Washington, D.C. — Senior FBI leaders refused to identify Clinton attorney Michael Sussmann as the source of evidence suggesting illicit back channel communications between the Trump Organization and Russia’s Alfa Bank, concealing Sussmann’s identity from the rank-and-file agents as they investigated the alleged Trump-Russia connection in 2016, FBI agent Ryan Gaynor testified Monday in Sussmann’s false-statement trial.
Sussmann is charged with telling former FBI general counsel James Baker that he wasn’t representing any client when he presented Baker with flimsy evidence connecting the Trump Organization with Russia’s Alfa Bank shortly before Election Day in 2016. The government, represented by members of Special Counsel John Durham’s team, alleges that Sussmann was acting on behalf of the Clinton campaign and tech executive Rodney Joffe.
FBI agent Ryan Gaynor — who “tracked” the course of the investigation from FBI headquarters in D.C. while it was carried out by agents in Chicago — was the focus of the defense’s efforts on Monday.
The prosecution used Gaynor’s testimony to reinforce its argument that Sussmann’s alleged deception was material to the bureau’s investigation.
Notably, Gaynor said that agents in Chicago repeatedly asked to be able to interview the source of the information (Sussmann), but that he denied them that opportunity because he had been told that senior FBI leadership placed a “close hold” on the source’s identity, limiting its distribution.
Sussmann was representing the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee as a partner at the Perkins Coie law firm at the time he sought the meeting with Baker, who he had worked with years earlier at the Department of Justice.
Gaynor said that knowledge of Sussmann’s identity and professional connections would have altered the resulting investigation into the Trump-Alfa Bank evidence, calling Sussmann’s motivations “key” in determining what level of investigation to open.
Joffe, who was then an executive at the cybersecurity firm Neustar, dug up the Trump-Alfa Bank evidence and provided it to Sussmann, who also represented Neustar at Perkins Coie. Joffe was considered a confidential human sources (CHS) by the FBI. The knowledge that Joffe was the original source of the Trump-Alfa evidence would have impacted how Gaynor approached the investigation, he said. For one, he would have been better able to evaluate the source’s credibility, which he would have found lacking given that Joffe went through Sussmann instead of coming to the bureau with the evidence directly. On a personal note, Gaynor said it diverted his time away from other important election infrastructure matters.
Gaynor’s testimony comes after Baker, the former FBI general counsel, testified that he would have treated Sussmann differently had he known that his longtime friend and former colleague was coming to him with the Trump-Alfa evidence on behalf of a client and not as a “good citizen,” as he initially believed. Baker said he likely would not have concealed Sussmann’s identity from his fellow agents had he known Sussmann was representing the Clinton campaign.
Defense attorney Michael Bosworth pressed Gaynor on apparent discrepancies in his testimony during cross-examination on Monday.
On what appeared to be a whiteboard, Bosworth enumerated each of the meetings Gaynor had with the government, in September and December 2020, February 2021, and then before the grand jury that indicted Sussmann last summer.
Bosworth went through the notes taken during each of those meetings, and found that none included testimony that Gaynor’s understanding in 2016 was that Sussmann “had come representing himself,” an understanding Gaynor testified to on Monday. In one particularly tense exchange between the attorney and witness, Bosworth noted that Gaynor had five separate opportunities to describe his impression during his grand jury testimony, and pointed out that at one point Gaynor testified that the “extent of what I understood” was that Sussmann did work for the DNC.
It was not until May 13 of this year that notes from Gaynor’s meetings with the government reflected Gaynor’s professed impression that Sussmann was not working on behalf of the DNC when he came forward with the Trump-Alfa evidence. The witness openly admitted that he was never explicitly told whether Sussmann was working for the DNC.
In another instance, Bosworth seemed to imply that Gaynor had changed his testimony in order to please the prosecution, after he was informed by members of Durham’s team that he had gone from a witness-in—to-a-subject-of their investigation. Originally, Gaynor had testified that he withheld Sussmann’s identity from the Chicago team on his own, his status as a witness reinstated after a review of documents caused him to remember the close hold that tied his hands.
Also taking the witness stand on Monday was Allison Sands, the lead agent on the Alfa Bank case in Chicago, who told prosecutor Brittain Shaw that the conclusion of her investigation was that “there was no evidence that this covert communication channel [between the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank] existed.” Sands said that she would have done nothing different from a technical perspective had she known the actual source of the evidence. However, she was under the impression that the case had been referred to the FBI by the Department of Justice at the time, and said that she gave it extra “weight” as result. “There was no opportunity” for a “sanity check,” on the claims being made, she explained.
The cross-examination, again performed by Bosworth, drilled down on the fact that Sussmann is not the one who told her that the case had been referred to the bureau by the DOJ, as well as Sands’s failure to interview David Dagon, a computer scientist who she was told wrote one of the white papers describing the data. Bosworth elicited from Sands that it would have been a “logical investigative step” to reach out to Dagon, but she believes she had been told to stay focused on the hard evidence.
He also had Sands detail her experience at the bureau prior to the Alfa Bank case; she had been an agent for only 3.5 months when she took the lead role on it.
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