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      2016 Campaign Looms Large as Justice Dept. Pursues Jan. 6 Inquiry

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      Top officials at the department and the F.B.I. appear intent on avoiding any errors that could taint the current investigation or provide ammunition for a backlash.As the Justice Department investigation into the attack on the Capitol grinds ever closer to former President Donald J. Trump, it has prompted persistent — and cautionary — reminders of the backlash caused by inquiries into Mr. Trump and Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential campaign.Attorney General Merrick B. Garland is intent on avoiding even the slightest errors, which could taint the current investigation, provide Mr. Trump’s defenders with reasons to claim the inquiry was driven by animus, or undo his effort to rehabilitate the department’s reputation after the political warfare of the Trump years.Mr. Garland never seriously considered focusing on Mr. Trump from the outset, as investigators had done earlier with Mr. Trump and with Mrs. Clinton during her email investigation, people close to him say.As a result, his investigators have taken a more methodical approach, carefully climbing up the chain of personnel behind the 2020 plan to name fake slates of Trump electors in battleground states that had been won by Joseph R. Biden Jr.That has now led them to Mr. Trump and his innermost circle: Justice Department lawyers are questioning witnesses directly about the actions of Mr. Trump and top advisers like his former chief of staff, Mark Meadows.Christopher Wray, the F.B.I. director, appears to be proceeding with caution in hopes of armoring the bureau against future attacks by making sure his agents operate by the book. Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesAs prosecutors delve deeper into Mr. Trump’s orbit, the former president and his allies in Congress will almost certainly accuse the Justice Department and F.B.I. of a politically motivated witch hunt.The template for those attacks, as Mr. Garland and the F.B.I. director, Christopher Wray, well know, was “Crossfire Hurricane,” the investigation into the Trump campaign’s connections to Russia, which Mr. Trump continues to dismiss as a partisan hoax.The mistakes and decisions from that period, in part, led to increased layers of oversight, including a major policy change at the Justice Department. If a decision were made to open a criminal investigation into Mr. Trump after he announced his intention to run in the 2024 election, as he suggests he might do, the department’s leaders would have to sign off on any inquiry under an internal rule established by Attorney General William P. Barr and endorsed by Mr. Garland.“Attorney General Garland and those investigating the high-level efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election are acutely aware of how any misstep, whether by the F.B.I. or prosecutors, will be amplified and used for political purposes,” said Mary B. McCord, a top Justice Department official during the Obama administration. “I expect there are added layers of review and scrutiny of every investigative step.”Key Revelations From the Jan. 6 HearingsCard 1 of 9Making a case against Trump. More

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      Barry Morphew Pleads Guilty to Casting Missing Wife’s Ballot for Trump

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      Prosecutors in April dropped a first-degree murder charge against Barry Morphew, whose wife, Suzanne Morphew, disappeared in May 2020.The husband of a Colorado woman who has been missing for more than two years pleaded guilty on Thursday to casting her mail-in ballot for Donald J. Trump during the 2020 election, telling F.B.I. agents, “I figured all these other guys are cheating.”The man, Barry Morphew, 54, was given a sentence of one year of supervised probation but avoided jail time after pleading guilty to one count of forgery, a felony, in district court in Chaffee County, according to court records.The outcome in the voter fraud case marked the latest twist in the mystery of what happened to Suzanne Morphew, who disappeared in May 2020 after going for a bike ride near her home in Salida, Colo.The missing person’s case has generated national headlines. Prosecutors charged Mr. Morphew with first-degree murder last year, but then, in April, they dropped all charges against him related to her disappearance after a judge imposed sanctions on them for violating discovery rules. Mr. Morphew maintained his innocence as prosecutors accused him of killing his wife after learning that she had been involved in an extramarital affair.The body of Ms. Morphew, a mother of two who was 49 when she vanished, has not been found.About five months after she was reported missing, her mail-in ballot for the 2020 election arrived at the clerk’s office in Chaffee County, about 100 miles west of Colorado Springs, according to an arrest warrant.Election officials contacted the sheriff’s office, which took a photograph of the ballot and seized it as evidence. A space for the voter’s signature was blank, but Mr. Morphew wrote his name on a line for legal witnesses to sign ballots. The ballot was dated Oct. 15, 2020.When F.B.I. agents asked Mr. Morphew why he had returned his missing wife’s ballot, he told them, as detailed in the warrant, “Just because I wanted Trump to win.”Mr. Morphew told investigators that he didn’t know he was not authorized to cast a ballot for his wife.“I just thought, give him another vote,” he said, referring to Mr. Trump. “I figured all these other guys are cheating. I know she was going to vote for Trump anyway.”Iris Eytan, a lawyer for Mr. Morphew, said in an interview on Friday that her client had mistakenly assumed that when he became the legal guardian for his wife after her disappearance, it extended to voting.“He believed that because he could sign legal documents for her, that the ballot, similarly, was under his authority,” Ms. Eytan said. “So he was following her wishes. He did not sign her name. He signed his name on the witness line. So he didn’t, in any way, intend to deceive the clerk of the court.”Ms. Eytan said that instead of prosecuting Mr. Morphew for voter fraud, the authorities should be focused on the search for Ms. Morphew.“Barry’s life is shattered,” she said. “Her disappearance is not linked to him. He’s looked at and treated like a killer.” More

