9? They really let conservative media bastardized what’s going on. If they want any credibility to their investigation they better clean it up and quick.
Hillary leaves big messes.
(Content to let the investigation play out and see what it says in the end.)
“The latest pleading from Special Counsel Robert [sic] Durham provides indisputable evidence that my campaign and presidency were spied on by operatives paid by the Hillary Clinton Campaign in an effort to develop a completely fabricated connection to Russia. … In a stronger period of time in our country, this crime would have been punishable by death.”
— Former president Donald Trump, in a statement, Feb. 12
“I was proven right about the spying, and I will be proven right about 2020!”
— Trump, in a statement, Feb. 14
It’s not every day that a former president suggests that his political opponents should be executed. But ever since Trump in early 2017 falsely accused former president Barack Obama of spying on him, based on sketchy, anonymously sourced reports, he and his allies have sought to somehow make the claim come true. (Never mind that now the claim is against the Clinton campaign.)
The latest “evidence” comes via a court filing by special counsel John Durham, who was tasked by former attorney general William P. Barr to investigate the roots of the FBI counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign. Since being appointed special counsel 16 months ago, after a preliminary investigation lasting 17 months, Durham has filed two indictments. Every subsequent court filing is scrutinized carefully by right-leaning media, sometimes in misleading ways.
For instance, Fox News has reported that Durham alleged that Clinton’s “presidential campaign in 2016 had paid to ‘infiltrate’ servers belonging to Trump Tower and later the White House.” But the word “infiltrate,” even though it is in quotes, appears nowhere in Durham’s filing. Instead that word comes via Kash Patel, a former Trump administration official who offered his own spin on the document.
The Durham filing says much less than what Trump claims. Thus far, Durham has not charged anyone with spying on Trump. In fact, the statute of limitations has already expired for a key meeting cited in the filing.
Here’s a guide for the perplexed.
What’s this about?
In September, Durham charged Michael Sussmann, a former federal prosecutor with expertise in computer cases, with lying to the FBI during a meeting in 2016. The indictment alleged that he told the FBI he was not acting on behalf of clients when in fact, the indictment said, he was secretly acting on behalf of Clinton’s political team. Sussmann has pleaded not guilty, and his lawyers have denied he ever said he had no clients.
Why did Sussmann meet with the FBI?
On Sept. 19, 2016, Sussmann told James Baker, general counsel at the FBI, that cybersecurity researchers had found possible evidence of a secret communications channel between computer servers associated with the Trump Organization and with Alfa Bank, a Kremlin-linked financial institution. The researchers allegedly had been enlisted by someone identified in the indictment as Tech Executive-1 and was later revealed to be Rodney Joffe, an Internet entrepreneur who founded the world’s first commercial Internet hosting company. Joffe, who has not been charged, had hired Sussmann in February 2015 “in connection with a matter involving an agency of the U.S. government,” according to the indictment.
The FBI investigated Sussmann’s tip but concluded that it was not suspicious at all. The indictment said agents found that the computer in question “was not owned or operated by the Trump Organization, but, rather, had been administered by a mass marketing email company that sent advertisements for Trump hotels and hundreds of other clients.”
What is the connection to the Clinton campaign?
Sussmann worked for Perkins Coie, which was employed by the Clinton presidential campaign. The indictment claims that in Perkins Coie internal paperwork, Sussmann billed his time with Baker to the Clinton campaign. He also billed much of his time on the Alfa Bank matter to the Clinton campaign, according to the indictment. But Sussmann’s lawyers have said the billing records are misleading because the Clinton campaign received a flat retainer so the hours did not result in additional charges.
In a later filing in October, Durham appeared to acknowledge that he did not have evidence that Sussmann ever spoke directly to the Clinton campaign about Alfa Bank. Instead, he suggests that such communications took place via another Perkins Coie lawyer who was general counsel for the Clinton campaign. (At one point, for instance, the lawyer sent an email about the Alfa Bank matter to Clinton campaign officials, including current national security adviser Jake Sullivan.) A Durham spokesman declined to comment.
