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John Durham Flip Flops On Friday - Go Figure

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Category: News & Politics

Via: john-russell • 2 years ago • 21 comments

By: Mark Sumner (Crooks and Liars)

John Durham Flip Flops On Friday - Go Figure

He dropped his "bombshell" last Friday and today he says wait I didn't mean THAT.

S E E D E D C O N T E N T

Credit: @bluegal (Composite)Like us on FacebookFollow us on TwitterBy Mark Sumner — February 18, 2022

Earlier this week, special counsel John Durham filed a new document as part of his never-ending "investigation" into the origins of the Trump-Russia investigation. That document appeared to be utterly pointless. It was a complaint about possible conflict of interest by the attorneys defending Michael Sussman from the one (1) charge that Durham has filed across the entire multiyear course of his globe-spanning effort—a potential conflict that Durham admitted could easily be resolved through negotiations with the attorneys.

But instead of negotiating, Durham filed a "motion of inquiry," the entire point of which appears to have been so that he could include this sentence: "The government's evidence at trial will also establish that among the internet data Tech Executive-1 and his associated exploited was domain name system (DNS) traffic pertaining to a particular healthcare provider, Trump Tower, Donald Trump's Central Park West apartment building, and the Executive Office of the President of the United States (EOP)."

The implications of that sentence have generated a faux scandal that is running 24/7 on Fox News and dominating other right-wing media. But now Durham himself appears to be running away from this claim.

Why Durham's latest filing confirms that Trump was never 'spied on'

The information contained in that sentence and one other inserted as "factual background" were pointedly not part of the evidence on which Sussman was indicted, and it's unclear that either was ever seen by the grand jury.

Sussman has pleaded not guilty to the single charge of lying to the FBI. On Thursday, Sussman's attorneys filed a motion to dismiss the case, accusing Durham of "extraordinary prosecutorial overreach" and saying the charge is about an incident which is "immaterial and cannot give rise to criminal liability."

On Thursday, Durham filed another motion defending his filing from earlier in the week. In this latest filing, Durham says that he included "limited additional factual detail" in that earlier motion for "valid and straightforward reasons." Durham argues that there's no reason to strike any part of his earlier motion despite how these claims "could garner media attention." He goes on to cite several cases in which evidence was admitted in spite of it being misinterpreted by the media … which may not be the great defense of this action that Durham seems to believe it to be.

But in explaining why the information was slipped in despite the CIA meeting not being the subject of any charge or connected to any claim against Sussman, Durham said this:

"… the Government included these paragraphs to apprise the Court of the factual basis for one of the potential conflicts described in the Government's Motion, namely, that a member of the defense team was working for the Executive Office of the President of the United States ("EOP") during relevant events that involved the EOP."

Since the original motion was a claim of potential conflict of interest by a member of the law firm representing Sussman, and that member worked with the White House during the term of President Barack Obama, this is a clear statement that the connection with the EOP that Durham is alleging took place before Trump took office.

Since the meeting with the CIA official took place only days after Trump took office, it never made any sense to believe otherwise. And since the data involved was only searching for DNS connections, not accessing a single byte of information exchanged, there is not—and has not been—any allegation of spying. Neither Sussman nor any of the technical advisers involved in the filing have ever faced any charge of wrongdoing related to the data they accessed.

Still, don't expect Durham's confirmation that Trump was not "spied on in the White House" to be made clear on Fox News. Or News Max. Or Epoch Times TV, whatever that is.

How these filings show Durham is working to create news, not justice

The indictment exclusively concerned a September 2016 meeting between Sussman and the FBI in which he indicated that he was not there as a representative of the Democratic Party or the Clinton campaign. Durham believes that was a lie, which is why there is an indictment.

But this new sentence relates to a meeting that Sussman had with a CIA official in February 2017, and the inclusion of "and the Executive Office of the President of the United States" was swiftly spun into a claim that the Clinton campaign "spied on Trump" after he was elected.

Speaking on Newsmax, former acting Director of National Intelligence Ric Grenell summed up the fire and fury on the right. "Durham's filing makes it clear," said Grenell, that the Clinton campaign was "infiltrating the White House, the executive office of the president. They were spying not only on the campaign of Donald Trump but Donald Trump as president."

Grenell was far from the only one. Here's Sen. Rick Scott holding a press event to claim that the Clinton campaign "actually spied on the president of the United States." Or how about Rep. Kevin McCarthy hitting up Twitter with the claim that "Democrats got caught spying, first on candidate Trump and then when he was President IN THE WHITE HOUSE."

The idea that Clinton's campaign had spied on Trump in office was enough for Trump to issue a statement declaring that "in a stronger period of time in our country, this crime would have been punishable by death" within two hours of Durham's filing. Rep. Jim Jordan hurried to agree that the death penalty was completely appropriate for this crime of … of … they'd figure that out later.