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      Prosecutors Rest in Contempt Case Against Steve Bannon

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      The government, seeking to hold Mr. Bannon to account for defying a subpoena from Congress, wrapped up its case after calling just two witnesses.WASHINGTON — The prosecution rested its case on Wednesday in the trial of Stephen K. Bannon, a former top adviser to President Donald J. Trump, as government lawyers sought to show that Mr. Bannon had repeatedly ignored warnings that he risked facing criminal charges in flouting a subpoena.Mr. Bannon was indicted in November on two counts of contempt of Congress after he refused to provide information to the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack.The trial on Wednesday largely centered on the testimony of Kristin Amerling, the deputy staff director and chief counsel to the Jan. 6 committee, who offered a detailed accounting of the committee’s attempts to compel Mr. Bannon to testify last year.“There had been a number of public reports stating that Mr. Bannon had been in communication with White House officials, including former President Trump in the weeks leading up to the Jan. 6 events,” Ms. Amerling said. “We wanted to understand what he could tell us about the connection between any of these events.”Prosecutors continued to describe Mr. Bannon’s decision to stonewall the committee as a straightforward case of contempt. By declining to testify, Mr. Bannon not only “thumbed his nose” at the law, but he also may have withheld significant information about the coordinated effort to disrupt the certification of the 2020 election, Amanda Vaughn, a prosecutor, said.Key Revelations From the Jan. 6 HearingsCard 1 of 8Making a case against Trump. More

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      Proud Boys Ignored Orders Given at Pre-Jan. 6 Meeting

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      The directives, given during a video conference, included obeying police lines and keeping away from ordinary protesters. But members of the far-right group played aggressive roles in several breaches at the Capitol.One week before scores of Proud Boys helped lead a pro-Trump mob in a violent assault on the Capitol last year, Enrique Tarrio, the chairman of the group, and some of his top lieutenants held a foul-mouthed video conference with a handpicked crew of members.The meeting, on Dec. 30, 2020, marked the founding of a special new chapter of the Proud Boys called the Ministry of Self-Defense. The team of several dozen trusted members was intended, Mr. Tarrio told his men, to bring a level of order and professionalism to the group’s upcoming march in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021, that had, by his own account, been missing at earlier Proud Boys rallies in the city.Over nearly two hours, Mr. Tarrio and his leadership team — many of whom have since been charged with seditious conspiracy — gave the new recruits a series of directives: Adopt a defensive posture on Jan. 6, they were told. Keep the “normies” — or the normal protesters — away from the Proud Boys’ marching ranks. And obey police lines.“We’re never going to be the ones to cross the police barrier or cross something in order to get to somebody,” Mr. Tarrio said.There was one overriding problem with the orders: None of them were actually followed when the Proud Boys stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6.Far from holding back, members of the far-right group played aggressive roles in several breaches at the Capitol, moving in coordination and often taking the lead in removing police barricades, according to a visual investigation by The New York Times of hundreds of hours of video footage of the assault.And despite what Mr. Tarrio said about keeping away from ordinary protesters, members of the group repeatedly instigated people around them in a tactic that some Proud Boys later described in private messages as “riling up the normies.”While the video conference has been mentioned in court papers, it has not been widely seen. A recording of it was seized from Mr. Tarrio’s phone by the F.B.I. this year, and a copy was recently obtained by The Times.Lawyers for the Proud Boys say the recorded meeting is a key piece of exculpatory evidence, contradicting claims by the government that a conspiracy to attack the Capitol was hatched several weeks before Jan. 6.In court filings, prosecutors have claimed that the Proud Boys began to plan their assault as early as Dec. 19, 2020 — the day that President Donald J. Trump posted a tweet announcing his Jan. 6 rally and saying it would be “wild.” But the video conference shows that, just one week before the event, when Mr. Tarrio and other Proud Boys leaders gathered their team for a meeting, they spent most of their time discussing things like staying away from alcohol and women and taking measures to ensure their own security.The recorded meeting makes no mention of any planning that might have occurred in the week directly before the Capitol attack. And while Mr. Tarrio suggests during the meeting that the complex structure he created for the Ministry of Self-Defense was meant to be self-protective — not offensive — in nature, prosecutors have claimed that the group’s “command and control” design was instrumental in facilitating the Capitol attack.In the meeting, Mr. Tarrio laid out how the group — whose members were chosen because of their “throttle control,” as another Proud Boys leader put it — had a three-person leadership team that sat above a larger group of eight or so regional leaders. There was a “marketing” division too, Mr. Tarrio explained, that would craft and promote the Proud Boys’ “narrative” to the media. The group’s rank and file, he said, would work in 10-man teams on Jan. 6 with medics and communications experts.Throughout the meeting, Mr. Tarrio and others used blatantly misogynistic, homophobic and antisemitic language, disparaging the Proud Boys’ female supporters and making references to the “J.Q.” — or the Jewish Question, a phrase that harks back to Nazi ideology. Mr. Tarrio also threatened participants in the video conference with expulsion from the Ministry of Self-Defense if they drank too much at the Jan. 6 event, noting that too many Proud Boys were sloppily intoxicated at earlier pro-Trump rallies.As for the Capitol itself, it came up only occasionally.At one point, as the floor was opened for questions, various Proud Boys asked Mr. Tarrio about the group’s goals for Jan. 6, including how much they would focus on Vice President Mike Pence’s certification of the election results that day. Mr. Tarrio deflected the inquiries, saying that the details of the Proud Boys’ mission would be discussed in future meetings.Nayib Hassan, Mr. Tarrio’s lawyer, declined to comment on the video. Lawyers for Joseph Biggs and Zachary Rehl, two other Proud Boys leaders who were on the call and are facing sedition charges, also declined to comment.Key Revelations From the Jan. 6 HearingsCard 1 of 6Making a case against Trump. More

