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“[John] Durham, the former U.S. attorney in Connecticut, was appointed in 2019 by then-Attorney General William Barr to investigate possible misconduct within the U.S. government as it investigated Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and any ties to the Trump campaign. One of the three people he’s charged is Michael Sussmann, a prominent cybersecurity lawyer who represented the Clinton campaign during the 2016 election…
“[According to a court filing last Friday] Sussmann relied on data gathered by a technology executive he worked with whose company, according to Durham, helped maintain servers for the White House. The executive, Rodney Joffe, enlisted the help of computer researchers who were already analyzing large amounts of internet data through a federal government cybersecurity research contract, tasking them with mining information to establish an ‘inference’ tying Trump to Russia, the court filing says. The researchers exploited domain name system internet traffic at locations including Trump Tower, Trump’s Central Park West apartment building and the Executive Office of the President, or EOP, Durham said.” AP News
Here’s our previous coverage of Sussman’s indictment. The Flip Side
The right argues that Durham’s investigation has uncovered serious misconduct.
“According to Durham, a tech executive named Rodney Joffe engaged in the information operation against Trump and his campaign. He allegedly coordinated with Michael Sussmann, a lawyer for the Clinton campaign, and his highly connected law firm, Perkins Coie, that did work for both the Clinton campaign and the Democratic Party…
“Durham notes that Joffe also joined up with an investigative firm that Perkins Coie hired on behalf of the Clinton campaign, numerous cyber researchers, employees at various internet companies and researchers at a US-based university. He sought, he said, to please VIPs in both the Clinton campaign and Perkins Coie…
“Joffe took advantage of his company’s ‘sensitive arrangement’ to provide services to the executive office of the president ‘for the purpose of gathering derogatory information about Donald Trump.’… From the perspective of several years ago, it’s the stuff of an implausible political thriller or a conspiratorial YouTube account. One presidential campaign spies on another as part of a broad effort to get government agencies to pick up the baton and launch a high-stakes investigation of the new president that hampers his first years in office and consumes massive public attention.”
Rich Lowry, New York Post
“The Russians were a legitimate 2016 electoral threat, but Mr. Joffe’s statement doesn’t explain how or why he cooperated with Clinton representatives. If the contractor’s job was to monitor security threats to the U.S., then the responsibility was to report any suspicious activity to the government—immediately and in a classified manner… We doubt government contracts include: ‘In case of threats, first call Democrats.’…
“Mr. Joffe’s statement raises more questions than it answers. Who in government provided the contract that gave him such access to White House records? Why did he cooperate with Clinton campaign operatives? How did he come to hire the same lawyer who worked for the Clinton campaign?”
Editorial Board, Wall Street Journal
“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…
“Durham is operating from a premise that the government, particularly the FBI, was duped by the Clinton operatives… 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.”
The Editors, National Review
The left argues that there is little substance behind Durham’s allegations.
The left argues that there is little substance behind Durham’s allegations.
"Internet service providers often allow third parties to collect domain name lookups because the information is useful for tracking bad actors on the Internet. If, for example, there are suddenly a number of lookups to we11sfargo.com, with ones replacing the Ls in the domain name, that might suggest some effort to redirect traffic away from the bank to some spoof site…
“[Some journalists] elevated questions about the ethics of digging through collected DNS records to investigate something that was probably outside of any agreement governing what the data was being collected for. But that doesn’t mean 1) that any laws were violated or 2) that this constitutes ‘hacking.’… If it’s evidence of Trump being ‘spied on,’ as the former president has also claimed in recent days, it’s a very broad sort of spying — collecting all of the domain-name lookups from a physical location or a network.”
Philip Bump, Washington Post
"It's not clear if anything in this narrative was illegal. The Georgia Tech folks were using public DNS data to help a military research organization analyze a 2015 Russian malware attack on the White House’s network, and nobody suggests they were acting illegally. Durham does suggest that Joffe obtained the White House DNS logs surreptitiously, which would be illegal, but Joffe claims it was an open part of the malware investigation. And all of this took place during the Obama presidency anyway, so nothing from any DNS searches of the White House could have anything to do with Trump. And Joffe has never been charged with anything.”
Kevin Drum, Jabberwocking
"Lawyers for Joffe and David Dagon, a Georgia Institute of Technology data scientist who helped develop the research Sussmann shared with the CIA, have challenged Durham’s representations. Dagon’s attorneys note that the DNS logs examined related to the Russian phone service came from the time of Barack Obama’s presidency. That appears credible, given that Sussmann’s meeting with the CIA was only three weeks after Trump had taken office. And they told the New York Times that Dagon and associates were using ‘nonprivate’ DNS data and ‘were investigating malware in the White House, not spying on the Trump campaign.’…
“[Those] who are part of the investigation should not be taken at their word. But it’s clear from Durham’s own filing that there is no evidence that Trump and White House servers were infiltrated… Putting together all the allegations and suggestions—a tech exec possibly tied to the Clinton campaign ‘exploiting’ data related to the White House and Trump Tower—right-wing journalists reached a dramatic conclusion: The Clintonites hacked Trump at his home (or office) and at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and spied on him. But this leap was based on cyber ignorance and possibly misinformation presented by Durham.”
David Corn, Mother Jones
“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.”
Glenn Kessler, Washington Post
