Ex-Clinton Campaign Manager Robby Mook Headlines Busy Day in Sussmann Trial

Isaac Schorr
·8 min read
3

The final day of testimony in the first week of former Department of Justice and Perkins Coie attorney Michael Sussmann’s false-statement trial saw former FBI general counsel James Baker, Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign manager Robby Mook, and two other witnesses from the CIA take the stand on Friday.

Sussmann is charged with telling Baker that he was not representing a client when he brought evidence of a secret communications channel between the Trump Organization and Russia’s Alfa Bank shortly before the 2016 presidential election. Prosecutors working under Special Counsel John Durham say that Sussmann was representing the Clinton campaign and tech executive Rodney Joffe — who came across the evidence — at the time.

Mook’s testimony — which came after Baker finished his time on the stand after having begun on Wednesday afternoon — was the most explosive.

The political operative, who was called to the stand by the defense, spoke out of turn. Earlier this week, the defense requested that Mook be allowed to testify before the prosecution finished with its witness list because Mook had a flight for a vacation scheduled for Saturday. While Mook is under subpoena, which would have mandated that he appear whenever the court asked him to do so, Judge Christopher Cooper granted the request.

Under direct examination by the defense, Mook said that he did not recall having ever interacted with the defendant and that he had no knowledge of Fusion GPS’s involvement in opposition research for the Clinton campaign while the campaign was ongoing. Mook noted that Perkins Coie, which served as outside general counsel for the Clinton campaign, did play a role in opposition research.

According to Mook, the campaign took an interest in a broad range of issues surrounding Donald Trump’s relationship with the Russian Federation and did not view the Alfa Bank allegations as an “October Surprise,” as the prosecution alleges. Mook denied that this was any kind of “silver bullet” and was insistent that the campaign would not have wanted anyone to go to the FBI with the information.

He said that such a course of action would not have been the best way to make the information public and that the campaign “did not trust them [the FBI],” citing the behavior of then-Director James Comey.

Leading Mook’s cross-examination, prosecutor Andrew DeFilippis first established that parts of the campaign’s work on Trump–Russia-related matters were delegated to Perkins Coie, and that Mook was not overseeing the work of Fusion GPS.

“I never engaged with Fusion GPS,” said Mook, who also relayed that then-Perkins Coie partner and Clinton campaign general counsel Marc Elias, who hired Fusion GPS, had “discretion” to make decisions and hire third parties.”

Under further questioning, Mook admitted that the campaign’s senior staff resolved to leak the evidence to the press so that they could “vet it out.” In what was perhaps the biggest bombshell of the trial to this point, Mook also admitted that Hillary Clinton herself “agreed to” the decision to leak the Alfa Bank allegations to the press. Mook was adamant that he had authorized campaign staff, rather than Perkins Coie, to carry out this task.

DeFilippis then presented Mook with a statement issued by Clinton campaign senior staffer Jake Sullivan — and later tweeted out by Clinton herself — after the first story on the Alfa Bank allegations was published by Franklin Foer of Slate.

DeFelippis asked Mook whether he trusted Perkins Coie to be accurate in its billing records, and Mook answered in the affirmative. He then went on to present Mook with a billing record from Sussmann in which he references “work on white paper” for the campaign. “White papers” has frequently been used to describe the documents passed along to the FBI by Sussmann that provided an analysis of the hard-copy evidence, which came in the form of Domain Name System Data (DNS) on thumb drives.

The prosecutor asked whether an October Surprise should be “damning,” and Mook said it should. He then inquired whether the Alfa Bank allegations were damning, and Mook called them “alarming.” DeFelippis asked Mook to read the date of Clinton’s tweet on the subject and he replied “October 31.”

DeFilippis ended his questioning there.

Defense counsel Michael Bosworth returned briefly to establish that Mook had not delegated “politics” or “press” to Perkins Coie, and that Foer’s article in Slate mentioned nothing about an FBI investigation.

Baker finally finished his time on the stand around 10:30 a.m. on Friday, having started on Wednesday afternoon. His cross-examination, having begun on Thursday afternoon, was finished by defense attorney Sean Berkowitz.

Berkowitz questioned Baker about his and the bureau’s decisions after Baker had obtained DNS data suggesting that there was a connection between the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank and what they might have suggested about the importance the bureau placed on the source of the data.

He also established that Sussmann had played a critical role in helping the FBI contact the New York Times about holding a story on the allegations.

Baker was grilled about whether “alarm bells” had gone off in his head because a news organization had received the evidence first, potentially suggesting that Sussmann was representing a client. He said that he “did not intuit” that there was an attorney–client relationship at work “because Michael [Sussmann] said the opposite.”

Baker admitted that the FBI would have wanted the materials Sussmann handed over “provided they could lawfully have them,” and that he trusted Sussmann very much at the time. He continued to maintain, however, that had he known Sussmann was representing a client, it would have changed the way he handled the situation.

“I would have passed that [evidence] along to somebody else in the FBI, but not necessarily in the same way,” said Baker.

In what might have been Baker’s biggest concession to the defense, he agreed with Berkowitz’s assertion that it was “critically important” for the FBI to get a heads-up about the allegations prior to the publication of an article about them.

The prosecution returned to question Baker and elicited from him that knowing of a relationship between one or more of the drafters of the aforementioned white papers and the Clinton campaign would have affected how Baker and the bureau handled the situation. He stated definitively that it would have “changed my assessment of reliability and credibility of the information.”

DeFillippis also asked Baker whether it would have changed his evaluation of Sussmann’s motives if he had known that the attorney was lobbying reporters to move forward with the story after he went to the FBI.

“It would have caused me to have serious concerns about what was happening here,” said Baker.

The other two witnesses were two retired CIA employees who met with Sussmann in early 2017 about the Alfa Bank allegations.

First up was Mark Chadason, who had already left the CIA by the time Sussmann had arranged for a meeting with him.

Chadason was informed of the allegations at a breakfast with Sussmann. In a memo, he recorded that Sussmann told him that he was representing a client who wished to remain anonymous and referred to his client’s lack of trust in the FBI to deal with these issues. He also recorded that Sussmann said that he would go to the New York Times if the evidence didn’t make its way to “senior bona fide CIA officers (active duty).” Chadason also noted that Sussmann told him that his client was a Republican engineer with a relationship to the intelligence community.

The second CIA witness — referred to as “Kevin P” in court — was active duty at the time, and interviewed Sussmann after his meeting with Chadason. He said that during that interview, Sussmann stated that he was not representing a client. In a memo he prepared with another colleague who had attended the interview, he wrote that “Sussmannn advised that he was not representing a particular client” and that attorney–client privilege did not apply.

Kevin P stated under oath in court that Sussmann disclosed that his firm represented the DNC and the Clinton campaign but also “made it clear that he did not have any connection” to that work.

Under cross-examination, Kevin P was interrogated by Berkowitz over whether he saw the memo prepared by Chadason that referred to client many times and even had a subheading dedicated to summarizing what was known by the client. The memo had been emailed to him, but the witness said that he had no memory of reading it but could not rule it out, as it was his general practice to review relevant documents before an interview.

Regardless, he was insistent that Sussmann told him during the interview that he was not representing a client.

Also noteworthy was that Kevin P wrote in his memo that Sussmann disclosed that he had gone to Baker about a “similar, though unrelated matter.” He stood by that claim.

The trial will resume on Monday morning.

More from National Review