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      Sussmann Acquittal Raises Question: What Is Durham Actually Trying to Do?

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      Supporters of the Trump-era prosecutor are lauding his work as a success in unearthing politically charged information, even though his first case to go to trial ended in failure.WASHINGTON — Even before 12 jurors voted to acquit Michael Sussmann of lying to the F.B.I. in a rebuke of the Trump-era special counsel, John H. Durham, supporters of Donald J. Trump were already laying the groundwork to declare that the prosecutor won despite losing in court.What really mattered, they essentially claimed, was that Mr. Durham had succeeded in exposing how Hillary Clinton framed Mr. Trump for the “Russia collusion hoax,” an argument that ricocheted across the right-wing news media.Indeed, Mr. Durham did show that associates of the 2016 Clinton campaign — a victim of Russian hacking — wanted reporters to write about the allegations that played a role in the case, an obscure theory about the possibility of a covert communications channel between Mr. Trump and Russia. But most news outlets were skeptical, and the F.B.I. swiftly discounted the matter.Still, that Mr. Durham’s cheerleaders have embraced this explanation for Mr. Durham’s actions is striking. Stephen Gillers, a New York University professor of legal ethics, said the case was “incredibly weak” and he doubted a prosecutor pursuing normal law enforcement goals would have brought it.“The case wasn’t a nothing-burger, but it was very thin, and it’s hard to understand why it was brought other than to support Trump’s allegation that the Clinton campaign falsely alleged a Trump-Russia connection,” he said. “That motive is unacceptable. The government’s only legitimate goal in bringing this case was conviction.”A spokesman for Mr. Durham did not respond to a request for comment. But in a pretrial filing in the Sussmann case in April, the Durham team denied any suggestion it was “a political actor when, in fact, nothing could be further from the truth.”When Attorney General William P. Barr assigned Mr. Durham in May 2019 to investigate the Russia investigation, he did not have a reputation for pursuing iffy cases or for using law enforcement power to publicize politically fraught information.A longtime career prosecutor before becoming a United States attorney under Mr. Trump, Mr. Durham was best known for investigating the C.I.A.’s post-Sept. 11 torture of detainees. He had brought no charges, then fought a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit to avoid disclosing his findings and witness interview records.Mr. Barr’s assignment was likely to be the last major act in Mr. Durham’s career. It portended difficulties.For starters, he appeared largely redundant: Michael E. Horowitz, the Justice Department’s independent inspector general, was already scrutinizing the origins of the investigation into possible ties between Mr. Trump’s campaign and Russia.Mr. Durham seemed to begin by searching for signs of political bias among F.B.I. officials Mr. Horowitz had already scrutinized and by hunting for wrongdoing among intelligence agencies outside Mr. Horowitz’s jurisdiction. No charges resulted.In December 2019, Mr. Horowitz issued his report uncovering serious flaws with certain wiretap applications but debunking Trump supporters’ baseless theory that the overall investigation was a “deep state” conspiracy. The F.B.I. officials had sufficient legal basis to open it, he found.In a break with his earlier silence toward his investigative work, Mr. Durham issued a statement disagreeing that there was an adequate basis for the investigation and suggesting that he had access to more information. He has yet to disclose what that is.Mr. Horowitz also uncovered that an F.B.I. lawyer had doctored an email used in preparation for wiretap applications, referring the matter for prosecution. While Mr. Durham’s team had not developed the case, it negotiated a plea agreement that resulted in no prison time. That is its only conviction to date.Mr. Trump and his supporters expressed frustration that Mr. Durham failed to charge any deep state conspiracy before the 2020 election.But Mr. Durham’s reputation with Trump supporters began to reverse course last fall, when he charged Mr. Sussmann in connection with telling the F.B.I. about the suspected covert communications channel, involving a server for Russia’s Alfa Bank.Soon after, he indicted a researcher for the Steele dossier — a discredited compendium of rumors about Trump-Russia links compiled for an opposition research firm funded by Democrats — for lying to the