Durham spent three years on the investigation and, in 2021, brought a charge of making false statements against Sussmann, accusing him of having lied to the FBI in one meeting in 2016, with no witnesses.
CrowdStrike discovered that two Russian hacker groups, working independently of each other, had penetrated DNC networks and stolen information, including opposition research on Trump.
[18] After more than two years of investigation, Durham had secured one felony indictment against FBI attorney Kevin Clinesmith for altering a government document used to obtain a FISA warrant against Trump campaign associate Carter Page.
Sussman had stated during a 2017 congressional deposition that he sought the meeting with Baker on behalf of an unnamed client, a cybersecurity expert who had analyzed the server communications data.
[9][21] The New York Times reported Durham had records showing Sussmann had billed the Clinton campaign for certain hours he spent working on the Alfa-Bank matter.
[22] In a December 2021 court filing, Sussmann's attorneys presented portions of two documents provided to them by Durham days earlier which they asserted undermined the indictment.
A second document was a June 2019 Justice Department inspector general interview with Baker in which he said the Sussmann meeting "related to strange interactions that some number of people that were his clients, who were, he described as I recall it, sort of cybersecurity experts, had found."
A Durham prosecutor later asserted that subsequent to his 2019 and 2020 interviews, Baker "affirmed and then re-affirmed his now-clear recollection of the defendant’s false statement" after refreshing his memory with contemporaneous or near-contemporaneous notes.
Sussmann's attorneys told the court that the new evidence "underscores the baseless and unprecedented nature of this indictment" and asked that his trial date be moved from July to May 2022.
[26][27] In a February 2022 court motion related to Sussmann's prosecution, Durham alleged that Sussmann associate Rodney Joffe and his associates had "exploited" capabilities his company had through a pending cybersecurity contract with the Executive Office of the President (EOP) to acquire nonpublic government Domain Name System (DNS) and other data traffic "for the purpose of gathering derogatory information about Donald Trump."
[29] Durham alleged Sussmann's data showed a Russian phone provider connection involving the EOP "during the Obama administration and years before Trump took office."
Durham asserted that Sussmann bringing his information to the CIA was part of a broader effort to raise the intelligence community's suspicions of Trump's connections to Russia shortly after he took office.
"[35][36] Sussmann's attorneys also explained that "Although the Special Counsel implies that in Mr. Sussmann's February 9, 2017 meeting, he provided Agency-2 with (Executive Office of the President) data from after Mr. Trump took office, the Special Counsel is well aware that the data provided to Agency-2 pertained only to the period of time before Mr. Trump took office, when Barack Obama was President,"[26] a time period (2015 and 2016) where much investigation of Russian hacks of Democratic Party and White House networks had occurred: "...cybersecurity researchers were 'deeply concerned' to find data suggesting Russian-made YotaPhones were in proximity to the Trump campaign and the White House, so 'prepared a report of their findings, which was subsequently shared with the C.I.A'.
According to Ja'han Jones of MSNBC's The ReidOut Blog, he repeated debunked conspiracy theories about the origins of the Russia investigation by stating that the case against Sussmann "crystallized the central role played by the Hillary campaign in launching, as a dirty trick, the whole Russiagate collusion narrative.
After the Sussmann prosecution failed, Barr stated it "accomplished something far more important" because it "crystallized the central role played by the Hillary campaign in launching as a dirty trick the whole Russiagate collusion narrative and fanning the flames of it.