<@JeanP> #129395
In this case, weak is an understatement. This case was literally Bill Barr and John Durham starting from a conclusion they made (“Trump had no connections with the Russians; it was actually the Clinton campaign that fed that story to the media and the FBI hoping to damage Trump with the revelation that the FBI was investigating him”) and working backwards, tossing or ignoring evidence that didn’t fit this conclusion and calling in people they harassed for years to threaten into changing their stories to match the conspiracy theory. Durham’s team was warned REPEATEDLY by the judge to stop treating hearsay and assumptions they pulled out of their asses as facts, and they kept ignoring him, until he tossed a bunch of their evidence as tainted.
Ultimately, this weak as shit case came down to a simple question; “Was Michael Sussman acting as an agent of the Clinton campaign when he brought information about the Alfa-Bank Trump connection to the FBI in 2016?” Durham’s argument is that as an agent of the Clinton campaign, EVERYTHING Sussman did automatically counted as acting as an agent. Sussman’s argument is that none of the actions he took to bring the information to the FBI were billed to the Clinton campaign (he paid for everything himself, including the cab fare) and he made it clear repeatedly to the FBI that although he was a Clinton campaign lawyer, he was bringing the information to them as citizen of the US, concerned about the potential of Trump’s connections to Russia if he were to win. In fact, some of the emails and messages his lawyers brought into court show that the campiagn asked him NOT to go to the FBI with the information, because they were worried that the media might not look as closely at it if the FBI was. And this failure causes the entire conspiracy theory to fall apart. Not to mention that the whole thing lies on the assumption that the FBI started looking into Trump BECAUSE of Sussman’s actions. That assumption is wrong; the FBI started looking into Trump’s Russia connections when they caught Papaolodos blabbing about Russia helping the Trump campaign.