Fox News Immediately Blames Jury for Finding Clinton Campaign Lawyer Not Guilty

Moments after Special Counsel John Durham was handed a major setback on Tuesday when a federal jury found Clinton-linked lawyer Michael Sussmann not guilty, multiple Fox News personalities accused the D.C.-based jurors of not giving prosecutors a “fair shake” due to political bias.

Sussmann was indicted in September 2021 on a single count of “willfully and knowingly” lying to a federal agent. The case centered on a 2016 meeting Sussmann had with the FBI over allegations that there was secret communication between a Russia-linked bank and the Trump Organization. Sussmann, who also represented Hillary Clinton’s campaign at the time, was accused of not telling the feds of his Democratic Party connections during the conversation.

Right-wing media and Trump allies had hoped that the Sussmann case would be the centerpiece of Durham’s investigation into Robert Mueller’s probe of Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election. (And pushed misleading claims about Durham’s investigation in the process.) Throughout the two-week trial, prosecutors argued that Sussmann had “a license to lie” in a last-minute effort by the Clinton campaign to tip the election with false claims about Trump-Russia collusion.

Clinton Campaign Lawyer Acquitted of Lying to the FBI in Trump-Russia Case

The jury, however, rejected the prosecution’s argument and apparently accepted the defense’s claims that Durham was basically trying to turn one brief meeting into a “giant political conspiracy theory.” Needless to say, Fox News was not pleased with the verdict and went right into spin mode.

At the top of the midday panel show Outnumbered, reporter David Spunt quickly tied Sussmann’s acquittal to the political makeup of the Washington, D.C., jury pool.

“We spoke to several legal experts—Jonathan Turley, Andrew McCarthy, Jim Trusty—all on Fox News who said they would not be shocked if Michael Sussman was acquitted simply because you have a D.C. jury,” he declared, referencing a number of conservative legal analysts the network has hosted to discuss the trial.

At the same time, Spunt and anchor Harris Faulkner attempted to find a silver lining for conservatives by asserting that Durham’s investigation shows that Democrats were indeed trying to “take down” Trump with false claims.

“At the end, Special Counsel John Durham team is saying they can paint the picture the highest level of the Hillary Clinton campaign were involved in an effort to take down Donald Trump’s campaign with bogus information,” Spunt said.

“If nothing else comes away from all of this, you can’t erase what we now know about that. You can’t take that fact away,” Faulkner responded, adding: “If nothing else, we have learned how tight the connections were between the people leading the FBI investigation and the Hillary Clinton campaign.”

Former Trump spokesperson turned Fox News host Kayleigh McEnany, meanwhile, continued to blame the jury and its supposed bias for not buying what Durham’s team was selling.

“The D.C. jury pool, this is an area of the country where 76 percent of people in the District of Columbia are registered Democrat,” she declared. “A third of that jury pool had strong feelings about the election and prosecutors were frustrated that they would not get a fair shake here. I think this does raise questions on how fair a shake you will be given in D.C. with a jury pool that does go in one direction.”

Fox News contributor Joe Concha went even further than his colleagues in railing against the jury.

“The fact that this jury was going to be sympathetic and friendly to Hillary Clinton’s campaign lawyer is not surprising. Especially when that jury had Clinton donors on it,” he exclaimed. “I’m telling you, our faith in institutions just took another big hit. This is a whole bowl of wrong. Very frustrating to see.”

Concha concluded: “You have a man who peddled a lie. A lie that he was going there as a concerned citizen. Then he charges the Clinton campaign for that visit to his friend James Baker. What else do you need? This jury was pretty dispositioned to have a not guilty verdict. And here we are again, another black eye for the justice system!”

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