Last night in a comment I drew attention to the view of Jonathan Turley, law prof and defense lawyer, regarding Durham’s case so far. I did so because some law pundits on Twitter have been loudly criticizing the performance of Durham’s team. I don’t have the background to judge, so I quoted Turley as counterpoint to the criticism:
The greatest challenge for Durham is the jury composition, not the evidentiary record in the case.
That’s not a blanket endorsement of Durham’s handling of the case at trial, but it does seem to be an argument that the case as presented should be sufficient to convince an impartial jury. That, as Turley says, could be the problem. Turley has been very critical of the judge’s handling of jury selection.
In possible support of what I present as Turley’s assessment is the late news today that Sussmann’s teams are exploring the idea of putting Sussmann on the stand, thus opening him to cross examination. That suggests that they’re not entirely satisfied with the way things have gone so far—and may risk opening Sussmann up to Durham’s questioning. At this point nothing is decided.
BTW, Turley has a brief article today pointing out what we discussed a bit yesterday. The testimony that the FBI’s “7th floor, including the Director” were “fired up” at the bare hint that Sussmann had provided the FBI with a narrative—nothing proven, just allegations—that could be used against Trump is strongly suggestive of bias that exceeded the bounds of professional integrity:
Paul Sperry points to another development that could prove important, depending on where Durham is going with his investigation and prosecution. Perjury isn’t necessarily easy to prove, but Robbie Mook may have placed himself in a bit of a difficult position:
DEVELOPING: Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook denied under oath knowing in 2016 that campaign lawyer Perkins Coie had retained FusionGPS, but prosecutor Durham has invoices from Perkins to Clinton campaign HQ in Brooklyn that show line items for "FusionGPS".
Clinton campaign lawyer Marc Elias testified that Mook was his billing contact at campaign HQ and they discussed "expenses" for "consultants" and "sub-consultants," which would include FusionGPS, the oppo research firm Mook now swears he knew nothing about,
Clinton campaign manager Mook's testimony denying knowing in 2016 that the campaign had hired FusionGPS to dig up Trump dirt (or knowing about Fusion at all) also strains credulity because Clinton campaign chairman Podesta was aware of Fusion and knew Fusion CEO Glenn Simpson.
Is this one more indication, among several already, that Durham’s handling of the Sussmann case looks to the future? We’ll see.
Amusing.
Sussman billed Hillary for the usb drives he gave the FBI.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/justice/sussmann-billed-clinton-campaign-for-thumb-drives-he-gave-to-fbi-pushing-alfa-bank-allegations
Did Joffe feed his Alfa Bank bunkum to the FBI via Sussmann, and then to the FBI through Grasso, but NOT his FBI handler as a CHS?
If so, could it be that the Conspirators learned from bitter experience in August 2016 that a former CHS who feeds his garbage to the FBI via both Steele/FusionGPS AND the former CHS's handler in the NYFO, caused McCabe to realized it was too obvious, and ordered the handler at the NYFO to not have further contact with the former CHS (in my opinion, Baumgartner) as referenced in footnote #461 of the Horowitz report?
Thus, Sussmann and Joffe were warned not to repeat the mistake Baumgartner made in August.
That would explain one reason it was imperative that Sussmann had to lie about not having a client when he brought the Alfa Bank garbage to Baker, and why CHS Joffe had to concurrently slip it into FBI's back door through an agent he knew, rather than his handler, in September.
And they would have known to do this only if there were a conspiracy sharing the info with each other.