Why does this matter?
Trump and his allies have charged that the Clinton campaign ginned up allegations of connections between Trump and Russia in the months before the election, leading to negative news stories and improper federal investigations.
Multiple investigations have found clear evidence of the Russian government’s efforts to intervene in the 2016 election on the side of Donald Trump. But special counsel Robert S. Mueller III could not find evidence of a conspiracy between Trump and the Kremlin; he merely concluded that the campaign was opportunistic about apparent assistance from Russia.
Meanwhile, the Clinton campaign has been connected to negative media reports during the campaign about Trump and Russia. A former British intelligence agent, Christopher Steele, working under contract for a private investigation firm at the behest of Clinton’s campaign, actively pitched his findings to news reporters, even though his reports later turned out to be poorly sourced.
So far, there is no evidence that the Clinton campaign directly managed the Steele reporting or leaks about it to the media.
The alleged Alfa Bank connection was also pursued by reporters, though only one publication published an article before the election. The indictment of Sussmann says that he disseminated the Alfa Bank allegations to the media, even before he met with the FBI. The Clinton campaign tried to exploit the story, but it was pretty quickly dismissed and largely ignored.
Where does the ‘spying’ claim come from?
Durham on Feb. 11 asked the court to examine what he called were potential conflicts of interest regarding Sussmann’s counsel, Latham & Watkins. As part of that document, he took the opportunity to raise new allegations, though no new crimes were claimed.
One claim — the source of the “spying” allegation — is that Durham has evidence that Joffe and his associates “exploited” domain name system (DNS) Internet traffic at an unnamed health-care provider, Trump Tower, Trump’s Central Park West apartment building, and “the Executive Office of the President of the United States.”
DNS information shows what a person has been doing on the Internet, such as browsing activity. Companies and government offices use special-purpose DNS providers that might monitor for suspicious traffic or filter out potentially dangerous web addresses that include typos.
The indictment added that Joffe’s employer “had come to access and maintain dedicated servers for the EOP as part of a sensitive arrangement whereby it provided DNS resolution services to the EOP. Tech Executive-1 and his associates exploited this arrangement by mining the EOP’s DNS traffic and other data for the purpose of gathering derogatory information about Donald Trump.”
The indictment does not make clear the circumstances of the White House contract, but Durham appears to be claiming the company kept track of the web addresses that Internet users at the White House were visiting. It is unclear whether such monitoring might have been part of the original contract. If so, that’s somewhat like hiring a security guard at the front gate to run a badge-scanning system, and then being shocked the security guard is keeping track of your comings and goings from the office. That’s not really the same as eavesdropping.
Moreover, contrary to much of the reporting in right-wing media, Durham does not specifically say the alleged monitoring of EOP took place while Trump was president — and the circumstances suggest it took place in 2016.
“The Special Counsel has again made a filing in this case that unnecessarily includes prejudicial — and false — allegations that are irrelevant to his Motion and to the charged offense, and are plainly intended to politicize this case, inflame media coverage, and taint the jury pool,” Sussmann’s lawyers charged in a response filed with the court Monday night that noted a number of reports that appeared in conservative media. The team, headed by Sean Berkowitz and Michael Bosworth of Latham & Watkins, requested that the court strike “factual background” of the Durham filing that made these allegations.
A spokesperson for Joffe also denied any nefarious intent in a statement to the Fact Checker.
“Contrary to the allegations in this recent filing, Mr. Joffe is an apolitical Internet security expert with decades of service to the U.S. Government who has never worked for a political party, and who legally provided access to DNS data obtained from a private client that separately was providing DNS services to the Executive Office of the President (EOP). Under the terms of the contract, the data could be accessed to identify and analyze any security breaches or threats,” the statement said. “As a result of the hacks of EOP and DNC [Democratic National Committee] servers in 2015 and 2016, respectively, there were serious and legitimate national security concerns about Russian attempts to infiltrate the 2016 election. Upon identifying DNS queries from Russian-made Yota phones in proximity to the Trump campaign and the EOP, respected cybersecurity researchers were deeply concerned about the anomalies they found in the data and prepared a report of their findings, which was subsequently shared with the CIA.”
