News over the weekend that Hillary Clinton’s campaign paid technology experts to infiltrate the servers at Trump Towers and later at the White House to dig up dirt on former President Donald Trump was a game-changer by anyone’s standards. This development boosts the credibility of Special Counsel John Durham’s investigation from conspiracy theory territory to reality.
Durham’s motion, filed late Friday evening, established the extraordinary lengths that Hillary Clinton and her deep state cronies were willing to go to destroy Donald Trump. Fox News broke the story on Saturday.
We’ve known since his September indictment on one count of lying to the FBI that Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussman, a partner at Washington, D.C. law firm Perkins, Coie, had approached then-FBI General Counsel James Baker in September 2016 with data he said tied Trump to Russia. He denied he was working on behalf of a client when in reality, he was working for the Clinton campaign and “Tech Executive-1.”
What we’ve learned from Durham’s new motion (below) is that Sussman met with the CIA in February 2017 to offer them an updated set of data showing alleged links between Trump and Russia. This data had been obtained by Tech Executive-1 from private servers — including the White House servers. And, acting on behalf of his embittered client, Hillary Clinton, he requested a prompt investigation.
“Tech Executive-1” is tech expert Rodney Joffe. At the time of Sussmann’s indictment, The New York Post wrote that Joffe had founded “UltraDNS Corp., the first cloud-based company to develop and market the ‘domain name’ services that translate numerical internet addresses into memorable names that can be typed into a browser.” This company was bought by Neustar Inc. in 2006 for $62 million. Joffe stayed on with Neustar as their security chief technology officer, retiring in 2021. It was his position with Neustar that provided Joffe the opportunity to tap the White House servers.
Joffe holds numerous patents and has won many awards including the coveted FBI Director’s Award for Cybersecurity in 2013, according to the Post. All of this is to establish that this man knew his way around tech.
He also had an agenda. Durham’s motion says that the highly partisan Joffe was hoping for a position in the future President Hillary Clinton administration. On his Monday night show, Fox News’ Tucker Carlson said Joffe had been promised a role as a top cybersecurity officer in the U.S. government.
The motion states: “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 [Georgia Tech] 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.” (Emphasis added.)
Sussmann presented the CIA (referred to in the filing as “Agency-2”) with “an updated set of allegations – including the Russian Bank-1 [Alpha Bank] data.”
This included “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 … 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.”
The Durham team found these “suspicious lookups” were “far from rare.”
“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.
The data “… 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.”
“In his meeting with Agency-2 employees, the defendant also made a substantially similar false statement as he had made to the FBI General Counsel. In particular, the defendant asserted that he was not representing a particular client in conveying the above allegations.”
So, Sussmann took cherry-picked, improperly (or possibly illegally) obtained information found on private servers to the CIA’s general counsel. He called for a prompt investigation into Trump’s ties with Russia, hoping that this “sensitive data” would prove that he was in Putin’s pocket.
In the end, it was determined that the lookups were common and “began at least as early 2014” – during the Obama administration.
Sussmann is accused in the motion of “withholding information” from the CIA and making a “substantially similar false statement” that he’d made with the FBI.
Sussmann and Joffe were far from the only ones willing to do Clinton’s dirty work. The scope of this scandal is vast and involves hundreds of useful idiots who were happy to carry water for this depraved woman.
A stunning paragraph in Durham’s September indictment document of Sussmann explains the whole story and shows that those involved knew exactly what they were doing.
Paragraph 23, section k includes an email written by one of the researchers who had been hired to find some evidence – any evidence – of a link between Trump and the Russian Bank (Alfa Bank). After an exhaustive and unproductive search, he wrote: “The only thing that drive[s] us at this point is that we just do not like [Trump].”
He essentially tells the others this is ridiculous and effectively asks, “what are we doing?”
Paragraph 23, Section k states: “On or about August 22, 2016, Researcher-1 emailed the aforementioned recipients, expressing continued doubt regarding the Russian Bank-1 allegations that SUSSMANN would later convey to the FBI, and raising concerns about the researchers’ bias against Trump.” (Emphasis added by Durham team.)
Let[’]s for a moment think of the best case scenario, where we are able to show (somehow) that DNS [] communication exists between Trump and R[ussia]. How do we plan to defend against the criticism that this is not spoofed [] traffic we are observing? There is no answer to that. Let’s assume again that they are not smart enough to refute our “best case” scenario. [Tech Executive-I], you do realize that we will have to expose every trick we have in our bag to even make a very weak association? Let[’]s all reflect upon that for a moment. Sorry folks, but unless we get combine netflow and DNS traffic collected at critical points between suspect organizations, we cannot technically make any claims that would fly public scrutiny.
[…]
The only thing that drive[s] us at this point is that we just do not like [Trump]. This will not fly in eyes of public scrutiny. Folks, I am afraid we have tunnel vision. Time to regroup?
Let that last paragraph sink in.
Team Clinton had researchers tying themselves into knots trying to come up with a way to discredit Trump. They simply could not find anything.
Yet one month later, on September 19, 2016, Clinton’s lawyer, Perkins Coie partner Michael Sussmann, meets with then-top FBI lawyer James Baker to “present documents purporting to show secret internet communications” about Donald Trump’s connection to the Alfa Bank. Several months later, he makes the same claims to the CIA.
And now that there was some “evidence,” the media was able to report on it. Sussman was delighted to provide them with this “scoop.”