Post by the Scribe on Feb 17, 2022 7:18:33 GMT
Business Insider
What you need to know about the John Durham filing that Trumpworld is fuming over
www.yahoo.com/news/trumps-latest-claims-clinton-campaign-172726669.html
Sonam Sheth
Tue, February 15, 2022, 10:27 AM
Former President Donald Trump
Then-President Donald Trump speaks in the Diplomatic Room of the White House on Thanksgiving on November 26, 2020 in Washington, DC.Erin Schaff/Getty Images
Trumpworld erupted over a new court filing from the special counsel John Durham.
They said the filing contains definitive proof that Democrats illegally spied on Trump in 2016 and 2017.
The filing does not allege espionage. It does claim that a Clinton-linked lawyer obtained non-public data from the White House and Trump's servers.
www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/02/15/heres-why-trump-once-again-is-claiming-spying-by-democrats/
The right-wing media sphere erupted this week over a legal filing from the special counsel John Durham, who is investigating the origins of the FBI's Russia probe, that former President Donald Trump and his allies said presented definitive proof that his political opponents illegally "spied" on him.
Trump declared in a statement that the filing provided "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," adding that such conduct "would have been punishable by death" in a "stronger period of time in this country."
www.businessinsider.com/trump-clinton-operatives-alleged-infiltration-once-punishable-by-death-2022-2?utm_medium=referral&utm_source=yahoo.com
Trump's claim that such activity would have at any time in American history been "punishable by death" is overblown, since the only crime Durham has accused anyone of committing is lying to the FBI. No one involved in the investigation has been charged with illegally spying on the Trump campaign or White House, or with a capital crime.
But the special counsel's investigation has in the past uncovered evidence of a connection between a lawyer with connections to the Clinton campaign named Michael Sussmann and a technology executive who Durham claims "exploited" internet data legally gathered from the White House and Trump Tower. Friday's filing also suggests that Sussman exaggerated evidence of a connection between Trump and Russia in meetings with law enforcement agencies, and lied about the capacity in which he was doing it.
Sussmann was charged last year with lying to the FBI while trying to get it to investigate an allegation that the Trump campaign used a secret email server to communicate with Russia's Alfa Bank during the 2016 campaign. The FBI has not uncovered any evidence of such a connection.
www.businessinsider.com/durham-indicts-perkins-coie-lawyer-false-statements-fbi-2021-9?utm_medium=referral&utm_source=yahoo.com
Sussmann has denied any wrongdoing and in a separate response said Durham's filing "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."
ecf.dcd.uscourts.gov/doc1/04519052327
What the Durham filing actually says
Durham's Friday filing contains almost no new information. It's not an indictment, meaning that no new criminal conduct was alleged. Instead, it relates to a conflict-of-interest matter in Durham's ongoing case against Sussmann, who worked at the law firm Perkins Coie, which represents the Democratic National Committee.
Durham's Friday filing said there's a potential conflict because the law firm representing Sussmann, Latham Watkins, previously represented Perkins Coie and the lawyer Marc Elias, who testified before Durham's grand jury.
www.law360.com/articles/1458876/ex-clinton-atty-elias-testified-to-sussmann-grand-jury
It also details a February 2017 meeting in which Sussmann flagged to the CIA that internet data he had obtained suggested someone using a Russian-made smartphone was connecting to White House and Trump Tower networks. The New York Times reported on this meeting last year.
www.nytimes.com/2021/10/01/us/politics/trump-alfa-bank-indictment.html
The filing says Sussmann got the data from an unnamed technology executive who Durham said "exploited" DNS traffic to gauge if there was a link between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives during the 2016 election.
Multiple media outlets have reported that the executive is Rodney Joffe, who works at the American tech company Neustar.
www.cnn.com/2021/09/30/politics/durham-subpoenas-probe-russia-fbi-sussman/index.html
www.nytimes.com/2022/02/14/us/politics/durham-sussmann-trump-russia.html
Durham's filing said some of the internet data that was mined was connected to two Trump buildings in New York City, the executive office of the president (EOP), and an unrelated Michigan hospital company that had also interacted with the Trump server.
It added that Joffe had access to this data because his employer had a set of "dedicated servers" for the White House as part of a "sensitive arrangement" in which it provided DNS resolution services to the White House.
DNS services like the one offered by Neustar essentially "monitor your traffic in the event that you might be sent to a malicious site," Karim Hijazi, the CEO of the cybersecurity firm Prevailion and a former intelligence community contractor, told Insider. "They'll stop the traffic, limit it, or redirect it to somewhere safe. So by definition, if you're using a service like Neustar's, your activity is being monitored because that's what you're buying."