F.B.I. about some sources.John H. Durham’s court filings have become fodder for the conservative news media.Samuel Corum for The New York TimesIn both cases, Mr. Durham festooned the narrow charges with copious information, heavy with insinuations that there had been a conspiracy to trick people into thinking Mr. Trump colluded with Russia — not by “deep state” officials, but by associates of Mrs. Clinton’s 2016 campaign.This narrative was not the original hope of Trump supporters, but has nevertheless provided them with new material to continue relitigating the events of 2016 and the Russia investigation.Mr. Durham’s court filings have become fodder for the conservative news media to express outrage about purported wrongdoing to Mr. Trump, typically conflating the Alfa Bank and Steele dossier matters with the official investigation.When Mrs. Clinton’s campaign manager, Robby Mook, testified at the trial that she approved efforts to get reporters to write about Alfa Bank, The Wall Street Journal ran an editorial headlined “Hillary Clinton Did It,” subtitled “Her 2016 campaign manager says she approved a plan to plant a false Russia claim with a reporter.”The piece offered no basis for implying that Mrs. Clinton believed the allegations were false. It also inaccurately stated the campaign had “created” the allegations, and made no mention of the most important news if the charge was what mattered: The campaign neither authorized nor wanted Mr. Sussmann to go to the F.B.I., he testified, undermining Mr. Durham’s narrative that Mr. Sussmann represented the campaign at a key meeting.Some of the most explosive Durham filings themselves have proved to be misleading or tangential to the case.The indictment of Mr. Sussmann selectively quoted from emails among the researchers who developed the Alfa Bank suspicions, fostering an impression that they did not believe their own analysis. But the full emails included passages in which the researchers expressed enthusiastic belief in their final handiwork.Moreover, the material seemed extraneous to a mere false-statement indictment because Mr. Sussmann was not part of those conversations. Indeed, the judge ruled nearly all that evidence inadmissible at the trial.In a pretrial filing in February, prosecutors added a few ambiguous sentences about separate concerns the researchers developed regarding data suggesting that Russian smartphones had been connecting to sensitive networks, including Trump Tower and the White House.Singling those out, the conservative news media erupted in a furor, inaccurately informing readers that Mr. Durham had evidence that the Clinton campaign paid to spy on the network of the Trump White House.Mr. Durham’s filing had not actually said that. The campaign did not pay the cybersecurity researchers, and the White House network data they had sifted for signs of possible Russian infiltration came from Barack Obama’s presidency. Mr. Durham disavowed responsibility for “misinterpreted facts.”Whatever his motives, Mr. Durham’s investigation has demonstrably functioned as a kind of fun-house mirror image of aspects of the work of Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel in the Russia investigation.Some liberal commentators once seemed to routinely suggest that developments in Mr. Mueller’s investigation meant the walls were closing in on Mr. Trump. But while Mr. Mueller’s March 2019 report detailed “numerous links between the Russian government and the Trump campaign,” he charged no Trump associate with conspiring with Russia.Similarly, pro-Trump commentators have repeatedly stoked expectations that Mr. Durham would soon charge some of Mr. Trump’s perceived enemies with a conspiracy to do him wrong. But after more than three years, he has offered only insinuations.There are limits to any equivalence. The F.B.I., as Mr. Horowitz indicated, had a sound factual basis to open the Russia investigation; Mr. Barr’s mandate to Mr. Durham appears to have been to investigate a series of conspiracy theories.Mr. Mueller’s team also charged or obtained guilty pleas from about three dozen people and companies and wrote a lengthy report in less time than Mr. Durham has taken to develop only two indicted cases, the first of which just ended in failure. After the verdict on Tuesday, the jury forewoman told reporters the case should not have been prosecuted.But on the night of the acquittal, Sean Hannity of Fox News said Mr. Sussmann was “just a small player in this whole case,” and dismissed the verdict as nothing more than political bias among a jury pool drawn from a heavily Democratic district.The trial, he assured his millions of viewers, was just a “preview of coming attractions.” More

