Turns out the real threat to 'norms' was the Clinton campaign
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
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.
Where could such a thing happen? Maybe Brazil or Equatorial Guinea? Well, we now know it happened in these United States.
The latest from special counsel John Durham is that a tech executive connected to the Hillary Clinton campaign mined Internet contacts between Russia and the entities connected to Donald Trump in a search for material to try, as Durham put it in a court filing last week, to "establish 'an inference' and 'narrative' tying then-candidate Trump to Russia."
Durham's probe is a righteous effort to get to the bottom of a matter that deranged American politics for two solid years but has been derided or ignored by the mainstream press, with baleful consequences.
Russiagate did more than its share to undermine the norm that losing campaigns should accept the result of free-and-fair elections and to erode confidence in institutions at the highest levels of our government. One way to minimize the harm is to insist on accountability. The people who were most invested in Russiagate for the longest, though, are least interested in revisiting its origins, let alone in apologizing for their own credulousness or malice.
Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign allegedly paid an internet company to "infiltrate" servers in order to link former President Donald Trump to Russia in 2016.
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.
One can only guess that he succeeded. According to Durham, Joffe "exploited his access to non-public and/or proprietary Internet data," and the university researchers he tapped "were receiving and analyzing large amounts of Internet data in connection with a pending federal government cybersecurity research contract."
Joffe analyzed so-called domain name system Internet traffic connected to Trump Tower and Trump's Central Park West apartment building. Shockingly, the data effort continued after Trump was inaugurated. 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."
Meanwhile, Sussmann used the deceptive work product from all of this sleuthing to try to convince the FBI and apparently the CIA that Trump was colluding with Russia. (Durham has indicted Sussmann for lying to the FBI to try to hide his connection to the Clinton campaign.)
Democrats are calling for Clinton to be investigated for her role in Russiagate.Getty Images
Durham pointedly refers to what Sussmann was hawking as "purported data." This operation was of a piece with the spurious Steele dossier that helped launch the FBI probe of the Trump campaign that morphed into the Mueller investigation. Or, to use Durham's terms, purported data drove purported investigations and ungodly amounts of purported journalism, all building toward purported collusion that eventually, under the weight of facts and logic, came to absolutely nothing.
If anyone involved in this investigative and journalistic fiasco is embarrassed by it, they haven't shown it. If any of them thinks it's bad practice to spy on a campaign and a newly elected president to use the resulting information to try to gull US government agencies, they haven't said so. If any of them are thinking "never again," they won't admit it.
Until they do, maybe they should temper their preachiness about threats to our system and norms.
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First the media ignored the story and now they are fighting it.
I’m proud to stand with the deplorables against that wicked witch
They took three days to come up with a carefully coordinated propaganda response, and hoped to avoid even acknowledging it.
Would love to see a midsummer "bombshell" from Durham.
It’s always amused me that the people who are the most obsessed with attacking trump as a liar and corrupt are those who shill the most vociferously for Hillary Clinton.
www.rawstory.com /marcy-wheeler-john-durham/
'The Durham investigation is in real trouble': Legal expert untangles the right wing's latest conspiracy theory
Travis Gettys 5-6 minutes 2/15/2022
The Donald Trump-appointed special counsel filed a misleading motion that has lit up Fox News and other conservative outlets, but a national security expert threw cold water on their narrative.
Fox News has been hyping special counsel John Durham's filing, which they have inaccurately declared as evidence that Hillary Clinton's campaign had paid technology executive Rodney Joffe to "infiltrate" a White House server, and Trump has called for anyone involved to be executed -- but attorney Marcy Wheeler explained how they had gotten their facts wrong to MSNBC's "Morning Joe."
"One of the things [Durham] revealed in that, which I have heard from other people is this claim that Rodney Joffe was accessing data from the White House," Wheeler said. "All of that data precedes Trump's inauguration, so you have Trump out there calling for these people to be put to death when really what happened is Rodney Joffe was trying to keep [then-president] Barack Obama safe from hackers. That's all it is. That's why Trump wants these people killed, Durham knows that."
