Sussmann said he was not working on behalf of any client, something Priestap also recorded in his notes, “Said not doing this for any client.”
Baker also told Director James Comey, Deputy Director Andrew McCabe and then-FBI later Trisha Anderson. Anderson also noted in her notes that were entered into evidence, “No specific client.”
However, during Marc Elias’ testimony, a variety of records showed that Sussmann was working for and billing time spent — including the conversation with Baker — to the Clinton campaign.
ICYMI: Former FBI top lawyer James Baker said that he is “100% confident” that Michael Sussmann told him he was not there on behalf of a client when he pushed Alfa Bank claims to the FBI in September 2016. Durham has shown evidence Sussmann went on behalf of the Clinton campaign. https://t.co/vKF6AIPYkJ
— Jerry Dunleavy (@JerryDunleavy) May 19, 2022
So, it sounds like they have Sussmann dead to rights as to the lie. He’s running out of time to flip.
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