Prosecutors argued Tuesday, the opening day of a criminal trial testing special counsel John Durham’s Russia investigation, that a Hillary Clinton campaign attorney “used and manipulated the FBI” with anti-Trump dirt to create an October surprise before the 2016 presidential election.
Prosecutors said the lawyer, Michael Sussmann, intended to deceive FBI officials in September 2016 in a scheme to sabotage Donald Trump’s campaign.
“The evidence will show the defendant’s lie was all part of a bigger plan. It was a plan to create an October surprise on the eve of a presidential election — a plan that used and manipulated the FBI,” federal prosecutor Brittain Shaw said in her opening statement. “It was a plan that largely succeeded.”
Mr. Sussmann is charged with lying to federal agents in the first trial of Mr. Durham’s probe of the origins of the FBI’s Trump-Russia collusion investigation.
He is accused of concealing the fact that he was representing the Clinton campaign and was a technology executive when he presented a top FBI official with two white papers and two thumb drives detailing now-debunked evidence of covert communication between the Trump Organization and Russia’s Alfa Bank.
via joemiller