A lawyer with ties to the US Democratic party has been cleared of lying to the FBI during the frenzied final days of the 2016 presidential campaign.
Michael Sussman, 58, had been charged with lying to investigators and concealing his ties to Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
At the time, Mr Sussman was looking into possible links between Russian officials and the Trump campaign.
The FBI looked into the allegations and found nothing suspicious.
A former federal prosecutor, Mr Sussman had been charged by special counsel John Durham, a US government attorney appointed by then-President Donald Trump’s justice department in 2019 to investigate potential illegalities in the government’s handling of investigations into Mr Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.
In the first case the Durham team brought to trial, prosecutors told a jury in a District of Columbia federal court that Mr Sussman had concealed his ties to Mrs Clinton’s presidential campaign when presenting information to the FBI about what he said were suspicious data transfers – possibly covert communications – between computer servers in Mr Trump’s New York business headquarters and Alfa Bank, one of Russia’s largest private financial companies.
Prosecutors alleged Mr Sussman did so because he knew the FBI would be less likely to investigate if the information came from a partisan source.
They also said that Mr Sussman had warned the FBI that a major media outlet (later revealed to be the New York Times) was preparing to report on the matter and that the FBI should investigate before the link became public – without revealing that he was also the source of the information for the Times.
They framed this as part of a larger effort by the Clinton campaign to trigger an FBI investigation that could then be cited as evidence of a nefarious relationship between Mr Trump and Russia just weeks before voters headed to the polls.
The jurors, however, were apparently swayed by Mr Sussman’s lawyers, who argued that the prosecutors were building a vast conspiracy theory around a 30-minute meeting with FBI General Counsel James Baker.
The defence team also said that research into political opponents shared with the media and government investigators is a common practice and that Mr Sussman’s Democratic ties were public knowledge.
To win their case, prosecutors had to prove that Mr Sussman lied and that his lies were relevant to the investigation the FBI launched into the matter.
During the trial Mr Baker testified that he would have viewed the information differently if he had known of Mr Sussman’s Democratic connections.