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      Michael Sussmann Is Acquitted in Case Brought by Trump-Era Prosecutor

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      The Democratic-linked lawyer was accused of lying to the F.B.I. about his clients when he passed on a tip about possible connections between Donald J. Trump and Russia.WASHINGTON — Michael Sussmann, a prominent cybersecurity lawyer with ties to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, was acquitted on Tuesday of lying to the F.B.I. in 2016 when he shared a tip about possible connections between Donald J. Trump and Russia.The verdict was a significant blow to the special counsel, John H. Durham, who was appointed by the Trump administration three years ago to scour the Trump-Russia investigation for any wrongdoing.But Mr. Durham has yet to fulfill expectations from Mr. Trump and his supporters that he would uncover and prosecute a “deep state” conspiracy against the former president. Instead, he has developed only two cases that led to charges: the one against Mr. Sussmann and another against a researcher for the so-called Steele dossier, whose trial is set for later this year.Both consist of simple charges of making false statements, rather than a more sweeping charge like conspiracy to defraud the government. And both involve thin or dubious allegations about Mr. Trump’s purported ties to Russia that were put forward not by government officials, but by outside investigators.The case against Mr. Sussmann centered on odd internet data that cybersecurity researchers discovered in 2016 after it became public that Russia had hacked Democrats and Mr. Trump had encouraged the country to target Mrs. Clinton’s emails.The researchers said the data might reflect a covert communications channel using servers for the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank, which has ties to the Kremlin. The F.B.I. briefly looked at the suspicions and dismissed them.On Sept. 19, 2016, Mr. Sussmann brought those suspicions to a senior F.B.I. official. In charging Mr. Sussmann with a felony, prosecutors contended that he falsely told the official that he was not there on behalf of any client, concealing that he was working for both Mrs. Clinton’s campaign and a technology executive who had given him the tip.Mr. Durham and prosecutors used court filings and trial testimony to describe how Mr. Sussmann, while working for a Democratic-linked law firm and logging his time to the Clinton campaign, had been trying to get reporters to write about the Alfa Bank suspicions.But trying to persuade reporters to write about such suspicions is not a crime. Mr. Sussmann’s guilt or innocence turned on a narrow issue: whether he made a false statement to the senior F.B.I. official at the 2016 meeting by saying he was sharing those suspicions on his own.Mr. Durham used the Sussmann case to put forward a larger conspiracy: that there was a joint enterprise to essentially frame Mr. Trump for collusion with Russia by getting the F.B.I. to investigate the suspicions so reporters would write about it. The scheme, Mr. Durham implied, involved the Clinton campaign; its opposition research firm, Fusion GPS; Mr. Sussmann; and the cybersecurity expert who had brought the odd data and analysis to him.That insinuation thrilled Mr. Trump’s supporters, who have embraced his claim that the Russia investigation was a “hoax” and have sought to conflate the official inquiry with sometimes dubious accusations. In reality, the Alfa Bank matter was a sideshow: The F.B.I. had already opened its inquiry on other grounds before Mr. Sussmann passed on the tip; the final report by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, made no mention of the Alfa Bank suspicions.But the case Mr. Durham and his team used to float their broad insinuations was thin: one count of making a false statement in a meeting with no other witnesses. In a rebuke to Mr. Durham; the lead lawyer on the trial team, Andrew DeFilippis; and his colleagues, the 12 jurors voted unanimously to find Mr. Sussmann not guilty.Some supporters of Mr. Trump had been bracing for that outcome. They pointed to the District of Columbia’s reputation as a heavily Democratic area and suggested that a jury might be politically biased against a Trump-era prosecutor trying to convict a defendant who was working for the Clinton campaign.The judge had told the jurors that they were not to account for their political views when deciding the facts. The jury forewoman, who did not give her name, told reporters afterward that “politics were not a factor” and that she thought bringing the case had been unwise.Mr. Durham expressed disappointment in the verdict but said he respected the decision by the jury, which deliberated for about six hours.