In any case, Trump’s original claim in 2017 was that Obama had wiretapped him, not that web searches had been tracked by the Clinton campaign. Trump relied on a report by a British journalist that a “FISA [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] warrant was granted in connection with the investigation of suspected activity between the server [in Trump Tower] and two banks, SVB Bank and Alfa Bank.”
The FBI did obtain a secret court order to monitor a former Trump campaign adviser, Carter Page. But as we noted, the FBI had quickly dismissed the Alfa Bank tip.
What else is new?
Durham mentions a meeting Sussmann had on Feb. 9, 2017, with “a second agency of the U.S. government,” previously identified in congressional testimony as the CIA. Durham alleges that Sussmann made new allegations against Trump, relying on the DNS traffic that had been collected, including that “Trump and/or his associates were using supposedly rare, Russian-made wireless phones in the vicinity of the White House and other location.” Durham’s filing said that his office found “no support” for these claims.
What is noteworthy about the date is that the meeting took place after Trump had already assumed the presidency. But that may be less nefarious than it seems. Sussmann, in December 2017, had previously explained to congressional investigators that he had tried to set up the meeting during Obama’s review of Russian involvement in the election.
“For reasons known and unknown to me, it took a long time to — or it took — you know, it took a while to have a meeting, and so it ended up being after the change in administration,” he said. He said he reported to the CIA “information that was reported to me [from a client] about possible contacts, covert or at least nonpublic, between Russian entities and various entities in the United States associated with the — or potentially associated with the Trump Organization.”
If Sussmann had planned to provide this material before Trump became president, that suggests any possible DNS monitoring took place in 2016 — as both the statement from Joffe’s spokesperson and the response from Sussmann’s legal team said.
“Although the special counsel implies that in Mr. Sussmann’s February 9, 2017 meeting, he provided [the CIA] with EOP data from after Mr. Trump took office, the special counsel is well aware that the data provided to [the CIA] pertained only to the period of time before Mr. Trump took office, when Barack Obama was President,” Sussmann’s legal team said in its filing. “Further — and contrary to the special counsel’s alleged theory that Mr. Sussmann was acting in concert with the Clinton campaign — the motion conveniently overlooks the fact that Mr. Sussmann’s meeting with [the CIA] happened well after the 2016 presidential election, at a time when the Clinton campaign had effectively ceased to exist.” The filing added that it is “false” that Sussmann billed the Clinton campaign for the September 2016 meeting with the FBI.
What is also noteworthy is that Durham raised this allegation in a filing dated Feb. 11. That means, as national security writer Marcy Wheeler first noted, the five-year statute of limitations for charging a crime in connection with the CIA meeting had expired two days earlier."
Link: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/02/15/heres-why-trump-once-again-is-claiming-spying-by-democrats/
It appears Mr. Sussman will be filing a motion to dismiss the indictment. Anticipating the motion, Durham's 2/11 filing was to preempt what he knows is coming from the defense.
The Fox News Conspiracy train swallowed it up.
And our Board dupes swallowed up what they heard on Fox News and other right wine garbage news outlets.
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/14/us/politics/durham-sussmann-trump-russia.html?referringSource=articleShare
Relax counsellor. Why are your feathers so ruffled?
(no message)
proves it,
White House and Trump Tower servers.
“As he did with Igor Danchenko, John Durham has raised a potential conflict as a way to air his conspiracy theories so he can jack up the frothy right. In this case, he describes an uncharged meeting at which Michael Sussmann, who no longer had anything to do with the DNC, shared an updated version of the Alfa Bank allegations with the CIA on February 9, 2017.
