Topic: WorldNetDaily
Like the Media Research Center, WorldNetDaily also sought to spin the acquittal of Democratic lawyer Michael Sussmann on charges of making false statements to the FBI that were pushed by right-leaning special counsel John Durham. A May 31 "news" article by Art Moore downplayed Durham's prosecutorial failure to praise him for injecting anti-Hillary narratives into right-wing media:
A Washington, D.C, jury on Tuesday acquitted former Hillary Clinton lawyer Michael Sussmann of lying to the FBI, but the most important outcome of the case for special counsel John Durham was the confirmation of Hillary Clinton's role in a plot to weaponize the FBI to launch an investigation of her Republican opponent in the 2016 election.
The jury saw compelling evidence that Sussmann falsely presented himself as a concerned citizen rather than as a member of Clinton's campaign when he gave the FBI data to support the bogus claim that Donald Trump had a secret communications channel with the Kremlin through computer servers owned by a Russian bank.
[...]
In Durham's indictment of Sussmann, he said the evidence against the Clinton lawyer reveals "a scandal much deeper than merely Sussmann's role in a second Russian hoax — a scandal that entangles the Clinton campaign, multiple internet companies, two federally-funded university researchers, and a complicit media."
The prosecution said during the trial that the material Sussmann gave to the FBI was "pure opposition research" for the purpose of concocting an "October Surprise" in the 2016 election.
The case also revealed that the FBI's top brass were excited about Sussmann's claim. An agent told a colleague in a text, "People on 7th floor to include Director are fired up about this server," referring to James Comey and the bureau's top brass.
And further, the Sussmann prosecution confirmed the Clinton campaign paid the opposition research firm Fusion GPS to produce the infamous dossier of unverified and now debunked claims against Trump compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele.
Moore then set up the same conspiracy theory that the MRC did in blaming thepurported bias of the jury for the acquittal:
Constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley summarized the jury bias in an interview with Bret Baier of Fox News.
"I mean, he is facing a jury that has three Clinton donors, an [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] donor, and a woman whose daughter is on the same sports team with Sussmann’s daughter," said the George Washington University professor of law.
"With the exception of randomly selecting people out of the DNC headquarters, you could not come up with a worse jury."
Turley apparently didn't mention that it was Durham's responsibility as a prosecutor to keep potential jurors he believed were biased off the jury or, failing that, try to move the trial to a jurisdiction that might be more favorable to his anti-Hillary bias.
The next day, Bob Unruh pushed the jury conspiracy angle further:
Jury nullification in America's judicial system is the simple act of a jury deciding the outcome of a case based on what it wants, a decision that is not necessarily in alignment with the actual law.
It dates to the beginning of the nation, when in 1735 John Peter Zenger was on trial for seditious libel, at that time banning any statement against British rule, and he was acquitted.
Courts later condemned it, but it remains within the authority of jurors to decide – alone – the result of their jury room discussions.
And that's what the acquittal of former Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann looks like, according to several experts.
In fact, Unruh cited only two: Turley and onetime acting Trump attorney general Matt Whitaker, whose take could hardly be considered unbiased. And, like Moore's article, Unruh didn't mention that the Durham's prosecution team signed off on every one of those jurors, meaning that the existence of purportedly biased ones can be laid squarely on Durham. Instead, he repeated Moore's praise of Durham for injecting more anti-Hillary narratives into right-wing media.