“I also want to recognize and thank the investigators and the prosecution team for their dedicated efforts in seeking truth and justice in this case,” he said in a statement.Outside the courthouse, Mr. Sussmann read a brief statement to reporters, praising the jury, his defense team and those who supported him during what had been a difficult year.“I told the truth to the F.B.I., and the jury clearly recognized that with their unanimous verdict today,” he said, adding, “Despite being falsely accused, I am relieved that justice ultimately prevailed in this case.”During the trial, the defense had argued that Mr. Sussmann brought the matter to the F.B.I. only when he thought The New York Times was on the verge of writing an article about the matter, so that the bureau would not be caught flat-footed.Officials for the Clinton campaign testified that they had not told or authorized Mr. Sussmann to go to the F.B.I. Doing so was against their interests because they did not trust the bureau, and it could slow down the publication of any article, they said.James Baker, as the F.B.I.’s general counsel in 2016, met with Mr. Sussmann that September. Mr. Baker testified that he had asked Eric Lichtblau, then a reporter at The Times working on the Alfa Bank matter, to slow down so the bureau could have time to investigate it.Mr. Sussmann’s defense team offered the jurors many potential paths to acquittal, contending that the prosecution had yet to prove multiple necessary elements beyond a reasonable doubt.His lawyers attacked as doubtful whether Mr. Sussmann actually uttered the words that he had no client at his meeting with the F.B.I. in September.That issue was complicated after a text message came to light in which Mr. Sussmann, arranging for the meeting a day earlier, indicated that he was reaching out on his own. But it was what, if anything, he said at the meeting itself that was at issue.Mr. Baker testified that he was “100 percent” certain that Mr. Sussmann repeated those words to his face. But defense lawyers pointed out that he had recalled the meeting differently on many other occasions.The defense team also argued that Mr. Sussmann was in fact not there on behalf of any client, even though he had clients with an interest in the topic. And they questioned whether it mattered, since the F.B.I. knew he represented the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign on other issues, and agents would have investigated the allegations regardless.Midmorning, the jury asked to see a trial exhibit meant to bolster the defense’s argument that Mr. Sussmann did not consider himself to be representing the Clinton campaign. It was a record of taxi rides Mr. Sussmann expensed for the Sept. 19 meeting at F.B.I. headquarters.He logged those rides to the firm rather than to the Clinton campaign or to the technology executive, Rodney Joffe, who had worked with the data scientists who developed the suspicions and brought them to Mr. Sussmann. Prosecutors asserted that Mr. Joffe was his other hidden client in the meeting.During the trial, prosecutors had made much of how Mr. Sussmann logged extensive hours on the Alfa Bank matter to the Clinton campaign in law firm billing records — including phone calls and meetings with reporters and with his partner at the time, Marc Elias, the general counsel of the Clinton campaign.Defense lawyers acknowledged that the Clinton campaign had been Mr. Sussmann’s client for the purpose of trying to persuade reporters to write about the matter, but argued that he was not working for anyone when he brought the same materials to the F.B.I.In a statement, Sean Berkowitz and Michael Bosworth, two of Mr. Sussmann’s defense lawyers, criticized Mr. Durham for bringing the indictment.“Michael Sussmann should never have been charged in the first place,” they said. “This is a case of extraordinary prosecutorial overreach. And we believe that today’s verdict sends an unmistakable message to anyone who cares to listen: Politics is no substitute for evidence, and politics has no place in our system of justice.” More