What Durham outlined doesn't amount to domestic political espionage
As Durham pointed out later in the filing, these DNS lookups started as early as 2014, when Barack Obama was in office, and continued until early 2017.
Lawyers for one of the researchers who worked with Joffe highlighted that timeline in a statement to The Times: "The cybersecurity researchers were investigating malware in the White House, not spying on the Trump campaign, and to our knowledge all of the data they used was nonprivate DNS data from before Trump took office."
A spokesperson for Joffe told NBC News that "contrary to the allegations in this recent filing," he had legal access to the DNS data under a contract that allowed Neustar to comb through the data, including from the White House, to look for security threats.
www.nbcnews.com/politics/justice-department/tech-exec-used-access-white-house-computers-look-dirt-trump-says-speci-rcna16123
"As a result of the [Russian government's] hacks of EOP and DNC servers in 2015 and 2016, respectively, there were serious and legitimate national security concerns about Russian attempts to infiltrate the 2016 election," the spokesperson continued. "Upon identifying DNS queries from Russian-made Yota phones in proximity to the Trump campaign and the EOP, respected cyber-security 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."
The Washington Post reported that internet providers frequently let third parties collect DNS lookups because the information can be helpful for tracking bad actors.
www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/02/14/why-trump-is-once-again-claiming-that-he-was-spied-upon-2016/
Durham's filing noted that the lookups took place on a broader scale as well.
According to the filing, Sussmann claimed the 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."
But "the more complete data" that Joffe and his associates gathered "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 US-based IP addresses," the filing said. Fewer than 1,000 of those lookups came from IP addresses affiliated with Trump Tower, it added.
In this case, the information Durham laid out raises questions about the ethics of Joffe using the data his company had legal access to for purposes that went beyond the scope of what the firm was hired to do. But there is no evidence presented by Durham saying that someone illegally accessed the data, and Durham doesn't accuse anyone of breaking the law by hacking or spying.
That doesn't mean he won't bring more serious charges down the line related to Democratic efforts to establish a Trump-Russia link, or that Sussmann and his source didn't behave unethically. It just means that Friday's filing doesn't lay out any such efforts that would constitute what Trump has implied is treasonous conduct punishable by death.
www.businessinsider.com/trump-clinton-operatives-alleged-infiltration-once-punishable-by-death-2022-2?utm_medium=referral&utm_source=yahoo.com
Read the original article on Business Insider
www.businessinsider.com/trump-durham-filing-illegal-spying-allegation-misses-the-mark-2022-2
What you need to know about the John Durham filing that Trumpworld is fuming over
www.yahoo.com/news/trumps-latest-claims-clinton-campaign-172726669.html
Sonam Sheth
Tue, February 15, 2022, 10:27 AM
Former President Donald Trump
Then-President Donald Trump speaks in the Diplomatic Room of the White House on Thanksgiving on November 26, 2020 in Washington, DC.Erin Schaff/Getty Images
Trumpworld erupted over a new court filing from the special counsel John Durham.
They said the filing contains definitive proof that Democrats illegally spied on Trump in 2016 and 2017.
The filing does not allege espionage. It does claim that a Clinton-linked lawyer obtained non-public data from the White House and Trump's servers.
www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/02/15/heres-why-trump-once-again-is-claiming-spying-by-democrats/
The right-wing media sphere erupted this week over a legal filing from the special counsel John Durham, who is investigating the origins of the FBI's Russia probe, that former President Donald Trump and his allies said presented definitive proof that his political opponents illegally "spied" on him.
Trump declared in a statement that the filing provided "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," adding that such conduct "would have been punishable by death" in a "stronger period of time in this country."
www.businessinsider.com/trump-clinton-operatives-alleged-infiltration-once-punishable-by-death-2022-2?utm_medium=referral&utm_source=yahoo.com
Trump's claim that such activity would have at any time in American history been "punishable by death" is overblown, since the only crime Durham has accused anyone of committing is lying to the FBI. No one involved in the investigation has been charged with illegally spying on the Trump campaign or White House, or with a capital crime.
But the special counsel's investigation has in the past uncovered evidence of a connection between a lawyer with connections to the Clinton campaign named Michael Sussmann and a technology executive who Durham claims "exploited" internet data legally gathered from the White House and Trump Tower. Friday's filing also suggests that Sussman exaggerated evidence of a connection between Trump and Russia in meetings with law enforcement agencies, and lied about the capacity in which he was doing it.
