The John Durham SOOPER Thread

✪ Special Counsel John Durham filed a motion in federal court in Washington, DC, on Friday alleging that Hillary Clinton’s political allies paid a contractor to spy on Donald Trump — both as a candidate, and as president — using cell phone data.

The motion was filed in the case of former Clinton Campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann, who is charged with lying to the FBI about whether he was working for the campaign when he told the FBI about a false link between Trump and Russia.

Sussmann was a partner at Perkins Coie, which often represents Democrats and which hired Fusion GPS to produce the false Russia “dossier” on then-candidate Trump, at the behest of the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee.

Durham’s filing deals with a potential conflict of interest involving Sussmann’s legal representation from Latham & Watkins LLP, which also represented others in the investigation “whose interests may conflict with those of the defendant.” These, the Techno Fog blog notes, include Perkins Coie, former Perkins Coie lawyer Marc Elias, and the Hillary Clinton campaign. If they are also charged or exposed to criminal liability, the firm might face a conflict of interest among the various defendants.

The filing then reveals that Sussmann was involved in an effort to mine data from a project run by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) at a U.S. university (identified in previous reports as Georgia Tech) to spy on Trump and his associates — at Trump Tower, at Trump’s private residence, and at the Executive Office of the Presidency once Trump took office in the White House. Their goal was to dig up damaging information that could then be used to build the “Russia collusion” narrative against Trump.

As Durham notes in the filing:

4. The Indictment also alleges that, beginning in approximately July 2016, Tech Executive-1 had worked with the defendant, a U.S. investigative firm retained by Law Firm-1 on behalf of the Clinton Campaign, numerous cyber researchers, and employees at multiple Internet companies to assemble the purported data and white papers. In connection with these efforts, Tech Executive-1 exploited his access to non-public and/or proprietary Internet data. 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. In doing so, Tech Executive-1 indicated that he was seeking to please certain “VIPs,” referring to individuals at Law Firm-1 and the Clinton Campaign.

5. The Government’s evidence at trial will also establish that among the Internet data Tech Executive-1 and his associates exploited was domain name system (“DNS”) Internet traffic pertaining to (i) a particular healthcare provider, (ii) Trump Tower, (iii) Donald Trump’s Central Park West apartment building, and (iv) the Executive Office of the President of the United States (“EOP”). (Tech Executive-1’s employer, Internet Company-1, 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 filing further explains that claims of collusion involving Trump were based on supposed hookups from these targeted sites with a Russian mobile phone provider, but failed to note that these connections were common in the U.S. and had begun in 2014 — i.e. during the Obama Administration, long before Trump.

The revelations in Durham’s filing are already being compared to Watergate, which began when Republican operatives broke into the offices of the Democratic National Committee during the 1972 presidential campaign. In this case, however, the alleged spying was not confined to the campaign but continued after the election, once Trump was already the president.

July 2016 also marks the point at which the Obama Administration launched its investigation into supposed links between Trump and Russia, after Trump joked at a press conference about Russia looking for Hillary Clinton’s missing emails.

In March 2017, after radio host Mark Levin noted evidence in the public domain that investigators had used wiretaps to eavesdrop on Trump associates, Trump claimed the government had his “wires tapped” and was attacked by the media.

Fox News quoted former Trump aides reacting to the news of Durham’s filing, claiming it vindicated their suspicions:

Former chief investigator of the Trump-Russia probe for the House Intelligence Committee under then-Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., Kash Patel, said the filing “definitively shows that the Hillary Clinton campaign directly funded and ordered its lawyers at Perkins Coie to orchestrate a criminal enterprise to fabricate a connection between President Trump and Russia.”

“Per Durham, this arrangement was put in motion in July of 2016, meaning the Hillary Clinton campaign and her lawyers masterminded the most intricate and coordinated conspiracy against Trump when he was both a candidate and later President of the United States while simultaneously perpetuating the bogus Steele Dossier hoax,” Patel told Fox News, adding that the lawyers worked to “infiltrate” Trump Tower and White House servers.

Former President Trump also issued a statement:

The latest pleading from Special Counsel Robert 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. 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. In a stronger period of time in our country, this crime would have been punishable by death. In addition, reparations should be paid to those in our country who have been damaged by this.

