No Justice for Russia Hoax: Hillary Lackey Sussmann Skates

BUCK: We just got some breaking news that is discouraging but not surprising, not surprising at all. And it’s, in fact, really worth us discussing here for a second. It’s that the lawyer for the Hillary Clinton campaign, Michael Sussmann — who pretty clearly lied to the FBI to get the Russia collusion thing going — the verdict just came down, and he was found not guilty. So, it turns out… I just want to say to everybody, this should not surprise you.

This is why I don’t believe Hunter Biden is going to be criminally charged, although there are some rumblings about that maybe happening so Clay and I can continue to have that discussion here. Clay, look, there’s the deep state in the judiciary. This guy clearly misrepresented in a critical way his intentions and the basis for the Russia collusion lie. This just came down, folks. As we came on air, the verdicts came down. Not guilty. Hillary Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann, who got the FBI and the media all fired up on the Russia collusion lie. Clay, how does this happen?

CLAY: I think it’s gonna be, first of all, the jury made this decision, right? So, in general the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard is a difficult one to reach. And my proposition is that juries tend to get things right. I think this was a complicated case. And let me explain why I think it was complicated. My understanding is there was a text message that basically let it be known that Michael Sussmann was lying to the FBI but then the notes that existed from the actual meeting that he had with the FBI was more complicated.

And, again, the standard of “beyond a reasonable doubt” for a criminal prosecution is a high one. Here’s what I would say is significant regardless. There were a lot of facts that came out of this case under oath that are very, very significant, leaving aside Michael Sussmann’s role here. First of all, Robby Mook, who was Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, directly testified under oath that Hillary okayed this leak of information to the FBI, meaning her fingerprints are all over Russia collusion, under oath and testimony in this case.

What will be interesting to see is how this is played – ‘cause, remember, the New York Times is of the world where basically pretending this case wasn’t going on. They weren’t covering it on the day-to-day basis. They were not maniacally focused on it. Compare it to, say, the way that they covered January 6th, every little nuance of January 6th is front-page news. Very little of the Sussmann trial was treated as front-page news.

What I will be curious about from a narrative perspective is whether this is trumpeted as evidence that Hillary Clinton and her campaign did nothing wrong, right? Because there is a difference between what they did, which was clearly pollute and create the Russia collusion narrative and a criminal finding of wrongdoing. I wanted Sussmann to be found guilty because it would then be impossible for the Hillary Clinton campaign to argue that they did nothing of a criminal nature or even wrong nature.

What’s going to immediately half, I think, Buck, is this is going to be taken as vindication from many that Hillary’s campaign did nothing wrong and anybody who argued otherwise that Trump, when he said that they were spying and all these things, I think the not-guilty verdict will receive far more attention than any of the facts that came out during the case.

BUCK: It will be amusing, Clay, to watch as all of a sudden, the media, “Oh, look!” CNN, breaking news, right, all of a sudden. And for a lot of their audiences, for the CNN audience, for the MSNBC audience, I think they’re gonna be like, “Wait, wait, there was a Sussmann trial? Hillary Clinton’s lawyer was facing federal criminal charges for lying?”

CLAY: For lying to the FBI. Yeah.

BUCK: New York Times readers are gonna be fascinated to read about this for the first time tomorrow. That’s one piece of this. But going back to the beginning of the Russia collusion, the giant lie — honestly, the whole thing was such an obvious fabrication to anybody who was being intellectually honest about this from the start, Clay.

I worked in a federal bureaucracy, CIA, and spent some time at the intelligence division of the NYPD, and one thing I can tell you is that so much of government power within the bureaucracy, within the federal agencies, is based upon good faith that the people that are doing the investigating, the people that are doing the subpoenaing, the people that are pulling your bank records, pulling your phone records, they’re doing so in good faith.

And part of good faith is what you believe to be credible, right? So if somebody comes in, let’s say, and if they say, “I want to be an FBI informant and I’m gonna tell you where the number two in Al-Qaeda is,” and he’s totally not credible and you say, “You know what? Fine. We’re gonna give you that justice for rewards. We’re gonna give you the $10 million” or whatever the bounty is. That person would be fired because that person is being an idiot, right?

