With Trump World claiming the investigation being led by Special Counsel to the US Attorney John Durham would uncover myriad plot to undermine Donald Trump, the sole indictment filed by Durham so far is being questioned for its veracity, the New York Times reports.
Durham charged Michael Sussman, a former lawyer for the Hillary Clinton 2016 presidential campaign, with making false statements to the FBI during the course of its investigation into an alleged signal between the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank, the largest public bank in Russia. Supposedly, Sussman claimed he wasn’t representing a client when in fact, he was.
In a lengthy 27-page indictment, Durham laid out a scenario with four data scientists dismissing a signal between a server at the Trump Organization and a counterpart at Alfa Bank. Durham claimed Sussman intentionally misled investigators about this point to push the FBI to open a probe into the two servers.
Emails uncovered by the Times, however, give a very different picture of the data scientists’ view. The scientists actually felt a duty to report the connection, and Sussman was acting on those concerns when he met with the FBI. None of the four data scientists were named in the Durham indictment.
The results the scientists found “have been validated and are reproducible. The findings of the researchers were true then and remain true today; reports that these findings were innocuous or a hoax are simply wrong,” said Jody Westby and Mark Rasch, lawyers for David Dagon, a Georgia Institute of Technology data scientist and one of the researchers whom the indictment discussed but did not name.