In a statement issued prior to the indictment, Sussmann’s lawyers insisted that their client is innocent and they suggested that politics were at work in the decision to charge their client.
“Mr. Sussmann has committed no crime,” defense attorneys Sean Berkowitz and Michael Bosworth said in the statement. “Any prosecution here would be baseless, unprecedented, and an unwarranted deviation from the apolitical and principled way in which the Department of Justice is supposed to do its work.”
Sussmann’s lawyers also contend that he never made such a statement, that the evidence in the case is weak and that there’s no sign the alleged falsehood affected the FBI’s work.
The charge against Sussmann from a Washington grand jury is the first outward sign of activity in Durham’s investigation in nearly nine months. Republicans have grown impatient with the probe, while still hoping for a report that will vindicate former President Donald Trump’s charge that the original inquiry was a thinly veiled and unfounded political attack.
“Does everybody remember when we caught the Democrats, red-handed, SPYING ON MY CAMPAIGN? Where’s Durham?” Trump wrote in a statement emailed to reporters last month.
Sussmann, a former federal prosecutor and cybersecurity expert who became a partner at the law firm Perkins Coie, is the second defendant facing charges brought amid Durham’s long-running investigation. The first, Kevin Clinesmith, pleaded guilty to altering an email used to obtain a surveillance warrant against former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.
Clinesmith’s alterations, Durham charged, obscured Page’s prior relationship with the CIA. Clinesmith was sentenced in January to probation.
Then-Attorney General Bill Barr tapped Durham in May 2019 to examine how the FBI’s investigation into the Trump campaign and Russia began.
Last year, Barr converted Durham’s probe into a special counsel investigation under Justice Department regulations.
That move effectively took Durham out of the normal Justice Department hierarchy and supervision, although after the Biden administration assumed office, Attorney General Merrick Garland retained the right to overrule any of Durham’s major decisions, such as the effort to seek an indictment of Sussmann.
A spokesman for Garland did not immediately respond to a request for comment on his role in the case.
The precise scope of Durham’s mandate has never been clear. Some close to the investigation have said Durham appeared not simply to be seeking out potential crimes, but conducting a broader review of the quality of the intelligence that led the FBI to begin investigating people tied to the Trump campaign.
Some former intelligence community officials have said those sorts of judgments were better reviewed by inspectors general of the intelligence agencies and not by a federal prosecutor.
The case against Sussmann was assigned on Thursday to Judge Christopher Cooper, an appointee of President Barack Obama.