WASHINGTON—Former Hillary Clinton campaign lawyer Marc Elias and an FBI special agent are among those set to testify on May 17 in the trial of another former Clinton campaign attorney.
Sussmann is on trial for allegedly lying to the FBI when he told then-FBI general counsel James Baker that he was bringing allegations against Donald Trump on his own volition, not on behalf of a client.
The claims were later deemed illegitimate by the CIA and unsubstantiated by the FBI, prosecutors recently revealed.
Sussmann was working for both the Clinton campaign and a technology executive named Rodney Joffe at the time he met with Baker ahead of the 2016 election, when Clinton and Trump were vying for the presidency.
Durham has alleged the campaign, Perkins Coie, and a company the firm tapped to perform opposition research called Fusion GPS conspired to push flawed claims about Trump.
Elias, who was the campaign’s general counsel, has claimed responsibility for hiring Fusion, the firm behind the so-called Steele dossier, a compilation of allegations created by ex-British spy Christopher Steele with the help of Fusion operatives.
In a declaration submitted to the court on April 19, Elias said Fusion’s work was to provide “consulting services in support of the legal advice” that Perkins attorneys were providing to the campaign and other clients related to defamation, libel, and similar laws.
Also slated to testify is FBI special agent David Martin, a cyber analyst.
The FBI employee can testify about three general topics, Cooper has said.
Those are: background information necessary to understand the technical data that Sussmann presented to Baker, conclusions that can be drawn from analyzing the kind of data that was presented, and methods investigators would use to “validate or further examine that data,” Cooper said in a recent order.
Martin, however, cannot get into “complex, technical explanations about the data” because those would be “only marginally probative of those defense theories,” he said.
