The Patriot Post® · Rigged Jury Finds Sussmann Not Guilty

We figured it for a coin flip, and it came up tails. Yesterday, an appallingly pro-Hillary DC jury acquitted Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann of lying to the FBI, thus bringing to a bitter end a once-promising case and dashing the hopes of every idealistic American who (foolishly) believes Lady Justice is blind.

We can only imagine the disappointment of Special Counsel John Durham. But we wonder: Can he imagine ours? Durham certainly had enough evidence to bring an indictment on behalf of the government, but he ultimately had the fate of his case decided by — let’s call it what it was — a rigged jury.

Is “rigged” too strong a word? You tell us. The jury had “three Clinton donors, an AOC donor, and a woman whose daughter is on the same sports team with Sussmann’s daughter,” noted constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley. “With the exception of randomly selecting people out of the DNC headquarters, you could not come up with a worse jury.”

More succinctly, as Sean Connery’s Sam Malone character said of Chicago in “The Untouchables,” “This town stinks like a [brothel] at low tide.”

“I don’t think it should have been prosecuted,” said the jury forewoman of the case. “There are bigger things that affect the nation than a possible lie to the FBI.”

Silly us, thinking that lying to the FBI is a big deal — or even a minor crime.

Did we also mention that the ostensibly impartial judge in this case, Christopher Cooper, was an Obama appointee who once clerked for Abner Mikva, Bill Clinton’s White House counsel, and whose wife is also a lawyer and has Lisa Page as a client? (Page, you’ll recall, was the illicit love interest of FBI lead investigator Peter Strzok, the guy who Robert Mueller was forced to kick off the case because of his outrageous bias against Donald Trump and people who shop at Walmart.) None of these conflict-rich relationships were enough for Cooper to recuse himself, though. Nor were they enough to prevent him from limiting the scope of evidence Durham could produce that involved Clinton. And this, as Turley notes, “prevented prosecutors from showing more about the development of [that] false claim and the role of the campaign.” How sweet it must’ve been for Sussmann to have had the judge in his corner.

“Don’t tell me what the law is,” sniffed notorious DC lawyer Roy Cohn many years ago. “Tell me who the judge is.”

Sussmann, for his part, strolled out of the courtroom yesterday a free man, and he let loose with some in-your-face triumphalism: “I told the truth to the FBI, and the jury clearly recognized this in their unanimous verdict [yesterday]. I’m grateful to the members of the jury for their careful, thoughtful service. Despite being falsely accused, I believe that justice ultimately prevailed in my case.”

Sorry, Mike, but you lost us — and we lost a mouthful of our morning coffee — at “I told the truth to the FBI.”

Here’s the backstory, as legal analyst Margot Cleveland wrote recently: “Last fall, Special Counsel John Durham charged Sussmann with lying to former FBI General Counsel James Baker when Sussmann met with Baker on September 19, 2016, to provide Baker data and whitepapers purporting to establish a secret communications network between Donald Trump and the Russian-based Alfa Bank. Prosecutors claim Sussmann told Baker that he was sharing the information on his own, when in fact Sussmann represented both the Clinton campaign and [a tech executive who was working for her campaign, Rodney] Joffe.”

Just how clear-cut was Sussman’s lie to then-FBI General Counsel James Baker? This clear-cut:

Jim — it’s Michael Sussmann. I have something time-sensitive (and sensitive) I need to discuss. Do you have availability for a short meeting tomorrow?— want to help the Bureau. Thanks. I’m coming on my own — not on behalf of a client or company

What part of “I’m coming on my own — not on behalf of a client or company” did that Swamp-dwelling jury not comprehend? Answer: Not a word. They understood it perfectly well, they knew it to be a lie, and they chose to nullify it anyway.

Somewhere, O.J. Simpson is smiling.

“It must seem like the only juror missing is Chelsea Clinton,” quipped Turley.

We’ve known all this to be a hoax and a dirty trick since early 2017, when then-House Intel Committee Chairman Devin Nunes alerted Trump that the Obama administration had been spying — yes, spying — on him.

Lest anyone think this was much ado about nothing, think again. Former Attorney General Bill Barr, who had a very public falling-out with Trump over whether Joe Biden got all 81 million of those votes legitimately (he didn’t), had this to say about Spygate: “I thought we were heading into a constitutional crisis. I think whatever you think of Trump, the fact is that the whole Russiagate thing was a grave injustice. It appears to be a dirty political trick that was used first to hobble him and then potentially to drive him from office.”

“I believe it is seditious,” Barr added.

Let that sink in, because Barr chooses his words carefully. This, then, was a real insurrection, not the fake one of Nancy Pelosi’s J6 fever dreams.

“In a way,” notes our Nate Jackson, “it was the perfect crime. Hardly anything Clinton’s campaign did was technically against the law, and even those things that might be minor crimes were committed by cutouts who’d never get convicted anyway — at least not by the Clinton donors on a DC jury.”

As for the FBI’s involvement, legal analyst Andrew McCarthy had this take: “You have to make up your mind about what the FBI is. Are they a dupe or are they a willing collaborator? Durham [prosecuted] on the notion that they’re a dupe. You have to prove for materiality purposes in a false statements trial that the duped party actually was fooled. I think the evidence here was strong that even though what Sussmann told them was false, was factually untrue, they weren’t fooled at all by it. They fully knew that they were getting political information from a partisan source, and a lot of what they did was designed to conceal the fact that they knew that.”

So, what’s next? “Measuring Durham’s performance by the outcome in United States v. Sussmann would be a mistake,” writes Cleveland. “Also, especially in the case of an acquittal, it would ignore the valuable information exposed related to the broader Spygate scandal. Using that gauge as a measure, the special counsel’s office succeeded wildly.”

We’re not so sure about “wildly,” but we can hope that Durham has set the stage for more damaging revelations about Crooked Hillary’s personal involvement in this whole rotten affair. Or maybe we’re just Charlie Brown, and DC justice is Lucy with the football.

Regarding the lack of justice for Clinton and her untouchable collaborators so far, our Mark Alexander notes:

Every rational American knows this to be true: In 2016, Hillary Clinton colluded with others to fabricate the Trump/Russia collusion conspiracy. They used their Leftmedia and Big Tech platforms to promote it in order to warrant a special prosecutor with the objective of subverting and disabling the Trump agenda — and they succeeded. Their fabrication was well documented, as were Clinton’s collaborators at the highest levels of the FBI and CIA. But the promise that Durham could connect the dots, and the window for justice to be served, is rapidly closing. This conspiracy was far worse than Watergate, but the outcome affirms that deep-state Demo conspirators can operate with impunity. Every rational and patriotic American should thus be deeply concerned about the proliferation of domestic enemies of Liberty.