But if there's any actual scandal here, none of it is on the part of Hillary Clinton, her campaign, or even Michael Sussman.

First, there's a strong series of "coincidences" connecting the filing to the former Devin Nunes aide and eventually the chief of staff to the acting secretary of defense, Kash Patel.

In 2017, Patel questioned Sussman as part of Nunes' House investigation and asked about meetings Sussman may have had with officials outside the FBI. Sussman informed Patel of the CIA meeting, what had been shared, and the date of the meeting. Patel did nothing in response to this knowledge, which was recorded in transcripts but didn't even merit mention in Nunes' eventual report on his findings.
On Feb. 7, Patel and Donald Trump were on Epoch Times TV for an interview in which Trump said there was "a lot coming" from Durham, and that the special counsel was about to "fully expose" the truth about the Clinton campaign. "It was them and Russia. It was them and Russia, they worked with Russia," said Trump.
One week after that interview, Durham issued a pointless document in which the only new information was a sentence pointing to the meeting that Patel had attended, and the answer to the question he had asked.
Patel then tweeted out a claim that 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."
Patel then went on Fox News to talk about how Clinton's team had worked to "infiltrate" the White House.

An unnecessary document and a purposely misleading claim

Durham gave Republicans a misleading statement they could use to allege a conspiracy to spy on the White House. He did so needlessly in a document that begins by admitting, "The government has discussed these matters with the defense and believes that any potential conflicts likely could be addressed with a knowing and voluntary waiver by the defendant ..."

Durham does not indicate that he asked for that waiver, or that Sussman refused. He just filed his document, giving him an excuse to slide in the lines that had Jordan demanding the death penalty.

Durham then included in the document the claim connecting the "executive office of the president" to the information collected without making it clear that this information did not involve any sort of illegal (or even legal) "hacking," that it was restricted to DNS entries and didn't involve reading a single text or email, and that it all took place before Trump took office.

In his final response, Durham refused to take responsibility for how the claim was being used to generate a "scandal" on the right, to sway public opinion about both his investigation and earlier investigations, and continued to obscure the fact that none of this took place after Trump was in office. This is what he had to say about his own nonresponsibility for how his deliberately vague additions are being used to generate a media firestorm on the right.

"If third parties or members of the media have overstated, understated or otherwise misinterpreted facts contained in the government's motion, that does not in any way undermine the valid reasons for the government's inclusion of this information."

That's a whole lot of non mea culpa.

All of which would seem to suggest that more charges should be filed in this case. Just not against Sussman.

Republished with permission from Daily Kos.

Fox News Completely Stops Covering Hillary Spying on Trump Story After Spending All Week Attacking Media For Ignoring It

By Colby HallFeb 18th, 2022, 11:52 am 4-5 minutes 2/18/2022

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Anyone watching Fox News this week was told that Hillary Clinton’s campaign had been caught spying on former President Donald Trump . This was reported across many Fox News programs as fact, with some hosts adding exotic frills to the story. More reputable news outlets were quick to pour cold water on the assertion. Some even called out Fox News for being either stupid or willfully misinforming their viewers.

The evidence for Fox News’s breathless and repeated “worse than Watergate” claim was a late Friday filing from Special Counsel John Durham that focused on one-time Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussman .

A good example of Fox’s sensationalized coverage were these comments from Jesse Watters , made on Monday:

Durham’s documents show that Hillary Clinton hired people who hacked into Trump’s home and office computers before and during his presidency, and planted evidence that he colluded with Russia. Yeah. You heard that right. Hillary broke into a presidential candidate’s computer server and a sitting president’s computer server, spying on them. There, her hackers planted evidence, fabricated evidence connecting Trump to Russia, then fed that doctored material to the feds and the media.

Durham’s filing did not show this – at all. What’s more, as New York Times reporter Charlie Savage pointed out, the right-wing media narrative surrounding the filing was “mostly wrong or old news.” Indeed, the Times had reported on it last year.

This didn’t keep Fox News from continuing to insist a scandal was afoot. The network even had the temerity to call out the rest of the media for ignoring this alleged bombshell: Fox News media report Howard Kurtz called ou t his competitors for not covering the story, though it was never made clear what exactly the story was. Oops.

But late Thursday, the story took another turn, as Durham responded to Sussman’s filing to dismiss the case, and added some clarity to the misreporting.

Savage wrote about the new filing, saying Durham “distanced himself on Thursday from false reports by right-wing news outlets that a motion he recently filed said Hillary Clinton’s campaign had paid to spy on Trump White House servers.”

The key statement from Durham’s most recent filing reads:

If third parties or members of the media have overstated, understated or otherwise misinterpreted facts contained in the government’s motion, that does not in any way undermine the valid reasons for the government’s inclusion of this information.

