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      Clashing Views of Cybersecurity Lawyer as Trial in Special Counsel’s Case Opens

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      Michael Sussmann, a prominent lawyer with Democratic ties, is accused of lying to the F.B.I. in a case with broader political overtones.WASHINGTON — Prosecutors and defense lawyers clashed in opening arguments on Tuesday in the trial of Michael Sussmann, a cybersecurity lawyer with links to Democrats who has been charged by a Trump-era special counsel with lying to the F.B.I. in 2016 when he brought the bureau a tip about possible Trump-Russia connections.Deborah Shaw, a prosecutor working for the Trump-era special counsel, John H. Durham, told a federal jury that Mr. Sussman was in part representing Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign at the time. But he claimed to the F.B.I. that he was not bringing the tip on behalf of any client because he wanted to conceal his ties to Mrs. Clinton’s campaign.Whether one loves or hates former President Donald J. Trump, Ms. Shaw said, the F.B.I. needs to know the truth “and should never be used as a political pawn.”But a defense lawyer, Michael Bosworth, argued to the jury that Mr. Sussmann did not lie to the F.B.I. when he relayed the suspicions. No one at the Clinton campaign told Mr. Sussman to take the matter to the F.B.I., Mr. Bosworth said.Mr. Bosworth did acknowledge that Mr. Sussmann was representing the Clinton campaign when he reached out separately to a reporter then at The New York Times about the suspicions. The move led the bureau, Mr. Bosworth said, to try to delay any news article while they investigated.“The meeting with the F.B.I. is the exact opposite of what the campaign would have wanted,” Mr. Bosworth said, adding: “They wanted a big story that hurts Trump and helps them. He was there to help the F.B.I.”The contrasting narratives were a highlight of the first day of the trial, which is expected to take about two weeks. Witnesses may include Marc Elias, who was then Mr. Sussmann’s law partner as well as the general counsel of the Clinton campaign, and James Baker, who was then the F.B.I.’s general counsel.The case centers on a meeting Mr. Sussmann had with Mr. Baker in September 2016, when Mr. Sussmann told Mr. Baker about some odd internet data and analysis by cybersecurity researchers who had said it might be a sign of a covert communications channel using servers for the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank, a Kremlin-linked financial institution. The F.B.I. investigated the matter but concluded the concerns were unsubstantiated.Although the false-statement charge against Mr. Sussmann is narrow, the case has attracted broad attention. It is the first developed by Mr. Durham, and the special counsel has used court filings to insinuate that Clinton campaign associates sought to frame Mr. Trump for colluding with Russia.It has been clear for months that the trial will turn in part on how to interpret what it means to bring information to the F.B.I. “on behalf” of a client. But the rival opening statements brought into sharper relief another dispute: Mr. Sussmann’s understanding of the status of a potential New York Times article.Ms. Shaw maintained that Mr. Sussmann and others decided to bring the information to the F.B.I. “to create a sense of urgency” when a Times reporter with whom he had previously shared the Alfa Bank allegations, Eric Lichtblau, did not swiftly publish a story about them.But Mr. Bosworth argued that Mr. Sussmann believed The Times was on the cusp of publishing the article when he reached out to the F.B.I. Mr. Sussmann, he emphasized, had been a federal prosecutor and had worked with the F.B.I. for years and wanted to give it advance warning so it would not be “caught flat-footed.”Mr. Lichtblau, who no longer works for The Times, may testify. In the meantime, some things remain unclear about the status of the potential article he was drafting. Mr. Baker has testified to Congress that the F.B.I. asked The Times “to slow down” on publishing it. But news reports have indicated that editors were not ready to run that article anyway.Mr. Sussmann was given the data and analysis by Rodney Joffe, an internet entrepreneur and expert in domain name systems who was already his client. The analysis had been developed by a group of data scientists who specialized in analyzing DNS data for signs of cyberthreats, and who eventually started working with him.After opening arguments, two F.B.I. agents testified. The first explained technical details to the jury about so-called DNS data, a type of internet log that was the basis for the suspicions.The second agent, Scott Hellman, an F.B.I. cybercrime specialist who was part of a two-person team that performed a quick initial assessment of the materials Mr. Sussmann had provided to Mr. Baker, testified that he was skeptical of its methodology and conclusions.Among other things, Mr. Hellman said, he did not think it made any sense that anyone would use a server with Trump’s name on it for a secret channel. He also testified that he had been frustrated that Mr. Baker did not tell him from whom he received the data.John H. Durham, center, is the special counsel assigned by the Trump administration in 2019 to scour the Russia investigation for wrongdoing.Samuel Corum for The New York TimesThe prosecution and defense appeared to be putting different emphasis on a matter that formed the backdrop to the constellation of events at issue in the trial: Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.In her opening statement, Ms. Shaw told the jury that Mr. Sussman had represented the Democratic National Committee when it was hacked in the spring of 2016, but she omitted the fact that Russia was the perpetrator.Mr. Bosworth, by contrast, emphasized to the jury that the onset the events took place “at a time when questions were swirling about Donald Trump’s connections to Russia.” More

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      Trump-Era Prosecutor’s Case Against Democratic-Linked Lawyer Goes to Trial

