I Predicted Trump Would Be Fundraising Off the Sussman Case By EOB Wednesday. It Took 20 Minutes.

I noticed an uptick this weekend in the junk email emanating from Camp Runamuck In Exile, and most of it had to do with throwing Hillary Rodham Clinton into the clink. For a long, bleary moment, I wondered if it were still 2016 and we still had a chance to deny the presidency to a vulgar talking yam. It was a long and bleary moment, but it was a nice long and bleary moment.

Out on the fringes of believability, where the wild vines of imagination entwine with each other to strangle common sense, the trial of one Michael Sussman has ended. He was acquitted Tuesday by a jury whose brains must hurt. From the Washington Post:

Tuesday’s verdict was a major setback for Special Counsel John Durham, who was appointed during the Trump administration and has spent three years probing whether the federal agents who investigated the 2016 Trump campaign committed wrongdoing. Sussmann was the first person charged by Durham to go to trial. Another person charged in the investigation is due to face a jury later this year.

Lord, I wish every taxpayer had a line-item veto for situations like this.

Prosecutors showed the jury emails, law-firm billing records and even a Staples receipt for thumb drives to tie Sussmann to the Clinton campaign. But Berkowitz said much of the witness testimony showed that the Clinton campaign did not want the Alfa Bank allegations taken to the FBI, because they preferred to see a news story about the issue and feared an investigation might complicate or delay such stories.

“Law-firm billing records”! Holy flashback! Anything about cattle futures or the White House travel office?

Sussman is a cybersecurity expert who was loosely connected with the HRC campaign. It is the contention of special counsel John Durham and his merry band that Sussman lied to the FBI back in 2016 in a meeting with the Bureau regarding suspicious contact between the Trump campaign and the Russian ratfcking community. Durham was appointed three years ago to conduct an investigation that was in the end guaranteed to raise money and give the Trump-enabling conservative movement some crapola to throw against the wall and see what sticks. From the New York Times:

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.”

Yes, dear friends, we’re back on this snipe hunt again. My trusty guides through this legal thicket have been Charlie Savage of the NYT and, especially, the redoubtable Marcy Wheeler, who has been poring over the court transcripts to give us all a good look at what a three-act clown show this really is. Apparently, the prosecution’s approach to the judge’s orders with which they disagree was to simply ignore them and do whatever they wanted anyway. Later on, it seemed that the judge had gotten fed up with being treated as though he were largely decorative in his own courtroom.

THE COURT: You know, I know that questions get asked rhetorically or argumentatively that are likely to draw an objection, and I will give lawyers some slack on that, but I expect both sides to comply with my evidentiary rulings. There’s a lot of evidence in this case. There’s a lot for the jury to digest. They will have plenty of validly admitted evidence to pore over, and from here on out, including in arguments, I expect both sides to comply with both the letter and the spirit of the Court’s evidentiary rulings. So let’s keep it clean from here, okay?

The whole prosecution is being played by the ol’ Clinton Rules, first established in the Whitewater kabuki of the early 1990s. Wheeler obtained a copy of what the prosecutor told the jury, and this is what Durham and his crew sought to prove.

So what will the evidence show? The evidence will show that defendant’s lie was all part of a bigger plan, a plan that the defendant carried out in concert with two clients, the Hillary Clinton Campaign and Internet executive Rodney Joffe. It was a plan to create an October surprise on the eve of the presidential election, a plan that used and manipulated the FBI, a plan that the defendant hoped would trigger negative news stories and cause an FBI investigation, a plan that largely succeeded.

The rest of the prosecution case proceeded from this talk-show rant disguised as a legal argument. However, while Dickens warned us the law may be an ass, it’s not stupid enough to fall for such an obvious bunco scheme as this. Originally, I thought they’d be raising money misleading the rubes off this verdict by EOB Wednesday. It took less than 20 minutes after the verdict before an email landed from Mar-a-Lago. The former president* wants help in suing the Pulitzer board unless it rescinds its 2018 award to the NYT and the Washington Post for their coverage of the Russian ratfcking. He was vindicated in court, he says. The grift goes on, and it is undying.

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