in the next 60-90 days we will see new indictments of a handful of people (including the tech executive) and of at least one organization (the tech company) for a conspiracy to make false statements to the federal government in order to harm a political opponent. Sussman will be hit with additional indictments.

the indictments will expressly mention Perkins Coie, Marc Elias, Hillary's campaign, and the Brookings Institute. there is a small chance, about 10%, that Perkins Coie will be indicted. There is a 5% chance that Fiona Hill will be mentioned.

Marc Elias apparently testified rather than take the 5th so either he's a bold man pushing all-in or he has agreed to a cooperation agreement. I think he's cooperating.

no federal government employees will be indicted.

there is an outside chance, 10% or so, that Durham will also indict people/orgs for abusing their access to classified data bases. you may recall that Admiral Rogers apparently shut down that access, met with Trump's team at Trump Towers, and the campaign moved out of the Tower the next day.

this is just a prediction.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4959408&forum_id=2#43906864)

==

Durham: Clinton allies spied on the Executive Office of the President

And - will we see a Rodney Joffe indictment?

Techno Fog

6 hr ago

135

111

The Michael Sussmann case is heating up.

On February 11, 2022, Durham filed the Government’s Motion to Inquire into Potential Conflicts of Interest in the Michael Sussmann case. Read it here. As you might recall, Sussmann was charged with giving false statements to then-FBI General Counsel James Baker regarding the interests he was representing in pushing to the FBI the Alfa Bank/Trump Organization hoax. More background information on the Sussmann indictment can be found here.

The basis for the motion is that Sussmann’s current counsel, Latham & Watkins LLP (Latham) might have a conflict of interest because Latham previously represented Perkins Coie and Mark Elias “in this investigation.” It is alleged that Latham “likely possesses confidential knowledge about Perkins Coie’s role in, and views concerning, Sussmann’s past activities.” (Cleaned up.)

There might also be a conflict because Latham was representing both the Clinton Campaign and Hillary for America in the Special Counsel’s investigation. Durham observes that Latham’s duties to these former clients “might cause its interests to diverge from those of [Sussmann].”

Why might there be a conflict?

Because Durham might offer evidence at trial he obtained from the Clinton Campaign and Hillary for America.

We previously discussed how Rodney Joffe (identified as Tech Executive-1 in the Sussmann indictment and in the latest filing discussing the conflict) exploited proprietary – and perhaps classified – data provided by DARPA to further their own political attacks, and how that might result in charges. It was later confirmed that two former DARPA employees have given grand jury testimony, so it appears Durham is following this track.

I provide that background because of what we just learned. Durham also divulged, to an extent, that contractors and tech experts (meaning Joffe and his cohorts) – those same people involved in the Alfa Bank hoax – essentially spied on President Trump.

According to Durham, Joffe and his associates exploited internet data from “the Executive Office of the President of the United States” to further their own political agenda. They had come to possess this data as part of a “sensitive arrangement” with the U.S. government. As Durham explains:

Joffe and his associates manipulated this information to further a conspiracy theory that Trump and those in Trump’s orbit were continuing their secret backchannels with the Russians. This was repackaged with the Alfa Bank hoax and given to Sussmann, who then laundered it to the CIA on February 9, 2017. Sussmann alleged to the CIA that the data showed “that Trump and/or his associates were using supposedly rare, Russian-made wireless phones in the vicinity of the White House and other locations.” Durham “identified no support for these allegations.”

One can’t help ask why Joffe (via Sussmann) risked legal exposure to continue to push false Trump-Russia allegations before and after the 2016 election. First to the FBI in 2016 then to the CIA in 2017. It seems that Joffe was desperate, and his desperation only increased after Trump’s election.

The source of Joffe’s desperation? It’s speculation at this point, but perhaps it goes to the origins of the purported Russia/DNC hack. To revise a previous question we have asked:

What if Crowdstrike was a patsy, there to unknowingly reach false conclusions of a “Russian hack” based on fraudulent information provided to them by Rodney Joffe and Perkins Coie and the DNC/Hillary Campaign?

