Michael A Sussmann was born on 1964 and is an American former federal prosecutor and a former partner at the law firm Perkins Coie, who focused on privacy and cybersecurity law.
21 Facts About Michael Sussmann
1.
2.
Durham spent three years on the investigation and, in 2021, brought a charge of making false statements against Michael Sussmann, accusing him of having lied to the FBI in one meeting in 2016, with no witnesses.
3.
Michael Sussmann grew up in New Jersey, and attended Rutgers University and then Brooklyn Law School.
4.
Michael Sussmann began his career as an associate at the law firm Proskauer Rose.
5.
Michael Sussmann went on to work for twelve years as a prosecutor at the US Justice Department, eventually specializing in computer crimes.
6.
Michael Sussmann was a special assistant in the United States Department of Justice Criminal Division, and was later appointed as senior counsel.
7.
Michael Sussmann worked as an assistant US attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, where he focused on white-collar and violent crime.
8.
Michael Sussmann worked for Perkins Coie from 2005, where he was a partner in its privacy and cybersecurity practice, until his resignation in September 2021.
9.
Michael Sussmann then contacted Shawn Henry, CSO and President of CrowdStrike Services.
10.
At the meeting, Michael Sussmann presented what he and others believed was evidence of potential communications between computer servers at the Russian Alfa-Bank and the Trump Organization.
11.
The indictment of Michael Sussmann alleges he told Baker he did not represent a client for the purposes of their meeting, when he was actually representing the Hillary Clinton 2016 presidential campaign.
12.
The New York Times reported Durham had records showing Michael Sussmann had billed the Clinton campaign for certain hours he spent working on the Alfa-Bank matter.
13.
Michael Sussmann's attorneys said he did so because he needed to demonstrate internally that he was engaged in billable work, though the work involved consulting with fellow partner Marc Elias, and the campaign paid a flat monthly fee to Perkins Coie but was not actually charged for those billed hours.
14.
Michael Sussmann notified CIA counterintelligence of the findings in February 2017, but it was not known if they were investigated.
15.
One document was a summary of an interview Durham's investigators conducted with Baker in June 2020 in which he did not say that Michael Sussmann told him he was not there on behalf of any client, but rather that Baker had assumed it and that the issue never came up.
16.
The New York Times reported that the narrow charge against Michael Sussmann was contained in a 27-page indictment that elaborated on activities of cybersecurity researchers who were not charged, including what their attorneys asserted were selected email excerpts that falsely portrayed them as not actually believing their claims.
17.
Michael Sussmann's attorneys told the court that the new evidence "underscores the baseless and unprecedented nature of this indictment" and asked that his trial date be moved from July to May 2022.
18.
Michael Sussmann notified CIA counterintelligence of the findings in February 2017, but it was not known if they were investigated.
19.
Michael Sussmann's attorneys responded that Durham knew Sussman had not made such a claim to the CIA.
20.
Durham asserted that Michael Sussmann bringing his information to the CIA was part of a broader effort to raise the intelligence community's suspicions of Trump's connections to Russia shortly after he took office.
21.
The New York Times reported in January 2023 that two prosecutors on Durham's team had argued to him that the evidence against Michael Sussmann was too thin to pursue charges, and that an acquittal would undermine public faith in Durham's investigation and law enforcement.