"Durham knows that this data precedes Trump," she continued. "He didn't include it in the filing so he has everyone worked up on Fox News. John Ratcliffe, you showed him earlier. Kash Patel is the source of many of these false claims. They were both witnesses to John Durham and Kash Patel has known about this allegation going back to December of 2017 because he's the one who asked [cybersecurity lawyer] Michael Sussman about it. Michael Sussman was honest about it back in December 2017 and Kash Patel when he was an Intelligence Committee staffer, when he was working in the White House, when he was the chief of staff for [the Department of Defense] he did nothing about this because he knew that all Rodney Joffe was doing was trying to keep the White House safe from hackers. That's what this is about."
Durham has accused Sussman of lying to FBI investigators during a September 2016 meeting about Trump's possible links to Russia, and this latest filing centers around the tech executive's investigation of rumors that computers at Trump Tower were communicating with servers at Russia's Alfa Bank.
"The Durham investigation is in real trouble," Wheeler said. "One of the allegations in the indictment is that Sussman was coordinating with the Hillary [Clinton] campaign on these Alfa Bank allegations back in October. Sussman was, like, name the people. In October, Durham said, 'I don't have any people.' In November, he first interviewed a Hillary staffer, he hadn't actually investigated this. We also learned recently that even though Durham and [then-attorney general] Bill Barr flew to Italy to get the phones from Joseph Mifsud , if you remember, is that Italian who was talking to George Papadopoulos. He never walked across DOJ to get the phones from James Baker, who is the single witness to this conversation with Michael Sussman. He didn't find out that DOJ [inspector general] had two of the phones until January. Then, after he revealed that he had these phones that he should have looked for four years ago, he then had to disclose that he had been told about one of the phones back in 2018 but he didn't remember it anymore."
"That's not the only thing that Durham didn't do before charging Sussman," Wheeler added.
She listed other flaws in Durham's investigation, and she expects Sussman to file a motion to dismiss the indictment against him -- and she believes the special counsel filed his pretrial motion last week to get ahead of that move.
"Probably what last Friday's stunt was about for Durham was an attempt to preempt that, an attempt to pretend that this investigation isn't kind of post-hoc a discovery of things," Wheeler said. "For example, he didn't investigate what the FBI's relationship is with Rodney Joffe before he charged Michael Sussman. He only pulled the communications when Sussman said, 'Why don't you find out what kind of relationship the FBI has with Joffe.' He discovered there were thousands of communications, so Durham is very close to position where Sussman is going to have the opportunity to say, 'You didn't do an investigation before you charged me.'"
"A week before he probably is going to have to do that this stunt comes out and you have all of these people who were witnesses, who fed these conspiracy theories to Durham on the front end," Wheeler concluded, "who then go on Fox News and make false claims about it. That's what the story is, Kash Patel garbage in, Kash Patel garbage out, and Trump threatening to kill people as a result."
Good old Morning Joe! He's still good for laughs. He and his sex partner are still mad at Trump for talking about them both showing up at his home right after they had plastic surgery.
It's a good thing we use this "fact check" group, otherwise you wouldn't be able to use the likes of "the raw story." Lol
A tech executive “exploited” his access to computer data at the Trump White House to find “derogatory information” about fmr. President Trump, a special counsel appointed during the Trump administration says.
Does this mean that Hillary won't be running in 2024?
Whore Hillary can run, but she can't hide.
Please, the Democrats are already anointing her in the holy waters of liberalism. It is her damn turn! If it wasn't for Trump, Russia, and the Deplorables she would have been President in 2016.
They believe that to the bottom of their damn ugly souls. Nothing will ever dissuade them, no matter how much evidence is provided.
All they will do is scream, "But Trruuummmmppppp!!!!!!" and expect the argument to be over.
That's funny because she was never much of a liberal.
Well, that's because "liberalism" keeps moving farther and farther left. When her husband was elected, she absolutely represented the far left of the Democratic Party. By 2008, she was the "moderate" and Obama was the left wing of the party.
The ancient Greek philosophers believed that democracy would evolve to the point where radicalism would emerge and destroy it. In our case it all came from a handful of professors who left the university of Frankfurt during the reign of the Nazis. The damn Nazis let them get away!
The spying I really want to see is the Hotel room of Hillary on election night as she drowned in whiskey. The stories coming from that night are legend.
BTW Durham's 13 page filing can be found here:
Why does the right-wing fear Clinton so much? Could it be that Putin fears her too?