Washington, D.C. — Messages between FBI agents made public during the false-statement trial of lawyer Michael Sussmann show that the Chicago office tasked with looking into allegations of communications between the Trump Organization and Russia’s Alfa Bank was forced to open a full investigation at the behest of FBI leadership, in spite of exculpatory analyses performed by agents.
Weeks ahead of the 2016 election, Joe Pientka, then running the bureau’s Crossfire Hurricane operation aimed at a broader review of ties between Donald Trump and Russia, sent a text message to Curtis Heide, one of the agents tasked with running the Alfa Bank investigation in Chicago, letting him know that leadership was enthusiastic about opening an investigation based on evidence that Sussmann provided FBI general counsel James Baker.
"People on 7th floor to include Director are fired up about this server," Pientka wrote.
Pientka went on to tell Heide that failing to open up an investigation and “put tools” into the matter was “not an option.”
“We must do it,” added Pientka.
During testimony in the Sussmann trial on Tuesday, Heide confirmed under questioning that he took this to mean the decision was out of his hands, and that he was obligated to open a full investigation into the allegations, rather than a preliminary one, or a mere assessment.
“Headquarters told us that not investigating the matter was not an option," Heide testified.
The enthusiasm of then-Director James Comey and other senior officials at the FBI could be contrasted with the doubt of agents who had personally examined the evidence of the alleged communications.
Scott Hellman, one of the first agents to look at the evidence — which came in the form of Domain Name System (DNS) data, as well as “white papers” purporting to summarize the data — told the court that he wondered if the white papers’ authors were “mentally disabled” after looking at the data and concluding that it did not comport with the paper’s conclusions. One of the white papers stated definitively that "these servers are configured for direct communications between the Trump organization and Alfa bank."
Hellman reviewed the evidence after Sussmann— then a partner at Perkins Coie representing the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee— provided it to FBI general counsel James Baker, who Sussmann had worked with years earlier at the Department of Justice. Sussmann is accused of lying to Baker when he said he wasn’t presenting the evidence on behalf of any client, despite billing hours to the Hillary Clinton campaign. At the time, Sussmann was also representing tech executive Rodney Joffe, whose firm Neustar initially dug up the DNS data.
Agent Ryan Gaynor — who tracked the progress of Heide and the rest of the Chicago team from FBI headquarters — testified on Monday that FBI leadership also placed a “close hold” on Sussmann’s identity, limiting the number of people who were aware that he was the one who brought the allegations to the bureau. Gaynor added that he would have approached the investigation differently had he known Sussmann and Joffe provided the evidence.
Baker testified earlier in the trial that he likely would not have protected Sussmann’s identity had he known that his former DOJ colleague approached him on behalf of a client and not as a “good citizen” as he initially believed.
On September 26, 2016, just a few days after receiving the case assignment and communications with Hellman about the evidence, Heide reported that his team was leaning toward thinking the allegations were “bunk.”
Emails sent by Joffe and unveiled by prosecutors on Tuesday suggest that Joffe himself had doubts about the very analysis he passed along to Sussmann in the form of white papers accompanying the DNS data.
While one of the white papers submitted to the FBI claimed that "the only plausible explanation for this server configuration is that it shows the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank to be using multiple sophisticated layers of protection in order to obfuscate their considerable recent email traffic," the email from Joffe suggests that he did not actually hold to that view.
In the email, which included an attachment to the aforementioned white paper, Joffe asked several cybersecurity experts to read the paper as if they “had no prior knowledge” and were not as knowledgeable in the field as they were.
“Is this plausible as an explanation?” asked Joffe. "Not to be able to say that this is without doubt, fact, but to merely be plausible," he continued.
Joffe told the recipients that if they spent more than an hour looking at the data, they had “failed the assignment.”
The email is key because it could speak to an intentional effort to deceive media figures and the FBI about the strength of the allegations.
Taken together, the revelations about the close hold and eagerness of FBI brass to open up a full investigation could speak to a broader pattern of malfeasance related to the various investigations into Donald Trump, a topic of great interest to Special Counsel John Durham, who brought the case against Sussmann.
Durham has been tasked with investigating the origins of the Trump-Russia inquiry.
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