Donald Trump and his supporters are not going to be happy about this latest setback.
Democrats breathed a sigh of relief.
And Donald Trump found out about a devastating court ruling that he never saw coming.
U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper – a Barack Obama appointee – handed down a major ruling in special counsel John Durham’s prosecution of Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann for lying to the FBI in a September 2016 meeting where Sussmann pressed the FBI to investigate the Russian collusion hoax.
Durham alleged Sussmann falsely claimed he was not meeting with the FBI on behalf of his client the Clinton campaign when Sussmann passed along a deranged conspiracy theory about a server in Trump Tower communicating with Alfa Bank in Moscow as evidence of a secret plot between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin.
In court filings Durham revealed he planned to prove that the Clinton campaign and its agents entered into a “joint venture” to plant false stories about the Trump campaign colluding with Russian law enforcement.
However, Judge Cooper is not letting Durham present all of his evidence in court.
In his ruling limiting the emails Durham can show the jury, Judge Cooper ruled Durham can present emails as evidence that pertain to Sussmann’s false claims about the Alga Bank server,
“These emails are admissible as non-hearsay because the Special Counsel does not appear to be offering them for their truth, but rather to demonstrate that Fusion GPS and the researchers shared the ultimate goal of disseminating the Alfa Bank allegations to the press,” Judge Cooper wrote.
But Judge Cooper blocked Durham from putting other emails in front of the jury that would demonstrate the “joint venture” on the part of the Clinton campaign and its agents to whip up a conspiracy theory about Trump-Russian collusion.
“The Court will exercise its discretion not to engage in the kind of extensive evidentiary analysis that would be required to find that such a joint venture existed, and who may have joined it, in order to admit these emails,” Judge Cooper added.
Judge Cooper wrote that he would block Durham from presenting these emails because Sussmann is not charged with conspiracy.
“For starters, Mr. Sussmann is not charged with a conspiracy,” Judge Cooper added. “Moreover, while the Special Counsel has proffered some evidence of a collective effort to disseminate the purported link between Trump and Alfa Bank to the press and others, the contours of this venture and its participants are not entirely obvious.”
“The government has proffered the existence of at least some circumstantial evidence connecting Mr. Sussmann to certain aspects of the data gathering effort,” Judge Cooper continued.
The Sussmann trial was the best opportunity for Durham to make his case in court that the Russian collusion hoax was a dirty trick cooked up by Democrats to damage Donald Trump.
But thanks to a friendly Democrat judge, Durham will not be able to make that case to its fullest extent.
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