rumitoid

Former President Donald Trump and his allies are saying that a recent court filing by Justice Department special counsel John Durham is proof that he was being spied on as a candidate in 2016 and later as president by people involved with Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

The 13-page filing lays out new evidence that Durham collected about the lengths to which Democratic partisans went to push the narrative to the FBI and the CIA that Trump was engaged in improper secret communications with the Kremlin while he was running for president.

But according to a leading cybersecurity expert, the highly technical filing — while raising some potentially troubling questions about the use of nonpublic government data for political purposes — does little to support Trump’s claim that his allegations of spying have been vindicated.

The filing was made by Durham on Friday in a case involving Michael Sussmann, a cybersecurity lawyer who has been charged with lying to the FBI by failing to disclose that he was working for Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign during a key meeting that September with a senior bureau official.

Prosecutors allege that in September 2016, Sussmann brought then-FBI general counsel James Baker since-debunked allegations about a secret communications channel between the Trump Organization and the Alfa Bank, a Russian financial institution owned by cronies of Vladimir Putin. Durham alleges that Sussmann told Baker he was not working on behalf of any client when he provided Baker with material about the supposed secret channel, when, according to the special counsel, he actually billed his work on the matter to Clinton's campaign. (Sussmann has denied the charges, and the case is scheduled to go to trial in federal court in Washington, D.C., this spring.)

The allegations about a secret channel were widely discussed in the media before the 2016 election and touted by the Clinton campaign. But the FBI and Robert Mueller's investigation later concluded that no such secret channel had existed.

In his filing, Durham said that an unnamed tech executive with government cybersecurity contracts exploited access to computer data at the Trump White House to find “derogatory information” about the president.

The tech executive — whom the New York Times identified as Rodney Joffe — used his access to domain-name system data to compile information about which computers and servers the White House servers were communicating with.

According to the filing, Joffe gave Sussmann data from computer servers at the Executive Office of the President, two Trump-owned buildings in New York and an unrelated medical firm in Michigan, and claimed the servers had connected with internet addresses “affiliated with a Russian mobile phone provider.”

Sussmann then gave the information to an unnamed federal agency — identified by the Times as the CIA — at a meeting on Feb. 9, 2017, less than a month after Trump took office. He claimed to the agency that the data “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.” But Durham said his office “has identified no support for these allegations.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/durham-special-counsel-filing-trump-spying-clinton-campaign-215335145.html

steve66613

How’s that crow tasting, there Rumi?

Milosia2 Loc: Cleveland Ohio

I would say it wasn’t necessary for Clinton to be involved. Trump had so many alphabet agencies following him around he could’ve said it was the man in the moon. Just a little dig by trump again to blame somebody who had nothing to do with it while trying to portray his own innocence.
Trump’s days are now numbered.
He’s starting to look like a rat in a corner.

Blade_Runner Loc: DARK SIDE OF THE MOON

Durham’s Jaw-Dropping Revelation

One characteristic of Russiagate bombshells is that the mainstream press simply doesn’t cover them. That stands in contrast to the breathless coverage given to the original investigations, even as they never delivered the promised goods.

So it is with the latest jaw-dropping revelation from the Durham investigation. Special Counsel John Durham, of course, is scrutinizing the origins of the Obama administration’s Trump/Russia probe — a probe that holdover officials at the FBI and other government national-security agencies extended into the Trump administration, even as Donald Trump was the sitting president of the United States and, at least nominally, the chief executive to whom those agencies answered.

In a court submission last week, Durham alleged that a tech executive, who was supposed to be helping the government combat cyber threats, used his privileged access to Internet data — specifically, domain name system (DNS) traffic between servers — to mine contacts between Russia and facilities connected to Donald Trump. The information, Durham says, was taken out of context and distorted to suggest that Trump might be a clandestine agent of Vladimir Putin’s regime. Alarmingly, some of the Internet traffic mined in early 2017 was generated by the Executive Office of the President — the White House. That is, the tech executive, who has been identified as Rodney Joffe, was monitoring then-President Trump, trying to portray him as Putin’s mole.

In other words: He was spying on the president of the United States with the aim of harming his ability to govern the country.

Joffe was a Clinton supporter who was hoping to land a big national-security post if Hillary Clinton were elected president in 2016. Joffe and the Clinton campaign got their lawyer, Michael Sussmann, to communicate this “intelligence” about a corrupt Trump–Russia relationship to government intelligence agencies in the hopes that they would take action against Trump. Sussmann, a former Justice Department cyber-security prosecutor, was then a partner at Perkins Coie, the politically connected law firm that represented the Democratic Party and the Clinton campaign.

Last year, Durham indicted Sussmann for lying to the FBI to conceal that he was working for the Clinton campaign and Joffe when he conveyed the information to James Baker, who was then the Bureau’s top lawyer (and an old acquaintance of Sussmann’s). Last week’s revelation by Durham indicates that, even after Sussmann delivered information to the FBI during the 2016 presidential campaign, Joffe continued to scrutinize Trump-connected Internet traffic. Durham has now disclosed that he intends to prove that Sussmann delivered the skewed data to another intelligence agency — apparently, the CIA — in February 2017, after Trump was already in office. That is, Clinton campaign operatives were using privileged information and insider access to nudge the government’s intelligence and law-enforcement apparatus to spy on the sitting president.

