WASHINGTON -- Michael Sussmann, a cybersecurity lawyer with ties to Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign, was acquitted Tuesday of a felony charge that he lied to the FBI in 2016 when he shared a tip about possible connections between former President Donald Trump and Russia.
The verdict was a blow to the special counsel, John Durham, who was appointed by the Trump administration three years ago to scour the Trump-Russia investigation for any wrongdoing. But Durham has yet to fulfill expectations from Trump and his supporters that he would uncover and prosecute a "deep state" conspiracy against the former president.
Instead, Durham has developed only two charged cases: the one against 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 such as conspiracy to defraud the government. They involve thin or dubious allegations about Trump's purported ties to Russia that were put forward not by government officials, but by outside investigators.
The case against Sussmann centered on odd Internet data that cybersecurity researchers discovered in 2016 after it became public that Russia had hacked Democrats and Trump had encouraged the country to target 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 FBI briefly looked at the suspicions and dismissed them.
On Sept. 19, 2016, Sussmann brought those suspicions to a senior FBI official. Prosecutors accused him of falsely telling the official that he was not there on behalf of any client, concealing that he was working for both Clinton's campaign and a technology executive who had given him the tip.
Durham and prosecutors used court filings and trial testimony to describe how 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.
Sussmann's guilt or innocence turned on a narrow issue: whether he made a false statement to a senior FBI official at the 2016 meeting by saying he was sharing those suspicions on behalf of no one but himself.
Durham used the Sussmann case to put forward a larger conspiracy: that there was a joint enterprise to essentially frame Trump for collusion with Russia by getting the FBI to investigate the suspicions so reporters would write about it.
The scheme, Durham implied, involved the Clinton campaign; its opposition research firm, Fusion GPS; Sussmann and a cybersecurity expert who had brought the odd data and analysis to him.
That insinuation thrilled 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 FBI had already opened its inquiry on other grounds before Sussmann passed on the tip.
The final report by the special counsel, Robert Mueller, made no mention of Alfa Bank. But the case 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.
"You can see what the plan was," assistant special counsel Andrew DeFilippis told jurors in D.C. federal court. "It was to create an October surprise by giving information both to the media and to the FBI to get the media to write that there was an FBI investigation."
In a rebuke to Durham, DeFilippis and their colleagues, the 12 jurors voted unanimously to find Sussmann innocent.
Some supporters of 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.
QUICK, EASY VERDICT
The verdict, coming after less than a full day of deliberations spread over parts of Friday and Tuesday, was not a close call or a hard decision, two jurors told The Washington Post that the judge had told the jury members they were not to account for their political views when deciding the facts.
"Politics were not a factor," the jury forewoman said, declining to give her name as she left the courthouse. "We felt really comfortable being able to share what we thought. We had concise notes and we were able to address the questions together."
"Personally, I don't think it should have been prosecuted," she added, saying the government "could have spent our time more wisely."
A second juror told The Post that in the jury room, "everyone pretty much saw it the same way."
Durham did not speak outside court, but he issued a statement saying "While we are disappointed in the outcome, we respect the jury's decision and thank them for their service."
Gregory Brower, a former U.S. attorney and senior FBI official, said the acquittal was "not a surprising result given the lack of evidence" and the way false statement laws have historically been applied.
"The special counsel was only appointed because the former president wanted an investigation that he could point to for political reasons during the campaign, and [former attorney general Bill] Barr gave him one," said Brower, noting that much of what Durham was asked to investigate had already been exhaustively examined by the Justice Department's inspector general.
"This quick acquittal," he said, "should mark the end of this chapter."
Outside the courthouse, Sussmann read a brief statement to reporters, expressing gratitude to the jury, his defense team and those who supported him during what had been a difficult year.
"I told the truth to the FBI, and the jury clearly recognized that with their unanimous verdict today," he said. "Despite being falsely accused, I am relieved that justice ultimately prevailed in this case."
The key witness of the trial was James Baker, who was the FBI's top lawyer when he met with Sussmann on Sept. 19, 2016. Baker told the jury he was "100% confident" that Sussmann insisted to him he was not acting on behalf of a client and if he had known, he would have handled the conversation differently and perhaps not even agreed to the meeting at all.
Since Sussmann did not testify, Baker gave the only direct witness account of the conversation.
Sussmann's attorneys repeatedly challenged Baker's credibility, noting that in one earlier interview, Baker said Sussmann was representing cybersecurity clients. In another, he seemed to say he didn't remember that part of the talk. In response to questions on the witness stand, he said he couldn't remember 116 times, according to Sussmann's attorney, Sean Berkowitz, who said the prosecution was trying to turn a 30-minute meeting more than five years ago into a "giant political conspiracy theory."
Baker, who now works for Twitter, testified that Sussmann told him that a major newspaper -- he later learned it was The New York Times -- was preparing to write about the allegations.
That apparently worried Baker, who said he knew a news story would probably cause any suspicious communications to stop, so he wanted the FBI to be able to investigate before an article appeared. Prosecutors say it was Sussmann himself who had provided the allegations about Trump to The Times.
Information for this article was contributed by Charlie Savage of The New York Times and by Devlin Barrett of The Washington Post.