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      Prosecutors and Defense Duel in Closing Arguments of Sussmann Trial

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      A verdict is expected as early as Tuesday in the case brought by a Trump-era special counsel against a lawyer with ties to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.WASHINGTON — Prosecutors and a defense lawyer put forward starkly opposing views on Friday in closing arguments for the politically charged trial of Michael Sussmann, a cybersecurity lawyer with ties to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.The case against Mr. Sussmann involves a narrow charge — an accusation of lying to the F.B.I. in a 2016 meeting — but is freighted with partisan overtones. It is also a test of the special counsel who brought it, John H. Durham, because it is his first case to go to trial since he was appointed three years ago to scour the Trump-Russia investigation for any wrongdoing.Two prosecutors told a jury that there was no doubt that Mr. Sussmann had lied to the F.B.I. to conceal his clients — including the Clinton campaign — at the September 2016 meeting, which focused on suspicious data that cybersecurity experts said suggested the possibility of a covert communications channel between Russia and someone close to Donald J. Trump.“It wasn’t about national security,” said one of the prosecutors, Jonathan Algor. “It was about promoting opposition research against the opposition candidate — Donald Trump.”But a defense lawyer, Sean M. Berkowitz, portrayed the case as riddled with uncertainties — including about what Mr. Sussmann actually said, whether it was false and whether it mattered if he was there on behalf of clients since the F.B.I. would have investigated the tip regardless. Each was a path to find reasonable doubt and vote to acquit, he said.“Mr. Sussmann’s liberty is at stake,” he said. “The time for political conspiracy theories is over. The time to talk about the evidence is now.”A verdict is expected as early as Tuesday.The case centers on odd internet data that cybersecurity researchers discovered in 2016 after it became public that Russia had hacked Democrats and Mr. Trump encouraged the country to hack Mrs. Clinton’s emails. The researchers said the data might reflect a covert communications channel using servers for the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank, a Kremlin-linked bank.The researchers began working with Rodney Joffe, a technology executive who was an expert in the type of internet data they were scrutinizing. Mr. Joffe brought the suspicions to Mr. Sussmann, who at the time represented the Democratic National Committee on matters related to Russia’s hacking of its emails. A partner at Mr. Sussmann’s law firm, Marc Elias, was the Clinton campaign’s general counsel.Mr. Sussmann and Mr. Joffe tried to get reporters — including Eric Lichtblau, then of The New York Times — to write about the matter, arguments in the trial showed. Mr. Sussmann continued to inform Mr. Elias about those efforts and discussed the matter with an opposition research firm the Clinton campaign had hired through Mr. Elias called Fusion GPS; the firm drafted a paper about Alfa Bank’s Kremlin ties that Mr. Sussmann later gave the F.B.I.Mr. Sussmann logged those efforts in law firm billing records as time spent working for the Clinton campaign, Mr. Durham discovered.On Sept. 18, 2016, soon after receiving an email claiming that Mr. Trump was upset about a Russia-related article that was soon to be published, Mr. Sussmann texted James A. Baker, the F.B.I.’s general counsel, and asked for a meeting the next day. He indicated that he was coming not on behalf of any client, but to help the F.B.I.The case is John H. Durham’s first to go to trial since he was appointed three years ago to scour the Trump-Russia investigation for any wrongdoing.Julia Nikhinson/ReutersMr. Durham’s team has accused Mr. Sussmann of making the same claim when he met the next day with Mr. Baker. In reality, prosecutors argue, Mr. Sussmann was concealing two of his clients — Mr. Joffe and the Clinton campaign.Mr. Algor told the jury on Friday that the effort was a conspiracy to engineer an “October surprise,” meaning a game-changing revelation late in a campaign, by getting the F.B.I. to open an investigation so reporters would write about it.The F.B.I. — which had already opened its investigation scrutinizing possible ties between associates of Mr. Trump and Russia on other grounds — briefly looked at the Alfa Bank suspicions and quickly dismissed them.In late October, Slate published an article about the matter, but it did not mention any F.B.I. investigation. That same day, The Times published an article co-written by Mr. Lichtblau that mentioned the Alfa Bank suspicions but reported that the F.B.I. had so far found no conclusive or direct link between Mr. Trump and the Russian government.The closing arguments focused on whether Mr. Sussmann repeated what he had said in his text message to Mr. Baker at their meeting the next day — a crucial technicality, because he is charged only for what he purportedly said at the meeting itself.Mr. Algor and another prosecutor, Andrew DeFilippis, told the jury that the evidence left no doubt that Mr. Sussmann repeated to Mr. Baker’s face that he was not there on behalf of any client.But Mr. Berkowitz pointed to Mr. Baker’s varying recollections of that meeting. And he noted that Mr. Durham had been investigating Mr. Baker for an unrelated offense but did not charge him, insinuating that the witness had an incentive to remember what the prosecutor wanted to hear: “It’s no wonder he delivered on the stand.”The F.B.I. headquarters in Washington. Two prosecutors told a jury that there was no doubt that Mr. Sussmann had lied to the bureau.Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesMr. Berkowitz also argued that it was true that Mr. Sussmann was not there on behalf of any client. While Mr. Sussmann had two clients with an interest in Alfa Bank, the defense lawyer said, Mr. Sussmann was not advocating that the F.B.I. take some step on their behalf — or any step at all.Countering that idea, prosecutors emphasized that on Sept. 13, Mr. Sussmann purchased thumb drives at Staples that he later expensed to the Clinton campaign; at the Sept. 19 meeting, he gave thumb drives to the F.B.I. Mr. DeFilippis called that “damning evidence.”Mr. Berkowitz mocked that evidence — a Staples receipt, he noted — saying it was a time when Mr. Sussmann was doing all kinds of work for the campaign. He also emphasized that Mr. Sussmann had not expensed to the campaign his taxi rides for the F.B.I. meeting, nor had he logged an “F.B.I. meeting” in billing records, as was his practice for such meetings.And Mr. Berkowitz cited testimony by Mr. Elias and Mrs. Clinton’s campaign manager, Robby Mook, that they did not direct or authorize Mr. Sussmann to go to the F.B.I. and did not see that step as in the interest of the campaign. They testified that they had just wanted The Times to publish an article; Mr. Baker testified that the F.B.I. asked Mr. Lichtblau to hold off on publishing anything so it could investigate first. More