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      The first case developed by the special counsel, John Durham, involves a lawyer who is accused of lying when he shared a tip with the F.B.I. about possible links between Donald J. Trump and Russia.WASHINGTON — When the Trump administration assigned a prosecutor in 2019 to scour the Russia investigation for any wrongdoing, President Donald J. Trump stoked expectations among his supporters that the inquiry would find a “deep state” conspiracy against him.Three years later, the team led by the special counsel, John H. Durham, on Monday will open the first trial in a case their investigation developed, bringing before a jury the claims and counterclaims that surrounded the 2016 presidential campaign. But rather than showing wrongdoing by the F.B.I., it is a case that portrays the bureau as a victim.The trial centers on whether Michael Sussmann, a cybersecurity lawyer with ties to Democrats, lied to the F.B.I. in September 2016, when he relayed suspicions about possible cyberconnections between Mr. Trump and Russia. The F.B.I. looked into the matter, which involved a server for the Kremlin-linked Alfa Bank, and decided it was unsubstantiated.In setting up the meeting, Mr. Sussmann had told an F.B.I. official that he was not acting on behalf of any client. Prosecutors contend he concealed that a technology executive and the Hillary Clinton campaign were his clients to make the allegations seem more credible.The defense argues that Mr. Sussmann was not acting on their behalf at the meeting. The F.B.I. was aware that he had represented Democrats on matters related to Russia’s hacking of their servers, and subsequent communications made clear that he also had a client who had played a role in developing the data analysis concerning Alfa Bank, his lawyers say.While the charge against Mr. Sussmann is narrow, Mr. Durham has used it to release large amounts of information to insinuate that there was a broad conspiracy involving the Clinton campaign to essentially frame Mr. Trump for colluding with Russia.That insinuation also hangs over the other case Mr. Durham has developed, which is set to go to trial later this year. It accuses a researcher for the so-called Steele dossier — a since-discredited compendium of opposition research about purported links between Mr. Trump and Russia — of lying to the F.B.I. about some of his sources.Both cases have connections with the law firm Perkins Coie, where Mr. Sussmann worked then. One of his partners, Marc Elias, was the general counsel of the Clinton campaign and had commissioned opposition research that led to the Steele dossier.The Alfa Bank allegations and the Steele dossier were largely tangential to the official investigation into whether there was collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign. F.B.I. officials had opened that investigation on other grounds, and the special counsel who completed the inquiry, Robert S. Mueller III, did not rely on either in his final report.(His report detailed “numerous links between the Russian government and the Trump campaign,” but he did not charge any Trump associate with a criminal conspiracy with Russia.)But supporters of Mr. Trump have rallied around Mr. Durham’s narrative, which resonates with Mr. Trump’s oft-repeated claim that the entire Russia investigation was a “hoax.”Defense lawyers for Mr. Sussmann have also rejected prosecutors’ broader insinuations about the constellation of events that led to his indictment, accusing the Durham team of fueling politicized conspiracy theories.Against that backdrop, much of the pretrial jostling has centered on how far afield prosecutors may roam from the core accusation. Judge Christopher Cooper of the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia, an Obama appointee, has imposed some limits on what Mr. Durham’s team may present to the jury.Through his court filings, Mr. Durham and his team have signaled that they suspect that the Alfa Bank data or analysis may have been faked, even though they were unable to prove it.But the judge barred Mr. Durham from presenting evidence or arguments along those lines, saying that unless there was proof Mr. Sussmann had reason to doubt the data when it was brought to him, there should not be “a time-consuming and largely unnecessary mini-trial to determine the existence and scope of an uncharged conspiracy.”Still, the judge has given prosecutors broader latitude to call witnesses associated with the Clinton campaign, including Mr. Elias and Robby Mook, the campaign manager.The Alfa Bank issue traces back to the spring of 2016, when it came to light that Russia had hacked Democrats.That summer, as suspicions escalated about Mr. Trump’s relationship with Moscow, a group of data scientists identified odd internet data that appeared to link servers for the Trump Organization to Alfa Bank.Working with Rodney Joffe, a technology executive and cybersecurity expert, they theorized that it might be a covert communications channel. Mr. Joffe, who was already a client of Mr. Sussmann’s, brought the matter to him, and Mr. Sussmann relayed those suspicions to reporters and the F.B.I. He also told Mr. Elias about it, and Clinton campaign officials were apparently aware that he was trying to get reporters to write about it.Seeking a meeting with the F.B.I. to share the material, Mr. Sussmann reached out to James A. Baker, then the agency’s top lawyer. Mr. Sussmann said in a text that he was not bringing it on behalf of any client and was motivated by a desire to help the bureau. Mr. Baker is expected to be a primary prosecution witness.But Mr. Durham’s team obtained law firm billing records showing that Mr. Sussmann had logged time working on the Alfa Bank suspicions to the Clinton campaign. The team argued that he lied because if the F.B.I. knew of the political connection, agents might have treated the matter differently.“The strategy, as the government will argue at trial, was to create news stories about this issue, about the Alfa Bank issue,” Andrew DeFilippis, a prosecutor for Mr. Durham, said at a recent hearing. “And second, it was to get law enforcement to investigate it; and perhaps third, your honor, to get the press to report on the fact that law enforcement was investigating it.”John H. Durham is the special counsel the Trump administration assigned in 2019 to scour the Russia investigation for any wrongdoing.Bob Child/Associated PressAt the same hearing, a defense lawyer, Sean Berkowitz, said that he would not contest that Mr. Sussmann represented the Clinton campaign in telling reporters about those allegations. But he suggested that the defense would contend that Mr. Sussmann did not believe he was taking the matter to the F.B.I. “on behalf” of the campaign or Mr. Joffe.Mr. Berkowitz noted that Mr. Sussmann had told Mr. Baker that he believed The New York Times planned to publish an article on the Alfa Bank suspicions, which was why he was reaching out.“We expect there to be testimony from the campaign that, while they were interested in an article on this coming out, going to the F.B.I. is something that was inconsistent with what they would have wanted before there was any press,” Mr. Berkowitz said. “And in fact, going to the F.B.I. killed the press story, which was inconsistent with what the campaign would have wanted.”Some details of that matter remain murky. Mr. Baker has testified that the F.B.I. tried to ask The Times “to slow down” on publishing. But news reports indicate that editors were not ready to run that article, which was being written by the reporter Eric Lichtblau, although the paper published one mentioning Alfa Bank six weeks later.Defense lawyers have also argued that even if Mr. Sussmann lied, it would have been immaterial because the F.B.I. would have still investigated the allegations. And they have suggested that despite his initial statement, Mr. Sussmann was open about having a client in subsequent communications. Notes of a March 2017 F.B.I. meeting with Mr. Baker show that the bureau understood he had one by then.The defense has also subpoenaed Mr. Lichtblau, who is no longer at The Times, to testify. A lawyer for Mr. Lichtblau has asked the judge to limit questioning to his discussions with Mr. Sussmann, avoiding other confidential sources and journalistic matters. Mr. Durham’s team is expected to object to any such constraint. More