Sussmann was charged last year with lying to the FBI while trying to get it to investigate an allegation that the Trump campaign used a secret email server to communicate with Russia's Alfa Bank during the 2016 campaign. The FBI has not uncovered any evidence of such a connection.
www.businessinsider.com/durham-indicts-perkins-coie-lawyer-false-statements-fbi-2021-9?utm_medium=referral&utm_source=yahoo.com
Sussmann has denied any wrongdoing and in a separate response said Durham's filing "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."
ecf.dcd.uscourts.gov/doc1/04519052327
What the Durham filing actually says
Durham's Friday filing contains almost no new information. It's not an indictment, meaning that no new criminal conduct was alleged. Instead, it relates to a conflict-of-interest matter in Durham's ongoing case against Sussmann, who worked at the law firm Perkins Coie, which represents the Democratic National Committee.
Durham's Friday filing said there's a potential conflict because the law firm representing Sussmann, Latham Watkins, previously represented Perkins Coie and the lawyer Marc Elias, who testified before Durham's grand jury.
www.law360.com/articles/1458876/ex-clinton-atty-elias-testified-to-sussmann-grand-jury
It also details a February 2017 meeting in which Sussmann flagged to the CIA that internet data he had obtained suggested someone using a Russian-made smartphone was connecting to White House and Trump Tower networks. The New York Times reported on this meeting last year.
www.nytimes.com/2021/10/01/us/politics/trump-alfa-bank-indictment.html
The filing says Sussmann got the data from an unnamed technology executive who Durham said "exploited" DNS traffic to gauge if there was a link between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives during the 2016 election.
Multiple media outlets have reported that the executive is Rodney Joffe, who works at the American tech company Neustar.
www.cnn.com/2021/09/30/politics/durham-subpoenas-probe-russia-fbi-sussman/index.html
www.nytimes.com/2022/02/14/us/politics/durham-sussmann-trump-russia.html
Durham's filing said some of the internet data that was mined was connected to two Trump buildings in New York City, the executive office of the president (EOP), and an unrelated Michigan hospital company that had also interacted with the Trump server.
It added that Joffe had access to this data because his employer had a set of "dedicated servers" for the White House as part of a "sensitive arrangement" in which it provided DNS resolution services to the White House.
DNS services like the one offered by Neustar essentially "monitor your traffic in the event that you might be sent to a malicious site," Karim Hijazi, the CEO of the cybersecurity firm Prevailion and a former intelligence community contractor, told Insider. "They'll stop the traffic, limit it, or redirect it to somewhere safe. So by definition, if you're using a service like Neustar's, your activity is being monitored because that's what you're buying."
What Durham outlined doesn't amount to domestic political espionage
As Durham pointed out later in the filing, these DNS lookups started as early as 2014, when Barack Obama was in office, and continued until early 2017.
Lawyers for one of the researchers who worked with Joffe highlighted that timeline in a statement to The Times: "The cybersecurity researchers were investigating malware in the White House, not spying on the Trump campaign, and to our knowledge all of the data they used was nonprivate DNS data from before Trump took office."
A spokesperson for Joffe told NBC News that "contrary to the allegations in this recent filing," he had legal access to the DNS data under a contract that allowed Neustar to comb through the data, including from the White House, to look for security threats.
www.nbcnews.com/politics/justice-department/tech-exec-used-access-white-house-computers-look-dirt-trump-says-speci-rcna16123
"As a result of the [Russian government's] hacks of EOP and DNC servers in 2015 and 2016, respectively, there were serious and legitimate national security concerns about Russian attempts to infiltrate the 2016 election," the spokesperson continued. "Upon identifying DNS queries from Russian-made Yota phones in proximity to the Trump campaign and the EOP, respected cyber-security 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."
The Washington Post reported that internet providers frequently let third parties collect DNS lookups because the information can be helpful for tracking bad actors.
www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/02/14/why-trump-is-once-again-claiming-that-he-was-spied-upon-2016/
Durham's filing noted that the lookups took place on a broader scale as well.
According to the filing, Sussmann claimed the 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."
But "the more complete data" that Joffe and his associates gathered "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 US-based IP addresses," the filing said. Fewer than 1,000 of those lookups came from IP addresses affiliated with Trump Tower, it added.
In this case, the information Durham laid out raises questions about the ethics of Joffe using the data his company had legal access to for purposes that went beyond the scope of what the firm was hired to do. But there is no evidence presented by Durham saying that someone illegally accessed the data, and Durham doesn't accuse anyone of breaking the law by hacking or spying.
That doesn't mean he won't bring more serious charges down the line related to Democratic efforts to establish a Trump-Russia link, or that Sussmann and his source didn't behave unethically. It just means that Friday's filing doesn't lay out any such efforts that would constitute what Trump has implied is treasonous conduct punishable by death.
www.businessinsider.com/trump-clinton-operatives-alleged-infiltration-once-punishable-by-death-2022-2?utm_medium=referral&utm_source=yahoo.com
Read the original article on Business Insider
www.businessinsider.com/trump-durham-filing-illegal-spying-allegation-misses-the-mark-2022-2
