A federal judge rejected a former Clinton campaign lawyer’s request to dismiss John Durham’s case against him

• A federal judge rejected Michael Sussmann’s request to dismiss John Durham’s case against him.
• Durham’s office charged Sussmann, a former Clinton campaign lawyer, with one count of lying to the FBI.
• US District Judge Christopher Cooper ruled that Sussmann “offers no legal authority” showing he did not make a material false statement.

A federal judge on Wednesday rejected the former Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann’s request to dismiss the special counsel John Durham’s criminal case against him.

Sussmann was charged last year with lying to the FBI during a conversation with then FBI general counsel James Baker in 2016. Durham’s indictment said that Sussmann “lied about the capacity in which he was providing” allegations to the FBI about what he claimed was a “secret communications channel” between the Trump Organization and Russia’s Alfa Bank.

The indictment said Sussmann lied to the FBI when he told Baker he wasn’t working on behalf of any client. In fact, the indictment said, Sussmann was acting on behalf of the Clinton campaign, the tech executive Rodney Joffe, and the internet company Neustar.

In their motion to dismiss the case against Sussmann, his lawyers argued that the lie he’s accused of telling was not material to the FBI’s 2016 Russia investigation. In other words, they said that Sussmann’s statement that he was not acting on behalf of a specific client did not influence the “discrete decision” the FBI faced at the time: whether to launch an investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia.

US District Judge Christopher Cooper, an Obama appointee, rejected that argument Wednesday, writing in a six-page ruling that Sussmann’s lawyers only addressed one part of the legal test to determine if a statement is material or not, namely if it affects the FBI’s decision to start an investigation.

But the defense “largely ignores the second part of the test: whether the statement could influence ‘any other function’ of the agency,” Cooper wrote.

He went on to say that “applying that prong of the materiality standard,” the US Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington, DC, has previously held that a “‘lie distorting an investigation already in progress’ also would run afoul.”

“Sussmann seeks to cabin this holding to statements made during the course of an ongoing investigation, but the Court sees no basis for this bright-line divide,” the ruling said.

Durham’s office said last year that Sussmann’s failure to disclose the capacity in which he was bringing the Trump-Alfa Bank allegation to the FBI “misled FBI personnel and deprived the FBI of information that might have permitted it more fully to assess and uncover the origins of the relevant data and analysis, including the identities and motivations of Sussmann’s clients.”

Cooper referenced that contention in his Wednesday ruling, writing that “as the Special Counsel argues, it is at least possible that statements made to law enforcement prior to an investigation could materially influence the later trajectory of the investigation. Sussmann offers no legal authority to the contrary.”

This story is developing. Check back for updates.