Sussmann prosecutors also take aim at Clinton, FBI and the news media

“It would have alarmed me, this nexus with the press and whether there was some effort to engineer a situation where the FBI would be investigating this material and that the press — even though it couldn’t determine the reliability of that material and couldn’t report on it — could report the FBI was investigating it.”Ultimately, the FBI investigated the computer data and decided it was nothing suspicious.Sussmann trial tests credibility of 2016 figuresBaker’s account underpins the core assertion of the prosecution case — that Sussmann lied about the client he was representing to try to spark both an FBI investigation and a news story about an issue that would hurt Trump’s election chances.Left unsaid was another reason Baker might have reacted differently if he had known Sussmann was acting on Clinton’s behalf: Of all of Comey’s senior advisers who worked on the Clinton email case, Baker was arguably the most critical of how she and her staff had communicated on sensitive topics, according to those who worked with him at the time, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.If Baker had known Sussmann’s information came from a Clinton campaign opposition-research effort, he might have had a much more negative reaction. “Two or three of the most damaging days of the campaign were caused by James Comey, not Donald Trump,” he said, referring to how the FBI had handled the email case.Mook added that Alfa-Bank was just one of many stories at the time about possible connections between Russia and Trump.If news stories about Alfa-Bank weren’t that important to Mook, they seemed important to everyone else.In February 2017 — after Trump took office — Sussmann was still trying to persuade the U.S. government to pursue the Alfa-Bank issue, and still trying to invoke the Times to make that happen, according to another witness.Mark Chadason, a former CIA officer, said he met with Sussmann and helped set up a meeting between the lawyer and agency officials to discuss the Alfa-Bank claims and a related allegation.In an email at the time, Chadason wrote that Sussmann said his client wanted the information to go to a senior CIA official, adding that “if there is no interest, he would most likely go to New York Times.”