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      More Evidence Bolsters Durham’s Case Against Michael Sussman

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      Separately, defense lawyers asked a judge to block the Trump-era special counsel from making the Steele dossier a focus of next month’s trial.WASHINGTON — The Trump-era special counsel scrutinizing the Russia investigation has acquired additional evidence that may bolster his case against a Democratic-linked lawyer accused of lying to the F.B.I. at a September 2016 meeting about Donald J. Trump’s possible ties to Russia, a new court filing revealed.In the politically high-profile case, the lawyer, Michael Sussmann, is facing trial next month on a charge that he falsely told an F.B.I. official that he was not at the meeting on behalf of any client. There he relayed suspicions data scientists had about odd internet data they thought might indicate hidden Trump-Russia links.The new filing by the special counsel, John H. Durham, says that the night before Mr. Sussmann’s meeting, he had texted the F.B.I. official stating that “I’m coming on my own — not on behalf of a client or company — want to help the bureau.”The charge against Mr. Sussmann, which he denies, is narrow. But the case has attracted significant attention because Mr. Durham has used filings to put forward large amounts of information, insinuating there was a conspiracy involving the Hillary Clinton campaign to amplify suspicions of Trump-Russia collusion. Mr. Durham has not charged any such conspiracy, however.The disclosure of the text to the F.B.I. official in question, James A. Baker, then the bureau’s general counsel, was part of a flurry of late-night filings on Monday by prosecutors and the defense centering on what evidence and arguments the judge should permit in the trial.At the same time, the filings suggest that the special counsel may use the trial to continue to examine larger efforts linked to the Clinton campaign that raised suspicions about potential collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia — including the so-called Steele dossier.The dossier is a notorious compendium of opposition research about purported Trump-Russia ties, since revealed to be thinly sourced and dubious. It was written by Christopher Steele, a subcontractor for Fusion GPS, a research firm that Mr. Sussmann’s former law firm, Perkins Coie, had hired to scrutinize such matters.Mr. Sussmann, a cybersecurity specialist, had worked for the Democratic Party on issues related to Russia’s hacking of its servers. One of his partners at Perkins Coie, Marc Elias, a campaign law specialist, was representing the Clinton campaign and hired Fusion GPS.Mr. Durham’s new filing refers to the dossier and Mr. Steele — including a meeting with Mr. Sussmann that Mr. Steele has said involved the suspicions about the odd internet data — and Mr. Sussmann’s legal team said that Mr. Durham appears to be planning to bring up the dossier at the trial even though the indictment does not mention it.Mr. Sussmann’s defense lawyers accused Mr. Durham of promoting a “baseless narrative that the Clinton campaign conspired with others to trick the federal government into investigating ties between President Trump and Russia,” asking the judge to block prosecutors from making arguments and introducing evidence related to the Steele dossier.“But there was no such conspiracy; the special counsel hasn’t charged such a crime; and the special counsel should not be permitted to turn Mr. Sussmann’s trial on a narrow false statement charge into a circus full of sideshows that will only fuel partisan fervor,” they wrote.The Durham team’s filing also asked the judge to bar the defense from making arguments and presenting evidence “that depict the special counsel as politically motived or biased based on his appointment” by the Trump administration.“The only purpose in advancing these arguments would be to stir the pot of political polarization, garner public attention and, most inappropriately, confuse jurors or encourage jury nullification,” it said. “Put bluntly, the defense wishes to make the special counsel out to be a political actor when, in fact, nothing could be further from the truth.”In the spring of 2019, the special counsel investigating the Trump campaign and Russia, Robert S. Mueller III, detailed “numerous links between the Russian government and the Trump campaign” but did not charge any Trump associate with conspiring with Russia. As Mr. Trump continued to claim that he was the victim of a “deep state” conspiracy, the attorney general at the time, William P. Barr, assigned Mr. Durham to scour the Russia investigation for any wrongdoing.But Mr. Durham has not developed any cases against high-level officials. Instead, he has brought false-statements charges involving two efforts by outsiders to hunt for signs of Trump-Russia links, both of which were thin and involved Perkins Coie in some way. He has used the indictments to insinuate that the Clinton campaign may have orchestrated the concoction of false smears against Mr. Trump, but without charging such a conspiracy.One such effort was the Steele dossier, and the other was the suspicions that Mr. Sussmann relayed to Mr. Baker. The latter suspicions had been developed by a group of data scientists who analyzed odd internet data they thought might suggest clandestine communications between a server for the Trump Organization and a server for Alfa Bank, a Kremlin-linked Russian financial institution.The F.B.I. — which had already opened the investigation that would evolve into the Mueller inquiry — looked into the Alfa Bank matter but decided the suspicions were unfounded.After Mr. Sussmann’s indictment, several criminal law specialists said the charge was an unusually thin basis for a federal case because it boiled down to a dispute over what was said at a one-on-one meeting at which there were no other witnesses and there was no recording. But the newly disclosed text message from Mr. Sussmann could bolster prosecutors’ case.In accusing Mr. Sussmann of falsely saying he was not conveying the suspicions on behalf of any client, the indictment also contended that he was concealing that he was actually representing two clients at that meeting — the Clinton campaign and a technology executive, Rodney Joffe, who worked with the cyberspecialists who analyzed the Alfa Bank data. Law firm billing records show that Mr. Sussmann listed the campaign for time working on Alfa Bank issues.Mr. Sussmann’s legal team has denied that he told Mr. Baker he was not conveying the information on behalf of any client. They also insisted to the Justice Department before the indictment that Mr. Sussmann was not there at the direction or on behalf of the campaign. In court filings, they have acknowledged that Mr. Sussmann “arranged for this meeting on behalf of his client,” referring to Mr. Joffe.The defense for Mr. Sussmann therefore may turn in part on what it means to be somewhere on behalf of a client. In a separate filing on Monday night, the defense asked the judge, Christopher Cooper of the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia, to dismiss the case if Mr. Durham does not grant immunity to Mr. Joffe, so that the technology executive can testify about his interactions with Mr. Sussmann regarding the meeting.In that filing, they said Mr. Joffe would offer “critical exculpatory testimony on behalf of Mr. Sussmann,” including that the two agreed that he should take the information to the F.B.I. “to help the government, not to benefit Mr. Joffe.” They also said that “contrary to the special counsel’s entire theory,” Mr. Joffe’s work with the data scientists was not connected to the campaign.A spokeswoman for Mr. Joffe did not provide a comment. But a letter from Mr. Joffe’s lawyer included in the filings said that while Mr. Joffe “can provide exculpatory information concerning the allegations against” Mr. Sussmann, Mr. Joffe still faced the possible risk of indictment and would invoke his Fifth Amendment rights not to testify. More