Sussmann has pleaded not guilty in the case.✪

✪ On Friday, Special Counsel John Durham filed with the D.C. Federal District Court a what should have been a boring conflict of interest motion, but it hid a surprise: The Clinton campaign, through Perkins Coie, spied on Trump both before and after he was president. The following is a plain English-language summary of relevant parts of the motion:

Michael Sussman was a partner at Law Firm-1 (i.e., Perkins Coie). He met with the FBI General Counsel (i.e., James Baker), and offered data and “white papers” purporting to show that Trump was communicating covertly with a Russia-based bank (i.e., Alfa-Bank). Mueller, incidentally, had to admit this was untrue.

Durham indicted Sussman because he allegedly told Baker that he was not divulging this information for a client. In fact, he was acting for at least two clients: the Clinton campaign and “Tech Executive-1” (i.e., Rodney Joffe), who worked at a “U.S.-based internet company” (i.e., Neustar Inc., a federal contractor).

As part of his work on the Clinton campaign, Sussman repeatedly met and communicated both with Joffe and with “another law partner” who was “Campaign Lawyer-1.” (I guess we can await that indictment soon….)

Beginning in July 2016, Joffe began to work with (1) Sussman, (2) an investigation firm that Perkins Coie hired for the Clinton campaign, (3) cyber researchers, and (4) “employees at multiple Internet companies” to assemble the data handed to James Baker. To do so, Joffe exploited access to private and/or proprietary internet data. He even coopted researchers at a U.S. university who were receiving lots of internet data as part of a cybersecurity research contract that was pending with the feds. (The Conservative Treehouse says the university is Georgia Tech and it was a DARPA contract.)

Durham alleges that Joffe was accessing internet traffic for “a particular healthcare provider” (speculated to be Spectrum Health), Trump Tower, Donald Trump’s Central Park West apartment building, and “the Executive Office of the President of the United States (‘EOP’).” (Emphasis mine.)

Joffe had a very specific assignment for the people working for him: He wanted them to mine internet data (and again, this was not public data) to “establish ‘an inference’ and ‘narrative’” that would tie then-candidate Trump to Russia. He told people that he was “seeking to please certain ‘VIPs,” meaning both Perkins Coie and the Hillary campaign.

Much of the motion is concerned with allegations already familiar to you from the indictment against Sussman. Thus, after talking to Baker, Sussman also talked to another government agency, telling its employees that DNS data (that is “Domain Name System” info, which is like an internet telephone directory) revealed that Trump or his team had looked up Russian contacts millions of times.

Sussman neglected to add that these DNS lookups were for Trump Tower as a whole, which is a massive business center. More importantly, when reporting about lookups from the “EOP” (that is, the White House server), Sussman didn’t mention that many of those DNS lookups went back to 2014—that is, when Obama was in the White House.

So again: Durham just let everyone know that the Hillary campaign, acting through Perkins Coie and its attorneys, engaged a tech-savvy executive to spy on Trump internet searches. This executive exploited his connections to obtain private and proprietary data (including federal government data) to review internet searches originating in Trump Tower, Trump’s home, and the White House. Moreover, this spying, which began when Trump was still a candidate, continued once he became president.

Trump, obviously, trumpeted the fact that he was right all along, as well as making clear the enormity of what happened.

Obviously, it’s nice to be proven correct. However, I agree with Conservative Treehouse that there are a few glaring problems here. Preliminarily, the obvious question is: If Rodney Joffe is spying on the office of the president, why hasn’t he been indicted?

That’s just one question, though. The real problem, which Sundance places at the head of his post, is this:

CTH begins every outline of the ongoing Durham investigation with the following disclaimer: How is John Durham going to reveal everything that is possible about the Deep State Trump targeting operation, and simultaneously handle the involvement of Robert Mueller, Andrew Weissmann and the Special Counsel team who were specifically appointed to cover it up?

The short answer is, Durham can’t. The ramifications would collapse the U.S. government; yes, all three collaborating branches.

