Judging Freedom - Smearing Trump in 2016 - Durham Investigation Update

Episode Date: April 6, 2022

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I come to the camera to discuss the curious case of Michael Sussman. You probably never heard of this guy. I'd never heard of him either until he was indicted. Michael Sussman was the chief campaign lawyer for Mrs. Clinton in her campaign against Donald Trump for the presidency in 2016. Michael Sussman has been indicted by John Durham, sort of a renegade prosecutor because he was not appointed by Joe Biden. He doesn't even answer to the attorney general, but he was appointed by Bill Barr, the last confirmed, Senate confirmed attorney general that President Trump had, and Mr. Durham's charge, many of you may know Durham's name, is to investigate the investigation

of Donald Trump for unlawful or alleged unlawful ties to Russia. So far, two indictments have come down. One, an assistant general counsel for the FBI, a lawyer, pleaded guilty to changing a document after it had been signed. So falsifying a document submitted to the FISA court, Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court, in order to get a search warrant. But the one I want to talk about today is the indictment of Michael Sussman. Now, Michael Sussman is a very prominent lawyer at, was at a very prominent law firm in Washington, D.C., and the law firm has ties to the Democratic Party and was general counsel to the Hillary Clinton for president campaign. Michael Sussman approached a guy named James Baker, not the James Baker that was Secretary of the Treasury and Secretary of State in the Reagan and Bush years, but Jim Baker, who

was the general counsel to the FBI. And in that meeting with the FBI, he handed information to Jim Baker, which would lead a neutral reader to conclude that there was an unlawful and perhaps even dangerous connection between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence. He was indicted for lying during that conversation, and the alleged lie seems simple and harmless, but I'll explain to you its significance. The lie was he was asked by Jim Baker, are you here on behalf of a client? And he said, no, I'm not here on behalf of a client. I'm paraphrasing. I'm an interested citizen. This information has come to me. It came to me through friends. They're my friends, but they're not my clients. Okay, end of the story. Except that John Durham,

prosecutor appointed by Bill Barr to investigate the Trump-Russia situation, came across evidence to show that Michael Sussman was in fact a lawyer for the Hillary Clinton campaign. So he told a lie to the lawyer for the FBI. Big deal, a lawyer told a lie to the lawyer for the FBI big deal a lawyer told a lie it's not going to bring the house down technically it is a crime to lie to an FBI agent or a senior employee a policymaking person at the FBI if it's a material lie it's five after four and you say it's four after four that's not material unless the difference between 404 and 405 is significant to the case. What's significant here is, Durham alleges, it began the wild goose chase that the FBI was on trying to find out Trump's alleged connections to the Russians. So, according to Durham, it was an effort to suck the FBI in to smear Donald Trump.

It's not a crime to smear a political campaign. New York Post has a headline today, Hillary and plot to smear D, meaning Donald. There's nothing wrong with that. It was a campaign. Ah, but using the FBI as your whipping boy to smear the other side, getting the government to do the investigation for you based on a lie, that's a serious issue. How do we know it was a lie? Sussman says he never said it. Baker said he did say it. Durham comes up with text messages from Sussman to Durham saying, I don't represent a client or a company. The theory is that if Sussman had said to Baker, I represent Mrs. Clinton, the FBI might not have taken it seriously. Well, go do your own investigation. But the FBI, according to

Durham, was led to believe that this was an innocent American reporting a case of potential espionage, or at least arguably unlawful contacts with a foreign government. So that's where it stands. What I thought was just this simple lie, and I'm not crazy about this statute that makes it a crime for you to lie to the FBI. I'll tell you why I'm not crazy about it in a minute. But what appeared at first to be a simple allegation of a lie now appears to be the tip of an iceberg, a planned plotted effort to seduce the FBI into doing the dirty work for the Clinton campaign. Dirty work, but legal dirty work, investigating the other side. Why am I not happy with this statute that makes it a crime to lie to the FBI?

Ah, because the FBI is allowed to lie to you. That's not an even playing field. Remember the famous case of Martha Stewart? During a conversation with her lawyer and an FBI agent, she lied to the FBI about whether or not she had stolen some stock. The FBI agent lied to her and her lawyer about whether she was a target of an investigation. She went to jail for six months. The FBI agent got promoted. That is not fair. All human beings have the same rights. If it's a crime to lie to the FBI, it should be a crime for the FBI to lie to you. What kind of a government lies to its own people? But that's where we are today. And I don't

think that the constitutionality of that statute will be tested in this case. What will be tested is the patience of the American public and whether or not there is more to this than Mr. Durham has shown. He showed this in documents he filed on Monday when he asked the court for permission to introduce the text messages at the time of trial. In doing that, he had to show the court the text messages. In doing that, he made it open to the public. That's how it came to us. That's why we're discussing it today. I don't know where this is going to go.

Is it just a simple white lie, one lawyer to another? Candidly, something that happens every day, thousands of times a day? Or is it a serious effort by Mrs. Clinton and her crew to have the FBI do their dirty work for them? Time will tell. Judge Napolitano, judging freedom.