This is outrageous, but at this point not surprising. We already knew, based on prior government disclosures and Justice Department inspector-general reports, that the FBI and Justice Department obtained national-security surveillance warrants from a secret federal court based on suspicions that Trump and his campaign were doing Putin’s bidding. That surveillance continued for more than half a year into Trump’s administration.

The Clinton campaign, we now know, played a huge role in generating the suspicions that spawned the government’s investigation, not least by commissioning the discredited “Steele Dossier,” which the FBI used to persuade the court to issue the warrants. Durham has also indicted Igor Danchenko, the principal source for funneling bogus Trump/Russia “collusion” information to Christopher Steele.

The former president has long maintained that government agencies colluded with the Clinton campaign to slander him as a Russian operative, hampering his capacity to govern and leading to the appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller, whose report ultimately cleared Trump on that score. Republicans are hoping that Durham brings about, in response, a legal Götterdämmerung.

We should be clear, though, on the state of play. Durham has not charged anyone with conspiring to defraud the government or a court. Neither Joffe nor Steele has been charged with a crime. And the only offenses for which Sussmann and Danchenko have been indicted involve lying to the FBI about who the sources of their information were; there is no allegation it was improper to provide the information — or even that the information was bogus, though there is abundant reason to believe it was at least badly misleading.

Most significantly, Durham is operating from a premise that the government, particularly the FBI, was duped by the Clinton operatives. Indeed, the one other indictment Durham has filed resulted in a slap on the wrist for an FBI lawyer, Kevin Clinesmith, whose crime was to lie to an FBI agent — in connection with the CIA’s having informed the Bureau that Carter Page, a former Trump campaign adviser, had been voluntarily providing the CIA with intelligence about Russia.

It appears, though, that government agencies, at their top hierarchies, were predisposed to believe the worst about Trump, that they were biased against him, and that they failed to view highly dubious derogatory information about him with a skeptical eye — including failing to verify it before using it in court to obtain surveillance authority. Worse, they continued to pursue investigations as if they, not the president, were charged by the Constitution with running the executive branch.

That is not a case of the government being in a Watergate-style criminal conspiracy with the Clinton campaign, but it certainly bears a family resemblance to Watergate.

All indications are that Durham’s final report will be damning — and, if the pattern holds, ignored by all the same people in the media who promoted Russiagate for years. Even if few people ever face legal jeopardy for this, there ought to be political repercussions as well as serious thought given to preventing similar abuses in the future.


Durham Report: Clinton Campaign Paid to Infiltrate Trump Tower, White House Servers

A filing from Justice Department special counsel John Durham says Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign paid a technology company to infiltrate Trump Tower servers, and later the White House, Fox News reports.

Durham in a motion filed Feb. 11 said the purpose of the surreptitious intrusion was to establish a "narrative" of collusion between then-Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and Russia.

Durham, appointed by then-Attorney General William Barr to lead a review into the Russia investigation, made the claim in his investigation that brought charges against an FBI attorney and former Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussman, who is currently charged with making a false statement to a federal agent.

In a section of the filing titled "Factual Background," Durham claims that Sussman "had assembled and conveyed the allegations to the FBI on behalf of at least two specific clients, including a technology executive (Tech Executive 1) at a U.S.-based internet company (Internet Company 1) and the Clinton campaign."

Durham's filing said the "billing records reflect" that Sussman "repeatedly billed the Clinton Campaign for his work on the Russian Bank-1 allegations," referencing fake white papers assembled by Sussman to indicate a connection between Trump and a Russian bank.

The filing also revealed that Sussman and the tech executive met and communicated with liberal activist lawyer Marc Elias.

"Tech Executive-1 also enlisted the assistance of researchers at a U.S.-based university who were receiving and analyzing large amounts of Internet data in connection with a pending federal government cybersecurity research contract."

"Tech Executive-1 tasked these researchers to mine Internet data to establish 'an inference' and 'narrative' tying then-candidate Trump to Russia," Durham stated.

Durham further claims that the internet company that Tech Executive-1 worked for "had come to access and maintain dedicated servers" for the president's executive office.

"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 filing reads.

Trump, responding to the news, issued a statement claiming that the latest bombshell provided "indisputable evidence" that his campaign was spied on by Clinton in order to "develop a completely fabricated connection to Russia."

"This is a scandal far greater in scope and magnitude than Watergate and those who were involved in and knew about this spying operation should be subject to criminal prosecution," the former president said.

Former Attorney General William Barr appointed Durham during the Trump administration to investigate the origins of the FBI's Russia probe, according to CNN.

So far, two indictments have been handed down – one on Sussman and the other on Russian analyst Igor Danchenko, a source for the 2016 Steele dossier containing collusion allegations about Trump.