The Indictment further details that on February 9, 2017, the defendant provided an updated set of allegations – including the Russian Bank-1 data and additional allegations relating to Trump – to a second agency of the U.S. government (“Agency-2”). The Government’s evidence at trial will establish that these additional allegations relied, in part, on the purported DNS traffic that Tech Executive-1 and others had assembled pertaining to Trump Tower, Donald Trump’s New York City apartment building, the EOP, and the aforementioned healthcare provider. In his meeting with Agency-2, the defendant provided data which he claimed reflected purportedly suspicious DNS lookups by these entities of internet protocol (“IP”) addresses affiliated with a Russian mobile phone provider (“Russian Phone Provider-1”). The defendant further claimed that these lookups demonstrated that Trump and/or his associates were using supposedly rare, Russian-made wireless phones in the vicinity of the White House and other locations. The Special Counsel’s Office has identified no support for these allegations. Indeed, more complete DNS data that the Special Counsel’s Office obtained from a company that assisted Tech Executive-1 in assembling these allegations reflects that such DNS lookups were far from rare in the United States. For example, the more complete data that Tech Executive-1 and his associates gathered – but did not provide to Agency-2 – reflected that between approximately 2014 and 2017, there were a total of more than 3 million lookups of Russian Phone-Provider-1 IP addresses that originated with U.S.-based IP addresses. Fewer than 1,000 of these lookups originated with IP addresses affiliated with Trump Tower. In addition, the more complete data assembled by Tech Executive-1 and his associates reflected that DNS lookups involving the EOP and Russian Phone Provider-1 began at least as early 2014 (i.e., during the Obama administration and years before Trump took office) – another fact which the allegations omitted.
The frothy right is very excited that, among the data that someone heavily involved in cybersecurity like Rodney Joffe would have ready access to, was data that included the White House. They seem less interested that, to disprove the allegations Sussmann presented, Durham effectively (in their frothy minds) conducted the same “spying” on EOP networks of President Obama that Durham insinuates Joffe did of Trump.
Remember: This meeting is not charged. It’s not clear such a meeting with the CIA could be charged. Durham presents zero evidence Sussmann knows anything about the comparative value of this data, either.
That’ll become important in a bit.
The conflicts Durham raises to justify this filing are a bit more interesting than the ones he raised with Danchenko. Latham Watkins used to represent Perkins Coie and Marc Elias in this matter, now they represent just Sussmann, and Elias will be asked to testify about instructions Sussmann got about billing records in his representation of the DNC. Latham represented the DNC. Latham represented Sussmann in December 2017 House Intelligence testimony that significantly undermines Durham’s indictment (and shows that the allegations at the core of this indictment originally came from Kash Patel, who by the time of trial may be charged for his participation in helping Trump attempt a coup). Latham also provided Perkins Coie advice regarding a PR statement that, Durham admits, he’s not been able to pierce the privilege of and he knows those who made the statement had no knowledge that could implicate the statement in a conspiracy. Somebody on Sussmann’s team used to work at the FBI and then worked for the White House. Those are the conflicts — more substantive than the ones Durham raised about Danchenko, but probably nothing that problematic.
Which makes the relative timing of this filing all the more interesting.
With Danchenko, Durham raised the potential conflict, first, at a status hearing less than two weeks after Stuart Sears filed a notice of appearance for Danchenko, and then again, in a filing two weeks after Sears filed, for a less pressing imagined conflict involving different lawyers in Sears’ firm.
With Sussmann, Durham waited for almost five months after indicting Sussmann to raise the conflict, even though all but one element of the imagined conflict would have been immediately apparent to Durham, not least that Latham had previously represented Elias.
That doesn’t seem to reflect any real burning concern about this conflict.
But, as noted, it did give Durham an excuse to float previously unreleased information that may not even come in at trial, given that it’ll have to be presented as 404(b) evidence and it, in fact, as presented, undermines the claim that Sussmann was hiding his ties to Hillary from the Federal government.
If the information doesn’t come in at trial, this may be Durham’s only chance to jack up the frothy right with it.
And that’s interesting because of the date of that CIA meeting: February 9, 2017, five years and two days before Durham filed this belated notice of a conflict.