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      Durham Distances Himself From Furor in Right-Wing Media Over Filing

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      The special counsel implicitly acknowledged that White House internet data he discussed, which conservative outlets have portrayed as proof of spying on the Trump White House, came from the Obama era.WASHINGTON — John H. Durham, the Trump-era special counsel scrutinizing the investigation into Russia’s 2016 election interference, distanced himself on Thursday from false reports by right-wing news outlets that a motion he recently filed said Hillary Clinton’s campaign had paid to spy on Trump White House servers.Citing a barrage of such reports on Fox News and elsewhere based on the prosecutor’s Feb. 11 filing, defense lawyers for a Democratic-linked cybersecurity lawyer, Michael Sussmann, have accused the special counsel of including unnecessary and misleading information in filings “plainly intended to politicize this case, inflame media coverage and taint the jury pool.”In a filing on Thursday, Mr. Durham defended himself, saying those accusations about his intentions were “simply not true.” He said he had “valid and straightforward reasons” for including the information in the Feb. 11 filing that set off the firestorm, while disavowing responsibility for how certain news outlets had interpreted and portrayed it.“If third parties or members of the media have overstated, understated or otherwise misinterpreted facts contained in the government’s motion, that does not in any way undermine the valid reasons for the government’s inclusion of this information,” he wrote.But even as he did not acknowledge any problem with how he couched his filing last week, Mr. Durham said he would make future filings under seal if they contained “information that legitimately gives rise to privacy issues or other concerns that might overcome the presumption of public access to judicial documents.”Former President Donald J. Trump has seized on the inaccurate reporting to declare that there is now “indisputable evidence” of a Clinton campaign conspiracy against him — and to suggest that there ought to be executions. Mr. Trump, Fox News hosts and others have also criticized mainstream journalists for not covering the purported revelation.The dispute traces back to a pretrial motion in the case Mr. Durham has brought against Mr. Sussmann accusing him of making a false statement during a September 2016 meeting with the F.B.I. where he relayed concerns about possible cyberlinks between Mr. Trump and Russia. The bureau later dismissed those as unfounded.Mr. Durham says Mr. Sussmann falsely told the F.B.I. official he had no clients, but was really there on behalf of both the Clinton campaign and a technology executive named Rodney Joffe. Mr. Sussmann denies ever saying that, while maintaining he was only there on behalf of Mr. Joffe — not the campaign.Several sentences of the filing recounted a second meeting, in February 2017, where Mr. Sussmann had presented different concerns about odd internet data and Russia to the C.I.A., which came from the same cybersecurity researchers who developed the suspicions he had presented to the F.B.I.At the C.I.A. meeting, Mr. Sussmann shared concerns about data that suggested that someone using a Russian-made smartphone may have been connecting to networks at Trump Tower and the White House, among other places.Mr. Sussmann had obtained that information from Mr. Joffe. The court filing also stated that Mr. Joffe’s company, Neustar, had helped maintain internet-related servers for the White House, and accused Mr. Joffe — whom Mr. Durham has not charged with any crime — and his associates of having “exploited this arrangement” by mining certain records to gather derogatory information about Mr. Trump.In the fall, The New York Times had reported on Mr. Sussmann’s C.I.A. meeting and the concerns he had relayed about the data suggesting the presence of Russian-made YotaPhones — smartphones that are rarely seen in the United States — in proximity to Mr. Trump and in the White House.But over the weekend, the conservative news media treated those sentences in Mr. Durham’s filing as a new revelation while significantly embellishing what it had said. Mr. Durham, some outlets inaccurately reported, had said he had discovered that the Clinton campaign had paid Mr. Joffe’s company to spy on Mr. Trump. But the campaign had not paid his company, and the filing did not say so. Some outlets also quoted Mr. Durham’s filing as using the word “infiltrate,” a word it did not contain.Most important, the coverage about purported spying on the Trump White House was premised on the idea that the White House network data involved came from when Mr. Trump was president. But Mr. Durham’s filing did not say when it was from.Lawyers for a Georgia Institute of Technology data scientist who helped analyze the Yota data said on Monday that the data came from the Obama presidency. Mr. Sussmann’s lawyers said the same in a filing on Monday night complaining about Mr. Durham’s conduct.Mr. Durham did not directly address that basic factual dispute. But his explanation for why he included the information about the matter in the earlier filing implicitly confirmed that Mr. Sussmann had conveyed concerns about White House data that came from before Mr. Trump was president.The purpose of the earlier filing was to ask a judge to look at potential conflicts of interest on Mr. Sussmann’s legal team. Mr. Durham included those paragraphs, he wrote, in part because one of the potential conflicts was that a member of the defense had worked for the White House “during the relevant events that involved” the White House.The defense lawyer in question is Michael Bosworth, who was a deputy White House counsel in the Obama administration.Separately on Thursday, lawyers for Mr. Sussmann filed a pretrial motion asking a judge to dismiss the case.They argued that even if Mr. Sussmann did falsely say at the F.B.I. meeting that he had no client — which they deny — that would not rise to a “material” false statement, meaning one affecting a government decision. The decision facing the F.B.I. was whether to open an investigation about the concerns he relayed at that meeting, and it would have done so regardless, they said.Mr. Durham has said Mr. Sussmann’s supposed lie was material because had the F.B.I. known that he was acting “as a paid advocate for clients with a political or business agenda,” agents might have asked more questions or taken additional steps before opening an investigation. More