You need to do verifications, there has to be good faith this that process. And with the Hillary Clinton, Russia collusion campaign situation, my concern from the very beginning is that whether it’s Comey or Sussmann or… Well, Sussmann was a private lawyer. You know what I mean. Whether it was Comey or Lisa Page or Peter Strzok or any of these individuals, they could always fall back on, “Not our fault!

“Not our fault we are so stupid that we actually believed this. We really thought this maybe happened,” even though no person could credibly think that, and so with Sussmann I think it falls into that category as well of, “How could this have gone…? How could he have ever believed this? He should have been lying to the FBI, in his own mind, from day one.” But there’s no penalty for stupidity, and the deep state’s got a whole lot of stupid.

CLAY: Yeah, and look, to me this evidence also is — we talked about this, I think, last week with Andrew McCarthy, if I’m not mistaken, Buck, and he was skeptical that we were gonna get a conviction and we dove into this based on the jury pool.

BUCK: He was. He kind of called this.

CLAY: Yeah. Right? You’re talking about a jury pool that overwhelmingly believes that Donald Trump is Satan, and that Hillary Clinton was robbed of the 2016 election. That’s what the jury pool in Washington, D.C., is going to believe. And so their pre-existing biases I think factored in here making it a more difficult forum than say having this case in Wyoming or West Virginia or someplace with a really high predisposition to believe what I think is the truth, which is that Hillary’s campaign helped to spread Russia collusion.

The other thing, Buck, from pure evidentiary perspective I think this is complicated for a lot of jurors to understand, and obviously we didn’t watch this on a day-to-day basis ’cause we’re live on the air. But what you have to do is drill this down to make it understandable, and to me as a lawyer, when Michael Sussmann is billing Hillary Clinton for his meeting with the FBI — which his billing records reflect that he did —

— it’s really hard for him to argue that he’s not meeting with the FBI as a representative of Hillary Clinton’s campaign. When he sent the text message saying that essentially he he needed to go meet with them, the evidence, to me — the evidence, to me — is clear that he lied to the FBI. And, by the way, this is what almost everybody day before, now, to his credit, he refused to plea; he went on trial, and he beat the trial.

I’m sure he has incredible lawyers. He had a good forum. But this is what almost everybody in the Trump embouchure, the Trump scope, the Trump penumbra got in trouble for, not actually Russia collusion but lying to the FBI when they were suddenly hauled in and harangued by FBI officials about all this different issue and they’re just panicked, right? So this is intriguing in some ways just FYI from a walking through the legality perspective.

BUCK: First of all, I think you’re up in the ante a little bit with embouchure and penumbra just by tossing that in there. Clay was tossing off the legal books this weekend.

CLAY: What’s crazy is the penumbra is basically where the right to abortion came from in Roe v. Wade, right, and it’s always been crazy. That’s the phrase. The phraseology is that there are certain rights that are encapsulated within the penumbra of other rights which is the right to privacy and everything else.

BUCK: It was intellectual nonsense, but yes. (laughing)

CLAY: That’s the expansiveness, but in the same way, there are so many people that got in trouble for Russia collusion, not for actual Russia collusion at all but for the FBI questioning them about Russia collusion and this all started with Sussmann and Hillary Clinton’s campaign being involved in helping to create.

BUCK: Yeah. This is why from the very beginning some of us were saying — I can speak for myself on this issue, ’cause now, Clay, we’re going back, what, five/six years now.

CLAY: Years. Yeah.

BUCK: I was saying anyone who thinks, “Oh, just wait; there’s going to be justice,” how? How is there going to be justice when the process was the punishment? This was used… The special counsel, the Mueller probe, investigation, whatever you want to call it, that was used as the primary political weapon against the Trump administration to slow down that White House, to put the fear of God — well, the fear of Mueller, I suppose — into all those people working in that White House, working for it.