As I keep noting, Durham is obviously trying to pull his fevered conspiracy theories into an actual charged conspiracy, one tying together the DNC, Fusion GPS, Christopher Steele, and Hillary herself. If he succeeds, these flimsy charges (against both Sussmann and Danchenko) become stronger, but if he doesn’t, he’s going to have a harder time proving motive and materiality at trial.
After charging Sussmann on almost the last possible date before the statute of limitations expired for his claimed lie to the FBI, though, Durham would need something on which to hang a continuing conspiracy to be able to charge the others. One of those events could have been the PR statement issued in 2018, which Durham says is inaccurate.
Privilege logs and redacted emails obtained from Law Firm-1 in this investigation reflect that in the days before the issuance of these statements, Latham attorneys sent, received, and/or were copied on correspondence relating to the drafting and dissemination of the statements. (Much of the substance of those emails was redacted and withheld from the Special Counsel’s Office pursuant to Law Firm-1’s assertion of attorney-client privilege and attorney work product protections). Because the defendant was aware of and/or reviewed these media statements, the Government may seek to offer them as evidence pursuant to Rule 404(b) or other provisions of law to establish that the defendant sought to conceal the Clinton Campaign’s ties to the Russian Bank-1 allegations from the FBI and others.3
3 According to counsel for Law Firm-1, the attorneys at Law Firm-1 and Latham who participated in drafting and/or reviewing these statements were unaware at the time that the defendant had billed work on the Russian Bank-1 allegations to the Clinton Campaign.
Except, as laid out here, none of the Perkins Coie people involved in writing the statement knew how Sussmann had billed his time. And Durham hasn’t found a reason to otherwise pierce the privilege claims that went into the drafting of the statement.
So that’s probably not going to work to establish his continuing conspiracy.
The other event on which Durham might have hung a continuing conspiracy was that February 9 meeting. It involved updated work from Joffe, after all. And Durham claims Sussmann again deliberately hid who his client was rather than (as he now knows Sussmann did for tips from Jofffe that had nothing to do with Donald Trump) just shared a tip anonymously.
But instead of rolling out what Sussmann presented in that February 9 meeting five years and two days ago in a conspiracy indictment, Durham instead packaged it up in a filing pertaining to a potential conflict. This February 9 meeting, it appears, won’t be the hook on which Durham gets to charge a conspiracy.
I’m not saying that Durham won’t be able to pull together his grand conspiracy. He might next point to testimony in Congress (possibly Glenn Simpson’s) to claim that there was some grand cover-up of what he imagines was an attempt to smear Donald Trump. Except, as this filing admits, Sussmann’s sworn testimony to the House Intelligence Committee shows that when asked — by future coup investigative subject Kash Patel — Sussmann testified consistently with sharing this information on behalf of Joffe, which is what Sussmann’s currently operative story remains. Durham did suggest he thinks he can show Sussmannn misled members of Congress because he claims it was, “knowingly and intentionally misleading insofar as it failed to disclose that the defendant billed work on the Russian Bank-1 allegations to the Clinton Campaign,” except (as with the alleged lie more generally) that’s not what he was asked about.
By all means, John Durham, make Kash Patel a witness at your trial. Give Sussmann an opportunity to ask how Kash came to learn of this meeting in the first place, to say nothing about whether Kash has recently been involved in efforts to overthrow the US government.
Whatever Durham hopes to use to sustain the claim of a continuing conspiracy, this filing seems to concede that the lies Durham claims Sussmann told in that meeting that took place five years and a few days ago will not be charged.
Ask not for whom the statute of limitations toll, John Durham. They toll for you.”
haven’t heard what he has got, but we know that he was no friend and certainly no lackey or President Trump.
You should wait and see instead of pre killing the messenger. Also, at this point, it should be quite clear to all that the info that you and the Left are using may well have been fabricated. Hang tight.
(no message)
Absolutely none, zero, not a servers will infiltrated. Even listen to John Ratcliff say the same thing.
and how high it goes.