Does Sussmann's Legal Victory Cover Up The FBI or Expose Trump?
Summary from the AllSides News Team
Does Michael Sussmann being found not guilty cover up the FBI or further expose former President Donald Trump's ties to Russia?
The jury on Tuesday ultimately ruled that the investigation led by Special Counsel John Durham couldn't prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Sussmann was lying about not representing "any client" during a meeting with former FBI general counsel James Baker in September 2016, only weeks before the election. Sussmann met with Baker to disclose potential ties between Trump's campaign and Russia.
Left-rated voices echoed previous criticisms and said Trump was "extensively" lying about his campaign’s ties to Russia. Washington Post (Lean Left bias) writers Paul Waldman and Greg Sargent framed Durham's "flop" as the "culmination of years of efforts" by Trump and the Republican Party to "erase the enormous significance" of the Russia scandal. The Daily Beast (Left bias) criticized Fox News (Right bias) for "immediately" blaming the jury and "its supposed bias for not buying what Durham’s team was selling."
Many right-rated voices emphasized how the "FBI’s own machinations" allowed Sussmann to claim a legal victory. National Review (Right bias) writer Isaac Schoor suggested Sussman's win is "far from a vindication of his actions" but rather Durham not being able to find "smoking gun evidence" that he lied. Holman W. Jenkins Jr. argued in The Wall Street Journal — Opinion (Lean Right bias) that this "collusion hoax" cost Trump "millions of votes" and served as an "excuse" for Clinton's defeat.
Featured Coverage of this Story
From the Right
The Sussmann Verdict Is an Indictment of Durham, Not a Vindication of the Ex-Clinton Lawyer
Michael Sussmann did exactly what he was accused of by Special Counsel John Durham. But the latter charged the former with lying to former FBI general counsel James Baker on the wrong day.
Durham’s team alleged that Sussmann told Baker that he wasn’t representing any client during a meeting at FBI headquarters on September 19, 2016, during which Sussmann handed over flimsy evidence of a secret communications channel between Russia’s Alfa Bank and the Trump Organization. In fact, the prosecution argued, Sussmann was acting on behalf of Hillary Clinton’s presidential...
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John Durham’s flop is only the latest of many Trump coverup failures
For three years, conservatives hyped John Durham’s investigation into the origins of the FBI’s original investigation of Russia’s effort to help Donald Trump get elected president in 2016. Durham, a prosecutor appointed in 2019 by then-Attorney General William P. Barr, would blow the lid off the real scandal, they said, which was a conspiracy between Democrats and the FBI to get Trump. This would show there was never anything to the Russiagate scandal.
Durham had all the time and resources he needed. As of last December, a partial accounting found he had spent about...
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Durham Jury Convicts the FBI 
If special counsel John Durham didn’t get the verdict he wanted in the Michael Sussmann case, it’s because he did a better job of convicting the victim than he did the culprit—the victim being the FBI, the agency to which the Democratic lawyer allegedly lied when claiming he wasn’t acting for the Clinton campaign while peddling slime about Donald Trump in the run-up to the 2016 election.
In the indictment filed eight months ago, Mr. Durham went out of his way to show why the FBI would not have been fooled by Mr. Sussmann,...
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