Made it harder for them to get legal representation. Made it harder for them to get people to come to work for Trump for all four years. I mean, you had friends in the White House, I knew people well in that White House. So, they were successful in the dirty trick and now what you find out is that the ultimate fail-safe that the deep state has is, FBI guys, for example, like Peter Strzok, “I’m so stupid I actually believed that Donald Trump did this and that we just couldn’t prove it.”

That was their fail-safe. And then for anybody on the private practice side of this, a lawyer like Sussmann or in the private sector, it is, “Oh, I can just count on a D.C. jury to bail me out,” because the actual chance that you have Democrats who believe Russia collusion on a D.C. jury is over 95% based on the population. Those are the actual numbers based on the political affiliation of people in D.C. So how are you gonna get justice in this case? And people are saying, “Oh, just wait for it.” We waited for it, and now we’re seeing it.

CLAY: Well, again, I would say the under-oath testimony is at least helpful. It wasn’t covered very much. But now all of a sudden, the not-guilty verdict is going to be covered as a clarion call. And it also makes it more difficult. We’ll talk about the impact. Again, this news just breaking as we’re coming on here. It also impacts, potentially… Look, you got a statute of limitations issue in terms of when you’re able to charge people for criminal violations.

Given the fact, as you mentioned, Buck, it’s been five years since a lot of this stuff happened back in the 2016 presidential campaign. And also, when you lose a case it makes it more difficult for you to feel like you should charge someone else, not to mention Sussmann himself could have ended up under fire, potentially, if he had lost this case, and maybe he rolls over on somebody else in the grand scheme of things associated with that.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

CLAY: Buck, we were talking about as we went to break, again breaking news just as we came on, the fact that Michael Sussmann, Hillary Clinton’s campaign lawyer, has been found not guilty of lying to the FBI. This means, I believe, Buck – when you really look at the larger picture — there will be essentially no one ever found guilty of collusion or conspiracy of a significant nature with Russia obviously in the Trump campaign, and almost everybody was charged ultimately for lying to the FBI.

And for starting the collusion rumor and having years of investigations, no one inside of Hillary Clinton’s campaign is going to suffer any consequences either. In fact, many of these people on Hillary’s campaign are now working in a Joe Biden White House, and Michael Sussmann has managed to avoid conviction here for a criminal charge of lying to the FBI, despite the fact that I believe he lied to the FBI.

Now, this is a hard case sometimes to prove, which is why I’m sure he rolled the dice. Proving knowledge of who he was representing, proving direct lying to the FBI based on this meeting — when my understanding is, Buck, there are not great contemporaneous records of exactly what was said. Unfortunately, this initial tip meeting, Buck, was not recorded, meaning there’s no audio or video of that conversation that all of us could just watch and it would be almost impossible to prove or disapprove.

It would just be the tape itself would prove whether or not he was lying. Text messages and legal records seem to suggest that he was clearly working for the Hillary Clinton campaign. But what exactly he said in that meeting, I think that’s the challenge of proving it beyond a reasonable doubt exactly what he said. If this were a civil case, I think it’s more likely than not. But “beyond a reasonable doubt,” a criminal statute’s a high standard.

BUCK: So, think of all the times in the Mueller probe people were charged, and in some cases pleaded, for very minor — for what I would argue are trivial —

CLAY: You’re exactly right.

BUCK: — and actually the kind of lies — not every lie, right? If you lie to the FBI about what you had breakfast in the morning because of whatever, if it’s not material to an investigation, they’re not supposed to charge that. But any lie that was told in the Russia collusion investigation by Mueller, any mistruth… Look what they did to Roger Stone. Look at the treatment Roger Stone got and look at the treatment that Sussmann gets. Stone, his defense was, “I was kidding. It was a joke in a DM. No one actually thinks this is…” They didn’t care. They lock him up, send dozens of guys with long guns to his house.

CLAY: Yes, and tipped off I think it was CNN or whoever —

BUCK: Yeah, CNN.

CLAY: — watch and record it live when he was arrested.