A federal judge ruled Thursday that GPS Fusion, the research firm hired by Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign to dig up dirt on Donald Trump’s alleged connections to Russia, must hand over two dozen emails to special counsel John Durham, Fox News informed.
Those emails are part of a bundle that the prosecutors subpoenaed last year, and they mostly involve exchange messages between Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussman and Fusion GPS.
U.S. District Judge Christopher “Casey” Cooper denied prosecutors access to 16 of the emails, but Durham was granted access to 22.
Cooper decided that the 16 emails in question were covered by attorney-client privilege and attorney-work-product privilege, while the other 22 were not.
Despite this, the judge determined that the emails will not be admissible in Sussman’s upcoming trial, citing the untimeliness of Durham’s request. Sussman is charged with lying to the FBI during a meeting in September 2016.
Sussman is accused of passing on to the FBI cybersecurity researchers’ concerns regarding a possible secret back-channel communication between Trump Organization servers and Alfa Bank in Russia.
The FBI looked into the subject but found no suspicious connections.
Sussmann allegedly misled the FBI’s then-general counsel by claiming that he was not attending the meeting on behalf of a specific client when, in fact, he was presenting data on behalf of the Hillary Clinton campaign and a tech executive with whom he had previously worked.
Sussman’s trial is expected to begin in federal court in Washington on Monday.
He has entered a not guilty plea.
Durham, a former United States attorney in Connecticut, was chosen by then-Attorney General William Barr in 2019 to investigate alleged government misconduct during the probe into Russian electoral meddling in 2016 and suspected connections to the presidential campaign of Donald Trump.
Sussmann is the third person to be charged thus far.
Kevin Clinesmith, a former FBI lawyer who received probation after pleading guilty to tampering with an email, and Igor Danchenko, a Russian expert and a source of information for Christopher Steele, former British intelligence operative who compiled an anti-Trump dossier, are the other two.
In November, Danchenko was charged with lying to the FBI during an interview in 2017.
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