Special counsel John Durham suggested the Justice Department’s watchdog sat on key information about debunked Trump-Russia collusion claims, including a critical 2017 meeting it held with a defendant but only disclosed earlier this month.
The defendant, former Hillary Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann, was indicted for allegedly lying to an FBI official in 2016 while pushing discredited claims of secret communications between a Russian bank and the Trump Organization.
Sussmann has pleaded not guilty.
In a Tuesday court filing, Durham said he only learned a week ago that Sussmann had a subsequent meeting in March 2017 with DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz, who conducted his own investigation into Trump-Russia matters, including claims about former President Donald Trump and Alfa Bank.
“The OIG had not previously informed the Special Counsel’s Office of this meeting with the defendant,” Durham’s team said in the filing.
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Durham’s team contended in a 2021 indictment that, when Sussmann was pushing the Alfa Bank claims into the FBI in September 2016, he told the bureau’s general counsel James Baker that he was not working for any particular client, but that he was in fact secretly doing the bidding of Clinton’s campaign and billing his services to her — as well as working on behalf of technology executive Rodney Joffe.
In their new court filing, Durham’s team said they had met with Horowitz in October and followed up with a discovery request for information relevant to its inquiry of the Russia investigation origins. Horowitz provided documents, records, and transcripts of interviews his office had conducted, including a report about a “cyber-related matter” Sussmann brought to the inspector general’s attention in early 2017.
The cyber report said Sussmann told an agent in Horowitz’s office that one of Sussmann’s clients claimed a DOJ inspector general employee’s computer was “seen publicly” in “internet traffic” and had connected to a virtual private network in a foreign country.
What Horowitz failed to reveal, according to Durham, was that he personally met with Sussmann in March 2017 to discuss the mysterious report. Durham only learned of that meeting during a Jan. 20 call with Sussmann’s lawyers, according to the filing, and the DOJ watchdog discussed it with Durham’s team for the first time the next day after being asked about it. Durham says Sussmann was working on behalf of Joffe related to this “cyber issue.”
Durham also said his team only learned this month that Horowitz was holding two FBI cellphones belonging to Baker, the FBI official whom Sussmann allegedly lied to, along with forensic analysis of the phones, which Durham is now reviewing.
The new filing by Durham also revealed that Democratic lawyer Marc Elias, who funded British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s discredited dossier while he was the Clinton campaign’s top lawyer in 2016, has testified before the grand jury.
Although the Trump-Alfa Bank claims were not part of the dossier, Steele pushed them to the media, to State Department officials, and to at least one high-ranking DOJ official. The Obama administration officials forwarded Steele’s Alfa Bank claims to the FBI in late 2016.
Steele testified in a British court that Sussmann provided him with claims about Alfa Bank’s purported ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin during a July 2016 meeting.
Clinton herself tweeted in the closing days of the 2016 race allegations that the Russian bank collaborated with Trump. She also shared a statement from Jake Sullivan, then her foreign policy adviser and now President Joe Biden’s national security adviser, on the “New Report Exposing Trump’s Secret Line of Communication to Russia.”
Horowitz’s lengthy December 2019 report on the flawed Trump-Russia investigation revealed that the FBI by early 2017 had concluded there were no links between the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank.
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Horowitz’s office declined to comment on the Washington Examiner’s questions about the new Durham filing.