As a consequence, some of these revelations are only valuable insofar as they will be needed by historians who look upon the scattered rubble of this once great republic and seek to explain to future generations how it all went wrong.

In other words, the Durham investigation is almost certainly just another cover-up. The Russia Hoax is a huge infection in the American body politic. It was Mueller’s responsibility, and it’s now Durham’s, to hide that infection. To that end, Durham is going to focus America’s attention on a few hangnails and scratches, in the hope it deflects us from the fact that the American political system is dying from sepsis. I would love to see Durham expose the whole festering mess, and I’d happily eat my words, but I don’t see that happening. ✪

✪ A filing by special counsel John Durham — alleging Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign paid a technology company to establish an “inference” that the Trump campaign was colluding with Russia so he could win an election — has not generated much excitement in the mainstream media.

Perhaps because the story is somewhat complex, the media has decided not to report on it? Indeed, naming all the players and their actions is a chore, if you read the few media outlets on the right that are covering it.

It’s sort of boring — until you realize the staggering implications of what’s being alleged. Durham is saying that the Democratic candidate for president in 2016 engaged in a criminal conspiracy to infiltrate the opposition’s most sensitive, compartmentalized information and tried to manipulate data and information to politically damage her opponent.

Nothing to see here. Move along.

CNN is full of stories about Donald Trump’s clogged toilet, but nothing about the Durham probe. The Washington Post is equally silent. As are The New York Times and the Associated Press.

Will these brave, courageous purveyors of truth cover the fact that Trump special prosecutor Robert Mueller was hoodwinked by these shenanigans? That Mueller was kept in the dark about the surveillance from which some of his “evidence” was obtained?

Donald Trump was livid.

Fox News:

Former President Trump reacted to the filing on Saturday evening, saying Durham’s filing “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.”

“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,” Trump said. “In a stronger period of time in our country, this crime would have been punishable by death.”

Trump added: “In addition, reparations should be paid to those in our country who have been damaged by this.”

Kash Patel, the former chief investigator of the Trump-Russia investigation for the House Intelligence Committee under former Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), told Fox News that the filing “definitively shows that the Hillary Clinton campaign directly funded and ordered its lawyers at Perkins Coie to orchestrate a criminal enterprise to fabricate a connection between President Trump and Russia.”

“Per Durham, this arrangement was put in motion in July of 2016, meaning the Hillary Clinton campaign and her lawyers masterminded the most intricate and coordinated conspiracy against Trump when he was both a candidate and later President of the United States while simultaneously perpetuating the bogus Steele Dossier hoax,” Patel said.

Republicans can do nothing as long as they’re in the minority. And even if they were to hold hearings after regaining the majority to try to get to the bottom of this swamp, it still wouldn’t be news.

For Democrats, it simply never happened, because it won’t be reported. This is especially true as long as Trump clogging up the White House toilet is repeated again and again as “breaking news.” ✪

✪ Former President Donald Trump reacted Saturday to allegations that Hillary Clinton operatives paid a contractor to spy on him using cell phone data during the 2016 campaign and into his presidency by calling it a scandal worse than Watergate.

Durham filed a motion in federal court in Washington, DC, in connection with the prosecution of former Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann, who is charged with lying to the FBI about his role in fabricating the Russia “collusion” hoax.

The filing … reveals that Sussmann was involved in an effort to mine data from a project run by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) at a U.S. university (identified in previous reports as Georgia Tech) to spy on Trump and his associates — at Trump Tower, at Trump’s private residence, and at the Executive Office of the Presidency once Trump took office in the White House. Their goal was to dig up damaging information that could then be used to build the “Russia collusion” narrative against Trump.

Trump reacted in a statement by implying that the Clinton operatives had committed treason:

The latest pleading from Special Counsel Robert 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. 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. In a stronger period of time in our country, this crime would have been punishable by death. In addition, reparations should be paid to those in our country who have been damaged by this.

In Watergate, Richard Nixon’s associates were caught breaking into the offices of the Democratic National Committee during the 1972 presidential campaign. In this case, the alleged spying continued beyond the campaign and into Trump’s presidency.

When Trump claimed in early 2017 that his “wires” had been “tapped” at Trump Tower, he was mocked by the media. ✪

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