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Happy Constitution Day
We will see, it's a pretty sketchy single 1001 charge, the feds' bread and butter charge, often (and fairly) criticized as a tool to generate charges when no substantive charges can be found.
It's based on a face-to-face oral statement with one government witness, Baker who took no contemporaneous notes. The notes referred to are hearsay.
The 27-page indictment is, to my reading, performative and seemingly focused on delivering a narrative of Trump-as-victim rather than a necessary exposition about Sussman's alleged crime. It's a one-count 1001; that usually doesn't require so much verbiage.
A few legal issues of note: the statute requires the gov’t to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Sussman knew the statement was false & made it with an improper purpose, that the statement was actually false & that it was “material.” Can’t convict without all of that. And bad facts make bad law & that has happened with this statute in the past, 1st courts added a materiality requirement & more recently that defendant knew lying to agents was a crime. Given inconsistent treatment of Sussman & Mike Flynn, lots of risk on appeal to the gov’t.
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