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      Court Filing Started a Furor in Right-Wing Outlets, but Their Narrative Is Off Track

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      The latest alarmist claims about spying on Trump appeared to be flawed, but the explanation is byzantine — underlining the challenge for journalists in deciding what merits coverage.WASHINGTON — When John H. Durham, the Trump-era special counsel investigating the inquiry into Russia’s 2016 election interference, filed a pretrial motion on Friday night, he slipped in a few extra sentences that set off a furor among right-wing outlets about purported spying on former President Donald J. Trump.But the entire narrative appeared to be mostly wrong or old news — the latest example of the challenge created by a barrage of similar conspiracy theories from Mr. Trump and his allies.Upon close inspection, these narratives are often based on a misleading presentation of the facts or outright misinformation. They also tend to involve dense and obscure issues, so dissecting them requires asking readers to expend significant mental energy and time — raising the question of whether news outlets should even cover such claims. Yet Trump allies portray the news media as engaged in a cover-up if they don’t.The latest example began with the motion Mr. Durham filed in a case he has brought against Michael A. Sussmann, a cybersecurity lawyer with links to the Democratic Party. The prosecutor has accused Mr. Sussmann of lying during a September 2016 meeting with an F.B.I. official about Mr. Trump’s possible links to Russia.The filing was ostensibly about potential conflicts of interest. But it also recounted a meeting at which Mr. Sussmann had presented other suspicions to the government. In February 2017, Mr. Sussmann told the C.I.A. about odd internet data suggesting that someone using a Russian-made smartphone may have been connecting to networks at Trump Tower and the White House, among other places.Mr. Sussmann had obtained that information from a client, a technology executive named Rodney Joffe. Another paragraph in the court filing said that Mr. Joffe’s company, Neustar, had helped maintain internet-related servers for the White House, and that he and his associates “exploited this arrangement” by mining certain records to gather derogatory information about Mr. Trump.Citing this filing, Fox News inaccurately declared that Mr. Durham had said he had evidence that Hillary Clinton’s campaign had paid a technology company to “infiltrate” a White House server. The Washington Examiner claimed that this all meant there had been spying on Mr. Trump’s White House office. And when mainstream publications held back, Mr. Trump and his allies began shaming the news media.“The press refuses to even mention the major crime that took place,” Mr. Trump said in a statement on Monday. “This in itself is a scandal, the fact that a story so big, so powerful and so important for the future of our nation is getting zero coverage from LameStream, is being talked about all over the world.”There were many problems with all this. For one, much of this was not new: The New York Times had reported in October what Mr. Sussmann had told the C.I.A. about data suggesting that Russian-made smartphones, called YotaPhones, had been connecting to networks at Trump Tower and the White House, among other places.The conservative media also skewed what the filing said. For example, Mr. Durham’s filing never used the word “infiltrate.” And it never claimed that Mr. Joffe’s company was being paid by the Clinton campaign.Most important, contrary to the reporting, the filing never said the White House data that came under scrutiny was from the Trump era. According to lawyers for David Dagon, a Georgia Institute of Technology data scientist who helped develop the Yota analysis, the data — so-called DNS logs, which are records of when computers or smartphones have prepared to communicate with servers over the internet — came from Barack Obama’s presidency.“What Trump and some news outlets are saying is wrong,” said Jody Westby and Mark Rasch, both lawyers for Mr. Dagon. “The cybersecurity researchers were investigating malware in the White House, not spying on the Trump campaign, and to our knowledge all of the data they used was nonprivate DNS data from before Trump took office.”In a statement, a spokesperson for Mr. Joffe said that “contrary to the allegations in this recent filing,” he was apolitical, did not work for any political party, and had lawful access under a contract to work with others to analyze DNS data — including from the White House — for the purpose of hunting for security breaches or threats.After Russians hacked networks for the White House and Democrats in 2015 and 2016, it went on, the cybersecurity researchers were “deeply concerned” to find data suggesting Russian-made YotaPhones were in proximity to the Trump campaign and the White House, so “prepared a report of their findings, which was subsequently shared with the C.I.A.”A spokesman for Mr. Durham declined to comment.Mr. Durham was assigned by the attorney general at the time, William P. Barr, to scour the Russia investigation for wrongdoing in May 2019 as Mr. Trump escalated his claims that he was the victim of a “deep state” conspiracy. But after nearly three years, he has not developed any cases against high-level government officials.Instead, Mr. Durham has developed two cases against people associated with outside efforts to understand Russia’s election interference that put forward unproven, and sometimes thin or subsequently disproved, suspicions about purported links to Mr. Trump or his campaign.Both cases are narrow — accusations of making false statements. One of those cases is against Mr. Sussmann, whom Mr. Durham has accused of lying during a September 2016 meeting with an F.B.I. official about Mr. Trump’s possible links to Russia.(Mr. Durham says Mr. Sussmann falsely said he had no clients, but was there on behalf of both the Clinton campaign and Mr. Joffe. Mr. Sussman denies ever saying that, while maintaining he was only there on behalf of Mr. Joffe — not the campaign.)Both Mr. Sussmann’s September 2016 meeting with the F.B.I. and the February 2017 meeting with the C.I.A. centered upon suspicions developed by cybersecurity researchers who specialize in sifting DNS data in search of hacking, botnets and other threats.A military research organization had asked Georgia Tech researchers to help scrutinize a 2015 Russian malware attack on the White House’s network. After it emerged that Russia had hacked Democrats, they began hunting for signs of other Russian activity targeting people or organizations related to the election, using data provided by Neustar.Mr. Sussmann’s meeting with the F.B.I. involved odd data the researchers said might indicate communications between the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank, a Kremlin-linked institution. The F.B.I. dismissed suspicions of a secret communications channel as unfounded. In the indictment of Mr. Sussmann, Mr. Durham insinuated that the researchers did not believe what they were saying. But lawyers for the researchers said that was false and that their clients believed their analysis.The meeting with the C.I.A. involved odd data the researchers said indicated there had been communications with Yota servers in Russia coming from networks serving the White House; Trump Tower; Mr. Trump’s Central Park West apartment building; and Spectrum Health, a Michigan hospital company that also played a role in the Alfa Bank matter. The researchers also collaborated on that issue, according to Ms. Westby and Mr. Rasch, and Mr. Dagon had prepared a “white paper” explaining the analysis, which Mr. Sussmann later took to the C.I.A.Mr. Durham’s filing also cast doubt on the researchers’ suggestion that interactions between devices in the United States and Yota servers were inherently suspicious, saying that there were more than three million such DNS logs from 2014 to 2017 — and that such logs from the White House dated back at least that long.But Ms. Westby and Mr. Rasch reiterated that YotaPhones are extremely rare in the United States and portrayed three million DNS logs over three years as “paltry and small relative to the billions and billions” of logs associated with common devices like iPhones.“Yota lookups are extremely concerning if they emanate from sensitive networks that require protection, such as government networks or people running for federal office,” they said. More