That statement was read in full by Bret Baier on Special Report Thursday night in advance of a remarkably muted panel discussion . Since then, the Fox News insistence that Clinton had been caught spying on Trump has nearly completely abated. That’s a rather stunning turn from the obsessive, nearly wall-to-wall coverage this non-story received over the past week.

In the past six days, John Durham was mentioned 219 times on Fox News, according to TVEyes. But as of 11 a.m. today. his name was mentioned only once by Steve Doocy on Fox & Friends , and it was in the context of Hillary Clinton being asked a question by a reporter.

So what happened? Mediaite reached out to Fox News to ask if the network no longer felt the bombshell that Hillary Clinton spied on Trump was newsworthy, or if they no longer believe that it’s true. Fox News has not replied.

In a column published earlier this week, I asked how real journalists could compete with a network such as Fox News that was so comfortable reporting falsehoods. The fact that the network has apparently ceased covering a story that they got so unbelievably wrong, without any public statement acknowledging it, just proves the point I made in that column.

What an incredibly embarrassing moment for Fox News.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.

Professor Principal

3 seeder JohnRussell 2 years ago

The special counsel implicitly acknowledged that White House internet data he discussed, which conservative outlets have portrayed as proof of spying on the Trump White House, came from the Obama era.

WASHINGTON -- John H. Durham , the Trump-era special counsel scrutinizing the investigation into Russia's 2016 election interference, distanced himself on Thursday from false reports by right-wing news outlets that a motion he recently filed said Hillary Clinton's campaign had paid to spy on Trump White House servers.

Citing a barrage of such reports on Fox News and elsewhere based on the prosecutor's Feb. 11 filing, defense lawyers for a Democratic-linked cybersecurity lawyer, Michael Sussmann, have accused the special counsel of including unnecessary and misleading information in filings "plainly intended to politicize this case, inflame media coverage and taint the jury pool."

In a filing on Thursday, Mr. Durham defended himself , saying those accusations about his intentions were "simply not true." He said he had "valid and straightforward reasons" for including the information in the Feb. 11 filing that set off the firestorm, while disavowing responsibility for how certain news outlets had interpreted and portrayed it.

"If third parties or members of the media have overstated, understated or otherwise misinterpreted facts contained in the government's motion, that does not in any way undermine the valid reasons for the government's inclusion of this information," he wrote.

But even as he did not acknowledge any problem with how he couched his filing last week, Mr. Durham said he would make future filings under seal if they contained "information that legitimately gives rise to privacy issues or other concerns that might overcome the presumption of public access to judicial documents."

Former President Donald J. Trump has seized on the inaccurate reporting to declare that there is now "indisputable evidence" of a Clinton campaign conspiracy against him -- and to suggest that there ought to be executions. Mr. Trump, Fox News hosts and others have also criticized mainstream journalists for not covering the purported revelation.

The dispute traces back to a pretrial motion in the case Mr. Durham has brought against Mr. Sussmann accusing him of making a false statement during a September 2016 meeting with the F.B.I. where he relayed concerns about possible cyberlinks between Mr. Trump and Russia. The bureau later dismissed those as unfounded.

Mr. Durham says Mr. Sussmann falsely told the F.B.I. official he had no clients, but was really there on behalf of both the Clinton campaign and a technology executive named Rodney Joffe. Mr. Sussmann denies ever saying that, while maintaining he was only there on behalf of Mr. Joffe -- not the campaign.

Several sentences of the filing recounted a second meeting, in February 2017, where Mr. Sussmann had presented different concerns about odd internet data and Russia to the C.I.A., which came from the same cybersecurity researchers who developed the suspicions he had presented to the F.B.I.

At the C.I.A. meeting, Mr. Sussmann shared concerns about data that suggested that someone using a Russian-made smartphone may have been connecting to networks at Trump Tower and the White House, among other places.

Mr. Sussmann had obtained that information from Mr. Joffe. The court filing also stated that Mr. Joffe's company, Neustar, had helped maintain internet-related servers for the White House, and accused Mr. Joffe -- whom Mr. Durham has not charged with any crime -- and his associates of having "exploited this arrangement" by mining certain records to gather derogatory information about Mr. Trump.

In the fall, The New York Times had reported on Mr. Sussmann's C.I.A. meeting and the concerns he had relayed about the data suggesting the presence of Russian-made YotaPhones -- smartphones that are rarely seen in the United States -- in proximity to Mr. Trump and in the White House.

But over the weekend, the conservative news media treated those sentences in Mr. Durham 's filing as a new revelation while significantly embellishing what it had said. Mr. Durham , some outlets inaccurately reported, had said he had discovered that the Clinton campaign had paid Mr. Joffe's company to spy on Mr. Trump. But the campaign had not paid his company, and the filing did not say so. Some outlets also quoted Mr. Durham 's filing as using the word "infiltrate," a word it did not contain.

