The Sussmann Trial: fingers pointed at FBI leadership

Last week, former FBI general counsel James Baker testified that he spoke with Priestap about his meeting with Sussmann and "Repeated to Mr. Priestap that Michael had said that he was not there on behalf of a particular client, that he was there as a citizen, as a - essentially as a human source of information, confidential source."

Q: Based on your experience, if Mr. Sussmann had brought these allegations to the FBI on behalf of the Hillary Clinton Campaign, would that have mattered to the FBI?

Priestap: Again, the - somebody - anybody bringing information to the FBI, we're interested - the FBI is interested in knowing the motivation of the person providing the information.

Q: As a general matter, if the FBI knew that a newspaper story was coming out about a threat from a nation state, are there ever occasions in which you would, at the FBI, want to ask a newspaper to hold off on running that story?

If the FBI thought, let's just say, that publicly revealing a certain matter could potentially negatively impact not just things the FBI was doing but potentially negatively impact the country, we'd want to have a conversation about it.

Counsel for Sussmann presented Priestap with messages from the FBI's internal messaging system, in which Priestap discussed how the FBI's leadership - Comey, McCabe, et al.

Back in 2016, Agent Gaynor was the FBI's counterintelligence division's unit chief in Washington, DC. He learned of the Alfa Bank allegations on September 23, 2016 during a briefing led by the FBI's Chicago field office.

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