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      Evidence Muddles Durham’s Case on Sussmann’s F.B.I. Meeting

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      One disclosure dovetails with the special counsel John Durham’s indictment against Michael Sussmann, while several others clash with it.WASHINGTON — When a special counsel accused a prominent cybersecurity lawyer of lying to the F.B.I. during a September 2016 meeting about Donald J. Trump’s possible links to Russia, the indictment presented a lengthy narrative but the direct evidence appeared lean.The indictment said the lawyer, Michael A. Sussmann, had made a false statement by telling an F.B.I. official that he was not representing a client in presenting the information. Mr. Sussmann, who has pleaded not guilty, has denied saying that. No one else was present and their conversation was not recorded, so the direct and clearly admissible evidence appeared to boil down to one witness.This week, additional pieces of evidence emerged into public view that were not in the indictment — one of which appears to dovetail with the accusation against Mr. Sussmann by the special counsel, John H. Durham, who was appointed during the Trump administration, while several others appear to conflict with it. The material emerged in court filings and at a status conference before a judge on Wednesday.It is not clear whether all of the newly disclosed evidence will be admissible. But the jostling between prosecutors and defense lawyers could offer a preview of aspects of the trial, which they said on Wednesday would last about two weeks and Judge Christopher R. Cooper said could begin in May or early June.While the charge against Mr. Sussmann is narrow, it has received significant political attention in part because Mr. Durham concluded that the Hillary Clinton campaign had helped push the suspicions, which concerned possible secret communications between computer servers associated with Mr. Trump’s company and the Kremlin-linked Alfa Bank. The F.B.I. decided the suspicions were unfounded.In accusing Mr. Sussmann of telling the F.B.I. official — James A. Baker, then the bureau’s general counsel — that he had no clients, Mr. Durham claimed that Mr. Sussmann was actually representing both a technology executive and the Clinton campaign. Mr. Sussmann, via his lawyers, denied that he told Mr. Baker that he had no client, while maintaining he was there on behalf of only the executive, not the campaign.One piece of newly disclosed evidence, described in a filing by Mr. Durham’s team on Tuesday evening, consists of handwritten notes by an F.B.I. lawyer to whom Mr. Baker spoke about the meeting that day. The Durham filing quoted the notes as saying “no specific client.”That evidence is similar to another set of handwritten notes previously cited in the indictment by another F.B.I. official who also spoke to Mr. Baker after the meeting. The indictment quoted those notes as listing Mr. Sussmann’s name, then a dash, then the name of his law firm, then a dash, and then the words “said not doing this for any client.”It is not clear whether such notes — or testimony by the F.B.I. officials who took them — would be admissible at a trial under complex rules of evidence. Those rules generally ban statements made outside court as hearsay, but they make exceptions subject to judges’ interpretations.The indictment also said that in February 2017, Mr. Sussmann met with the C.I.A. and conveyed similar and related concerns, citing a post-meeting memorandum by two agency employees that said he was “not representing a particular client.” Mr. Durham portrayed that as showing Mr. Sussmann had repeated a false statement.But at the hearing on Wednesday, a lawyer for Mr. Sussmann, Sean Berkowitz, cited evidence turned over by the prosecutors last week that muddies that picture by suggesting he may instead have told them he had a client.Emails by agency personnel ahead of the meeting, Mr. Berkowitz said, included statements like “Sussmann said he represents a client who does not want to be known” and “the plan should be to convince Sussmann that it is in his and his client’s interest to go to the F.B.I.” A draft version of the agency’s post-meeting memo also referred to Mr. Sussmann having a client, he said.A prosecutor working for Mr. Durham, Andrew DeFilippis, told the judge that “although we’re not, you know, interested in a full factual debate before the court,” an agency employee had spotted the reference to a client in the draft memo and “corrected” it for the final version. Mr. De Filippis did not address references to a client in the earlier emails.Those disclosures followed a court filing on Monday by Mr. Sussmann’s defense team that revealed contradictory things Mr. Baker had said under oath about the key interaction in Justice Department interviews, which Mr. Durham’s team disclosed to them last week.In 2019 and 2020 interviews, Mr. Baker recalled the interaction in two different ways that each clashed with the indictment’s version. In the first, he said Mr. Sussmann told him the cyberexperts who developed the Alfa Bank theory “were his clients.” In the second, he said Mr. Sussmann never said if he was representing anyone and Mr. Baker didn’t ask, but assumed he had no client.In the Tuesday court filing, Mr. Durham’s team accused the defense of “cherry-picking” the evidence and putting forward a “skewed portrayal.”The 2019 and 2020 interviews “occurred years after the events in question, and Mr. Baker made these statements before he had the opportunity to refresh his recollection with contemporaneous or near-contemporaneous notes,” they said, adding that he had since “affirmed and then re-affirmed his now-clear recollection of the defendant’s false statement.” More

