Hillary Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann will not try to prove in court his claims he gave to the FBI that former President Donald Trump had a secret back channel to a Russian bank, the New York Post reports.
Sussmann is on trial for lying to the FBI. His legal team made the move in a court filing on Monday after Special Counsel John Durham said he would not seek to disprove the data Sussmann gave to the FBI if he agreed to "concede or decline to dispute the fact that no secret channel of communications actually existed," court papers read.
Sussmann’s defense attorney "stated that he will not seek to affirmatively prove the existence of a link between Alfa Bank and the Trump campaign," Washington, D.C. federal Judge Christopher Cooper wrote in a six-page ruling, adding that, "the Court will hold the government to its word, and will not allow it to put on extensive evidence about the accuracy of the data Mr. Sussmann provided to the FBI unless Mr. Sussmann does so first."
Cooper did say, however, that he will permit the government to put on evidence reflecting the FBI’s ultimate conclusions, "which the Court understands to be that the Alfa Bank allegations were unsubstantiated — as well as the ‘particular investigative and analytical steps’ the FBI took to reach them."
He continued: "Such evidence is relevant to the government’s theory of materiality: that Mr. Sussmann’s alleged statement that he was not representing a client caused the FBI to handle the subsequent investigation differently than it otherwise would have."
Sussmann faces one charge of lying to then-FBI General Counsel James Baker for turning over three "white papers" and data files that he claimed connected the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia.
During a Sept. 19, 2016 meeting at FBI headquarters, Sussmann, who is a cybersecurity lawyer, is alleged to have claimed he was not acting on behalf of a client, but had been approached by "multiple cyber experts" over allegations of a "secret Trump Organization server that was in communication with" Alfa Bank.
However, Sussmann was actually working for Clinton's campaign and billed it for the time he spent communicating with a tech expert and conducting opposition research to build a "narrative" to tie Trump to Russia, according to his indictment.
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