Stacked Jury Acquits Hillary Clinton Campaign Operative

But Durham probe is still exposing the Clinton campaign’s Russian collusion hoax.

By Joseph Klein, FPM    June 3/22

Juries play a crucial role in America’s justice system. The Sixth Amendment to the Constitution guarantees in all criminal prosecutions that “the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury.” In both criminal and civil trials, the jurors are the fact finders, who are expected to fulfill this responsibility impartially and to reach their respective decisions based solely on the evidence presented to them in court. However, while juries often reach reasonable verdicts, jurors sometimes go rogue.

The verdict in O.J. Simpson’s criminal murder case was a classic example of a rogue jury at work. One of the jurors in that case admitted years later that she and other members of the jury voted to acquit O.J. Simpson as payback for the acquittal of Los Angeles police officers involved in the beating of Rodney King.

Now another set of biased jurors has gone rogue in a criminal trial, this time involving dirty tricks by Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. The jurors voted to acquit one of Hillary Clinton’s campaign lawyers,  Michael Sussmann, who was charged with lying to the FBI. The foundation was set with pro-defense rulings by a federal district court judge, Christopher Cooper, who was nominated by former President Barack Obama.

Special Counsel John H. Durham had brought a powerful case against Sussmann. His prosecution team presented documents and witness testimony proving that Sussmann had lied to the FBI in claiming that he was not acting on behalf of a client when he gave the FBI now-discredited information in 2016. The misinformation purported to link the Trump Organization with a Russian bank.

Nevertheless, the jurors were evidently not able to put their biases aside and they voted to acquit.

The trial was stacked against the prosecution from the very start.

“The Durham prosecutors were facing extremely adverse conditions in this trial,” George Washington University Law School Professor Jonathan Turley concluded. “Judge Cooper imposed strict limits on the scope of the evidence and possible examinations that prevented the prosecution from showing the origins of this information and the broader role of the Clinton campaign.”

“The jury composition was also challenging,” Professor Turley added. “In a city that voted over 90% for Clinton, this was a nightmare jury pool.”

Emphasizing this challenge faced by Special Prosecutor Durham regarding the composition of the jury, Professor Turley told Fox News: “I mean, he is facing a jury that has three Clinton donors, an AOC donor, and a woman whose daughter is on the same sports team with Sussmann’s daughter. With the exception of randomly selecting people out of the DNC headquarters, you could not come up with a worse jury.”

Judge Cooper compounded this challenge when he overlooked the strong potential for bias among a number of the jurors. For example, he overruled prosecutors’ objections to allowing a donor to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign to be seated on the jury. Judge Cooper relied on the donor’s self-serving claim that he could be impartial.

Another prospective juror who ended up as a member of the jury had disclosed that she too had donated to the Clinton campaign but could remain impartial.

Yet another prospective juror, who disclosed that her husband had worked for Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign, was also given the benefit of the doubt after making the same claim of impartiality.

A woman who admitted having concerns about the FBI and believing that the police should be de-funded was seated on the jury, nevertheless.

Following the acquittal verdict, the jury foreperson declared that she did not take the case seriously and thought that it never should have been brought in the first place.

“Personally, I don’t think it should have been prosecuted,” the foreperson said, “because I think we have better time or resources to use or spend to other things that affect the nation as a whole than a possible lie to the FBI. We could spend that time more wisely.”

This is jury nullification at work, backed by a trial judge who bent over backwards to help the Hillary Clinton operative win the case.

How different it was when the prosecution during the Trump administration sought to drop its case against a senior Trump aide, Michael Flynn, who had wanted to recant his guilty plea to the charge of lying to the FBI. The evidence supposedly supporting the charge had unraveled. A federal judge, who was nominated by former President Bill Clinton, refused to let the prosecution drop the case. Trump pardoned Flynn towards the end of his term in office.

In short, a senior Trump aide was persecuted, beginning with an irregular FBI interview that should have never happened in the first place, followed by mistreatment from the judicial system. Meanwhile, a Clinton campaign lawyer benefited from a stacked jury that acquitted him despite compelling evidence proving he had lied to the FBI on a material matter.

Although Special Counsel Durham has a guilty plea under his belt from a former FBI attorney who admitted to altering an email during the Russian collusion investigation, the D.C. swamp won a round with Sussmann’s acquittal.

Liberals should not go overboard with their celebration just yet, however. The Durham probe is far from over. A second trial is scheduled this October for a Russian researcher named Igor Danchenko, who was charged with lying to the FBI about his work on the Steele dossier. This discredited dossier was bought and paid for by Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

More indictments may follow. But whatever happens in the courtroom, the Durham investigation is exposing a level of dirty tricks by Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign that makes the Watergate scandal look like child’s play.

As Margot Cleveland, The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent, observed, the Durham probe has already uncovered substantial evidence that “the collusion hoax was a Hillary Clinton enterprise.”

Some of the evidence has been laid out in various court filings by Mr. Durham. Former Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook also admitted during the Sussmann trial that there were questions inside her campaign about the authenticity of the information that supposedly linked the Trump Organization to the Russian bank. Nevertheless, Mook said, Hillary Clinton personally approved of the decision to leak the speculative information to the media.

Clinton then completed the loop of the spread of Russia collusion misinformation her campaign had started by tweeting before the 2016 election: “Computer scientists have apparently uncovered a covert server linking the Trump Organization to a Russian-based bank.”

Fox News had previously reported on a CIA memo to the FBI from 2016 that stated in part: “An exchange [REDACTED] discussing US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s approval of a plan concerning US presidential candidate Donald Trump and Russian hackers hampering US elections as a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server.”

Whether the truth comes out in future trials or in Special Counsel Durham’s final report, the chickens will hopefully finally come home to roost for Crooked Hillary.

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