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      Defendant in Case Brought by Durham Says New Evidence Undercuts Charge

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      Lawyers for Michael Sussmann, accused by the Trump-era special counsel of lying to the F.B.I., asked for a quick trial after receiving what they said was helpful material from prosecutors.WASHINGTON — The defense team for a cybersecurity lawyer who was indicted in September by a Trump-era special counsel asked a judge on Monday to set a trial date sooner than the prosecutor wants — while disclosing evidence recently turned over to them that appears to contradict the charge.The materials could make it harder for the special counsel, John H. Durham, to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the cybersecurity lawyer, Michael Sussmann, is guilty of the charge against him: making a false statement to the F.B.I. during a September 2016 meeting about possible links between Donald J. Trump and Russia.The newly disclosed evidence consists of records of two Justice Department interviews of the former F.B.I. official to whom Mr. Sussmann is accused of lying, each of which offers a different version of the key interaction than the version in the indictment. That official is the prosecution’s main witness.The existence of the evidence, which Mr. Durham’s team provided to Mr. Sussmann’s team last week, “only underscores the baseless and unprecedented nature of this indictment and the importance of setting a prompt trial date so that Mr. Sussmann can vindicate himself as soon as possible,” the defense lawyers wrote.While Mr. Durham wants to wait until July 25 to start the trial, they said, the defense team urged the judge to set a start date of May 2.A spokesman for Mr. Durham declined to comment.The indictment centered on a September 2016 meeting between Mr. Sussmann and James A. Baker, who was then the F.B.I.’s general counsel. Mr. Sussmann relayed analysis by cybersecurity researchers who cited odd internet data they said appeared to reflect some kind of covert communications between computer servers associated with the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank, a Kremlin-linked Russian financial institution. (The F.B.I. briefly looked into the Alfa Bank suspicions, but dismissed them as unfounded.)Mr. Durham’s indictment accused Mr. Sussmann of falsely saying he was not there on behalf of any client. Through his lawyers, Mr. Sussmann has denied saying that to Mr. Baker.The indictment also said that Mr. Sussmann was in fact representing both a technology executive and the Hillary Clinton campaign. Mr. Sussmann has maintained he was only there on behalf of the executive, and not the Clinton campaign.Different statements by James Baker, a former F.B.I. general counsel, are at the heart of the legal battle.via C-SPANNo one else was present at the meeting, and if the trial boils down to pitting Mr. Baker’s memory against Mr. Sussmann’s, the newly disclosed evidence will provide fodder for the defense team to show that Mr. Baker’s accounts of that aspect of the meeting have been inconsistent, and to raise doubts about the reliability of the version cited by Mr. Durham.The newly disclosed evidence consists of partly redacted records of two of Mr. Baker’s interviews with the Justice Department. The court filing appended copies of several pages of a transcript and an interview report.In July 2019, Mr. Baker was interviewed by the Justice Department’s inspector general about the meeting. Mr. Baker stated, according to a two-page transcript excerpt, that Mr. Sussmann had brought him information “that he said related to strange interactions that some number of people that were his clients, who were, he described as I recall it, sort of cybersecurity experts, had found.”The newly disclosed evidence also includes a page of a report Mr. Durham’s team made to summarize an interview they conducted with Mr. Baker in June 2020. According to that report, Mr. Baker did not say that Mr. Sussmann told him he was not there on behalf of any client. Rather, he said the issue never came up and he merely assumed Mr. Sussmann was not conveying the Alfa Bank data and analysis for any client.“Baker said that Sussmann did not specify that he was representing a client regarding the matter, nor did Baker ask him if he was representing a client,” the Durham team’s report said. “Baker said it did not seem like Sussmann was representing a client.”Mr. Baker later told Bill Priestap, then the F.B.I.’s top counterintelligence official, about the meeting. According to the indictment, Mr. Priestap’s handwritten notes list Mr. Sussmann’s name and law firm and then, after a dash, states “said not doing this for any client.” (It is not clear whether such notes would be admissible at a trial.)The former Trump administration attorney general, William P. Barr, appointed Mr. Durham to scour the Russia investigation for evidence of wrongdoing by government officials pursuing it. The Sussmann indictment, however, portrayed the F.B.I. as a victim.Mr. Durham used the narrow charge against Mr. Sussmann to put out, in a 27-page indictment, large amounts of other information.He showed that Mr. Sussmann had interacted about Alfa Bank with a colleague at his law firm who represented the Clinton campaign, and that in accounting for his own time on the Alfa Bank matter in law firm billing records, Mr. Sussmann listed the campaign as the client. (Mr. Sussmann had represented the Democratic Party about Russia’s hacking of its servers.)Mr. Durham also put out significant amounts of information about the technology executive and three other cybersecurity researchers who had discovered the odd internet data and developed the theory that it reflected some kind of hidden communications, including mining emails in which they discussed what it might mean.Although Mr. Durham did not charge the researchers with any crime, he insinuated that they did not really believe what they were saying. Mr. Trump and his supporters seized on the indictment, saying it showed the Alfa Bank suspicions were a hoax by Clinton supporters and portraying it as evidence that the entire Russia investigation was unwarranted.Lawyers for those data scientists have pushed back, saying their clients believed their theory was a plausible explanation for the odd data they had uncovered — and still do. They have also accused Mr. Durham of putting forward a misleading portrayal in his indictment by selectively excerpting fragments of their clients’ emails, omitting portions that showed their clients enthusiastically supported the final analysis.The transcript and statement add to materials already in the public record, in which Mr. Sussmann and Mr. Baker recalled that meeting in sworn testimony in ways that do not clearly dovetail with the indictment’s accusation.In a deposition before Congress in 2017, Mr. Sussmann testified that he had sought the meeting on behalf of a client who was a cybersecurity expert and had helped analyze the data. And in a deposition to Congress in 2018, Mr. Baker said he did not remember Mr. Sussmann “specifically saying that he was acting on behalf of a particular client.” More