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      Defense Team for Democratic-Linked Lawyer Won’t Call Ex-Times Reporter to Testify

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      Lawyers had argued that the reporter, Eric Lichtblau, should testify about his communications with their client, Michael Sussmann, who is accused of lying to the F.B.I.WASHINGTON — The defense team for Michael Sussmann, a lawyer with ties to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, has dropped its plans to call a former New York Times reporter to testify in a trial that centers on Mr. Sussmann’s motives in meeting with the F.B.I. in 2016.Testimony in the case has underlined the role the news media played during the bare-knuckle fight between Mrs. Clinton and Donald J. Trump in the 2016 presidential election, particularly as suspicions about Mr. Trump’s possible ties to Russia grew.Mr. Sussmann’s lawyers had argued that the former Times reporter, Eric Lichtblau, should testify about his communications with Mr. Sussmann over odd internet data that cybersecurity researchers said could be covert communications between the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank, a Kremlin-affiliated bank.A special counsel, John H. Durham, has accused Mr. Sussmann of lying to the F.B.I. about his reason for meeting with a top bureau official at the time, James Baker, to convey that information, by saying he was not there on behalf of any client. Prosecutors contend he was in fact representing the Clinton campaign and a technology executive who worked with the researchers.Defense lawyers have argued that Mr. Sussmann represented the campaign in efforts to get reporters to write articles about the Alfa Bank suspicions, but not when he approached the F.B.I. about the data and his belief that a news article about it would soon be published.In his testimony last week, Mr. Baker said that the prospect of an imminent article led him to fear that the F.B.I. would not have time to investigate the possibility of a secret channel before the participants read the news and shut it down. But a week later, when he asked Mr. Lichtblau to delay, he said the reporter indicated that an article was not yet ready to publish.The Times published an article that mentioned the Alfa Bank matter about six weeks later, but it said the F.B.I. “ultimately concluded that there could be an innocuous explanation.”Prosecutors have insinuated that Mr. Sussmann sought to prompt an F.B.I. investigation so reporters would write articles about it, while defense lawyers have argued that he went to the bureau only when he believed an article was imminent.“The defense’s theory is that the story was going to come out, or was likely to come out, or was close to coming out; and Mr. Sussmann wanted to give a heads-up,” Sean Berkowitz, Mr. Sussmann’s lawyer, told the court on Monday.Mr. Lichtblau’s testimony could have shed light on what he told Mr. Sussmann regarding how soon an article might be published before he sought the F.B.I. meeting.Mr. Lichtblau apparently consented to testify as a defense witness about the narrow topic of his interactions with Mr. Sussmann. But a dispute arose over whether prosecutors could ask him about other sources during cross-examination.Late Tuesday, Mr. Sussman’s defense team withdrew its subpoena for Mr. Lichtblau’s testimony without stating a reason. A lawyer for Mr. Lichtblau declined to comment.The Sussmann trial, which began on May 16, is the first case to be developed by Mr. Durham, a special counsel appointed during the Trump administration by Attorney General William P. Barr to examine the origins of the F.B.I.’s investigation into ties between Mr. Trump and Russia.But the Alfa Bank matter was tangential to the official investigation. Trial testimony has shown that F.B.I. agents swiftly dismissed the suspicions as implausible.Mr. Durham’s prosecutors have accused Mr. Sussmann of trying to persuade the F.B.I. to investigate Mr. Trump over his ties with Russia, to facilitate negative coverage about Mrs. Clinton’s rival and disseminate unsubstantiated claims before the election.At the trial on Wednesday, prosecutors wrapped up their case by introducing a stack of written documents, including records from Mr. Sussmann’s law firm that showed he billed many hours on the Alfa Bank matter to the Clinton campaign.Defense lawyers sought to raise doubts. They emphasized that Mr. Sussmann’s billing of several hours on apparent Alfa Bank matters the day of the F.B.I. meeting did not mention the F.B.I. or a meeting, as was his habit for other such meetings. They also pointed out that he when he expensed taxis for the meeting, he charged them to the firm, not any client. More