WASHINGTON—Testimony that suggested the Donald Trump-Russia claims given to the FBI by a Hillary Clinton lawyer may have been fabricated will be struck from the record, along with mention of the email that triggered the testimony, a judge has ruled.
On Tuesday, FBI agent Curtis Heide was presented with an email sent by Rodney Joffe to researchers with the Georgia Institute of Technology dated Sept. 14, 2016. Joffe discussed one of the white papers Michael Sussmann, a lawyer representing both Joffe and the Clinton campaign, later handed over to the FBI alleging a secret link between Trump and a Russian bank.
“Please read as if you had no prior knowledge or involvement, and you were handed this document as a security expert (NOT a DNS expert) and were asked: ‘Is this plausible as an explanation?’” Joffe wrote. “NOT to be able to say that this is, without doubt, but to merely be plausible.”
DNS stands for Domain Name System, or the type of information that Joffe and the researchers said linked Russia’s Alfa Bank and Trump’s business in the papers they compiled. Sussmann gave those papers to the FBI shortly after the September email.
Asked about the language in the message, Heide said that “it appears, from this email, that this report may have been fabricated.”
Sean Berkowitz, a defense lawyer, said while the jury was out of the room that the answer was “prejudicial” to his client.
“I did not want to draw attention to it. But given the parameters of the court’s prior ruling and the way that they went through that, I think that was improper to elicit, and nonresponsive,” Berkowitz said.
Jonathan Algor, a prosecutor with special counsel John Durham’s team, said asking Heide about the email was “legitimate” because it followed a series of questions from the defense about David Dagon, one of the researchers Joffe emailed, and the source for the paper in question.
U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper, the Obama appointee overseeing Sussmann’s case, on May 24 ordered Heide’s quote struck from the record. His justification was that the answer was “at odds” with his earlier ruling that prosecutors could not delve into whether the data was concocted or “spoofed” because Sussmann was said to not be involved in the research itself.
On Wednesday, Cooper said the email itself can no longer be an exhibit.
Cooper had allowed the document to be admitted because he said it was not hearsay since it had a statement and a question.
By John Haughey and Zachary Stieber
