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Bloomberg
Prosecutors hoping to prove a top lawyer for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign lied while trying to get the FBI to investigate a suspected secret link between Donald Trump’s company and a Russian bank are having a hard time getting their own witnesses to confirm the claim.
Michael Sussmann, a prominent cybersecurity lawyer with close ties to the Democratic Party, is on trial for allegedly concealing the identity of his client when he met with the FBI’s general counsel two months before the election to provide evidence of communications between computer servers at the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank.
But, after two days of testimony in Washington, some of the government’s main witnesses have so far thrown cold water on the claim that Sussmann met with the FBI on Clinton’s behalf, even though evidence presented to the jury shows Sussmann billed the campaign for his time at the meeting.
Prosecutors spent hours asking Marc Elias, the campaign’s former general counsel and a top Democratic election lawyer, about the billing practices of the law firm that both he and Sussmann worked for at the time, Perkins Coie.
Elias testified that taking the purported evidence to the FBI would not have been helpful to the campaign. He pointed to failure of FBI and then-Director James Comey to stop Democratic Party emails from being published.