Most important, the coverage about purported spying on the Trump White House was premised on the idea that the White House network data involved came from when Mr. Trump was president. But Mr. Durham 's filing did not say when it was from.

Lawyers for a Georgia Institute of Technology data scientist who helped analyze the Yota data said on Monday that the data came from the Obama presidency. Mr. Sussmann's lawyers said the same in a filing on Monday night complaining about Mr. Durham 's conduct.

Mr. Durham did not directly address that basic factual dispute. But his explanation for why he included the information about the matter in the earlier filing implicitly confirmed that Mr. Sussmann had conveyed concerns about White House data that came from before Mr. Trump was president.

The purpose of the earlier filing was to ask a judge to look at potential conflicts of interest on Mr. Sussmann's legal team. Mr. Durham included those paragraphs, he wrote, in part because one of the potential conflicts was that a member of the defense had worked for the White House "during the relevant events that involved" the White House.

The defense lawyer in question is Michael Bosworth, who was a deputy White House counsel in the Obama administration.

Separately on Thursday, lawyers for Mr. Sussmann filed a pretrial motion asking a judge to dismiss the case.

They argued that even if Mr. Sussmann did falsely say at the F.B.I. meeting that he had no client -- which they deny -- that would not rise to a "material" false statement, meaning one affecting a government decision. The decision facing the F.B.I. was whether to open an investigation about the concerns he relayed at that meeting, and it would have done so regardless, they said.
Mr. Durham has said Mr. Sussmann's supposed lie was material because had the F.B.I. known that he was acting "as a paid advocate for clients with a political or business agenda," agents might have asked more questions or taken additional steps before opening an investigation.

Professor Principal

4 Kavika 2 years ago

WARNING, FLIP FLOP IN PROGRESS.

Professor Principal

4.1 Hallux replied to Kavika @4 2 years ago

Oh well, there's always masks and mandates to fall back on.

Professor Principal

5 JBB 2 years ago

Yes, because everyone can put a timeline together...

Beginning in 2014 and continuing right up to election 2016 Trump was in secret negotiations with Putin to build Trump Tower Moscow even offering Putin a half billion dollar luxury penthouse as a bribe. Of course he lied about this but Giuliani and Don Jr admitted it...

So, of course, ours and our allies' state Intelligence services noticed this and investigated. Anything less would have been malfeasance on their parts.

Professor Principal

5.1 seeder JohnRussell replied to JBB @5 2 years ago

ours and our allies' state Intelligence services noticed thus and investigated. Anything less would have been malfeasance on their parts.

You are correct.

Professor Principal

5.2 Vic Eldred replied to JBB @5 2 years ago

You mean he wanted to build a hotel in Moscow?

Holy shit! / S

Professor Principal

5.2.1 seeder JohnRussell replied to Vic Eldred @5.2 2 years ago

Trump lied about it in 2016 because he assumed it would cost him the election if the public learned he was making business dealings with Moscow. His lying about it was one of the reasons he was investigated by the FBI.

Professor Principal

5.2.2 JBB replied to Vic Eldred @5.2 2 years ago

I mean what I say. Trump has himself to blame!

Professor Guide

6 Dulay 2 years ago

Gee John, you should have seeded each of those articles independently, spread them out over a couple of days. Just in case some here miss the first one.

Professor Principal

6.1 seeder JohnRussell replied to Dulay @6 2 years ago

I am visiting a relative currently an have limited access to a pc. Seeding from my phone or tablet is kind of a pain.

Professor Principal

7 Sparty On 2 years ago

And the investigation goes on ..... bad dream for Hillary sycophants.

Bad dream!

Professor Principal

7.1 Vic Eldred replied to Sparty On @7 2 years ago

A bad dream with a rude awakening!

Professor Principal

7.1.1 seeder JohnRussell replied to Vic Eldred @7.1 2 years ago

The bad dream is that we have such an ignorant political right.

Professor Expert

7.1.2 Krishna replied to Vic Eldred @7.1 2 years ago

A bad dream with a rude awakening!

So Victor E.

I see that Hillary is also living rent free in your head as well.

Good on ya

Professor Quiet

7.1.3 Ed-NavDoc replied to Vic Eldred @7.1 2 years ago

I checked a couple of media bias fact checker sites and, oh what a surprise, Crooks & Liars is rated very left to extreme far left in favor of liberal causes and reporting that are heavily in favor of Hillary and other hard core liberals. Nothing like quoting fair and center biased reporting sources!

Professor Guide

7.1.4 Dulay replied to Vic Eldred @7.1 2 years ago

The rude awakening will come when one of y'all look up the statute of limitations for all of the alleged crimes y'all think you can prosecute Hillary Clinton for.

I asked you before and I'll ask you again, WHAT crime are you alleging that Hillary Clinton committed Vic?

Professor Expert