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      Authorities Arrest Analyst Who Contributed to Steele Dossier

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      Igor Danchenko, a Russia analyst who worked with Christopher Steele, the author of a dossier of rumors and unproven assertions about Donald J. Trump, was taken into custody as part of the Durham investigation.WASHINGTON — Federal authorities on Thursday arrested an analyst who in 2016 gathered leads about possible links between Donald J. Trump and Russia for what turned out to be Democratic-funded opposition research, according to people familiar with the matter.The arrest of the analyst, Igor Danchenko, is part of the special counsel inquiry led by John H. Durham, who was appointed by the Trump administration to scrutinize the Russia investigation for any wrongdoing, the people said.Mr. Danchenko, was the primary researcher of the so-called Steele dossier, a compendium of rumors and unproven assertions suggesting that Mr. Trump and his 2016 campaign were compromised by and conspiring with Russian intelligence officials in Moscow’s covert operation to help him defeat Hillary Clinton.The people familiar with the matter spoke on condition of anonymity because the indictment of Mr. Danchenko had yet to be unsealed. A spokesman for Mr. Durham did not respond to a request for comment.Some claims from the Steele dossier made their way into an F.B.I. wiretap application targeting a former Trump campaign adviser in October 2016. Other portions of it — particularly a salacious claim about a purported sex tape — caused a political and media firestorm when Buzzfeed published the materials in January 2017, shortly before Mr. Trump was sworn in.But most of the important claims in the dossier — which was written by Mr. Danchenko’s employer, Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence agent — have not been proven, and some have been refuted. F.B.I. agents interviewed Mr. Danchenko in 2017 when they were seeking to run down the claims in the dossier.The interview suggested that aspects of the dossier were misleading: Mr. Steele left unclear that much of the material was thirdhand information, and some of what Mr. Danchenko — who was born in Russia but lives in the United States — had relayed was more speculative than the dossier implied.A 2019 investigation by the Justice Department’s inspector general sharply criticized the F.B.I. for continuing to cite material from the dossier after the bureau interviewed Mr. Danchenko without alerting judges that some of what he said had cast doubt on the contents of the dossier.The inspector general report also said that a decade earlier, when Mr. Danchenko worked for the Brookings Institution, a prominent Washington think-tank, he had been the subject of a counterintelligence investigation into whether he was a Russian agent.In an interview with The New York Times in 2020, Mr. Danchenko defended the integrity of his work, saying he had been tasked to gather “raw intelligence” and was simply passing it on to Mr. Steele. Mr. Danchenko — who made his name as a Russia analyst by exposing indications that the dissertation of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia contained plagiarized material — also denied being a Russian agent.“I’ve never been a Russian agent,” Mr. Danchenko said. “It is ridiculous to suggest that. This, I think, it’s slander.”Mr. Steele’s efforts were part of opposition research that Democrats were indirectly funding by the time the 2016 general election took shape. Mr. Steele’s business intelligence firm was a subcontractor to another research firm, Fusion GPS, which in turn had been hired by the Perkins Coie law firm, which was working for the Hillary Clinton campaign.Mr. Danchenko said he did not know who Mr. Steele’s client was at the time and considered himself a nonpartisan analyst and researcher.Mr. Durham has been known to be interested in Mr. Danchenko and the Steele dossier saga. In February, he used a subpoena to obtain old personnel files and other documents related to Mr. Danchenko from the Brookings Institution, where Mr. Danchenko had worked from 2005 until 2010.The charges against Mr. Danchenko follow Mr. Durham’s indictment in September of a cybersecurity lawyer, Michael Sussmann, which accused him of lying to the F.B.I. about who he was working for when he brought concerns about possible Trump-Russia links to the bureau in September 2016.Mr. Sussmann, who then also worked for Perkins Coie, was relaying concerns developed by data scientists about odd internet logs they said suggested the possibility of a covert communications channel between the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank, a Kremlin-linked financial institution. He has denied lying to the F.B.I. about who he was working for.William K. Rashbaum More