We don’t have an answer to that question - yet. Maybe we never will. But if anything, it seems likely that we will see an indictment of Rodney Joffe.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4959408&forum_id=2#43957213)

“I believe that there is no possible way that you can be spying and monitoring computers at the White House unless you have the help of the U.S. government.”

https://rumble.com/vuski6-ric-grenell-reacts-to-bombshell-report-that-trump-was-spied-on-as-president.html

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4959408&forum_id=2#43958153)

'Per Durham, this arrangement was put in motion in July of 2016, meaning 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 while simultaneously perpetuating the bogus Steele Dossier hoax,' Patel told Fox.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4959408&forum_id=2#43958681)

Admiral Rogers appears to be the only one who acted to shut down spying on Trump.

A lot of people had to know that spying was going on.

Presumably that's why on the last day or so of his presidency Obama called together key players and formally instructed them that "whatever is done must be done by the book." To wash his hands.

I think Susan Rice knew too.

Probably Comey.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4959408&forum_id=2#43959913)

==

CONSPIRACY THEORIES

YOU’LL NEVER BELIEVE IT BUT HILLARY CLINTON DID NOT, IN FACT, SPY ON TRUMP’S WHITE HOUSE

In less breaking news, Donald Trump remains a moron.

BY BESS LEVIN

FEBRUARY 15, 2022

Image may contain Face Human Person Laughing Crowd Audience and Speech

DIGITAL COLORIZATION BY BEN PARK; BY SCOTT OLSON (TRUMP), JUSTIN SULLIVAN (CLINTON), BOTH FROM GETTY IMAGES.

Imagine, if you will, that a special counsel appointed by the federal government declared in a court filing that he had evidence that a major political figure—let’s call her Hillary Clinton—had paid spies to infiltrate the White House and run surveillance on Donald Trump in order to frame him as a foreign asset. The whole thing would be a big flipping deal! One for which there would be major, major consequences and far-reaching fallout. The country, nay, the world would be gripped by the story, and for good reason—a former candidate for office spying on the president? In the White House? That would be crazy! And you’re right—it would be crazy if something like that had actually happened. Which it didn’t, though unfortunately for reason, logic, and the concept of the truth, Donald Trump, Fox News, and various other deranged conservatives cannot be convinced of that.

Yes, as you’ve probably heard, on Saturday the former president released a statement claiming “Special Counsel Robert Durham”—he meant to say “John Durham” but was apparently too angry to keep his Johns and his Roberts straight—had uncovered “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,” a “scandal far greater in scope and magnitude than Watergate” for which Trump suggested those involved should be executed but would settle for criminal prosecution. The problem? Neither Robert Durham nor John Durham nor anyone else for that matter had actually provided evidence of any such crime, let alone even suggested it.

Per The New York Times:

ADVERTISEMENT

When John H. Durham, the Trump-era special counsel investigating the inquiry into Russia’s 2016 election interference, filed a pretrial motion on Friday night, he slipped in a few extra sentences that set off a furor among right-wing outlets about purported spying on former President Donald J. Trump. But the entire narrative appeared to be mostly wrong or old news—the latest example of the challenge created by a barrage of similar conspiracy theories from Mr. Trump and his allies.

The latest example began with the motion Mr. Durham filed in a case he has brought against Michael A. Sussmann, a cybersecurity lawyer with links to the Democratic Party. The prosecutor has accused Mr. Sussmann of lying during a September 2016 meeting with an F.B.I. official about Mr. Trump’s possible links to Russia. The filing was ostensibly about potential conflicts of interest. But it also recounted a meeting at which Mr. Sussmann had presented other suspicions to the government. In February 2017, Mr. Sussmann told the C.I.A. about odd internet data suggesting that someone using a Russian-made smartphone may have been connecting to networks at Trump Tower and the White House, among other places.

According to the filing, Sussmann had gotten his information from technology executive Rodney Joffe, whose company, Neustar, had performed server-related work for the White House. In Durham’s estimation, Joffe and his colleagues had “exploited this arrangement by mining [certain records] for the purpose of gathering derogatory information about Donald Trump.” Fox News took this line from Durham’s filing and ran with it, claiming Durham had said he had found that the Clinton campaign had paid the technology company to “infiltrate” White House servers. The lack of similarly baseless claims from the mainstream media led Trump to declare “The press refuses to even mention the major crime that took place. This in itself is a scandal, the fact that a story so big, so powerful and so important for the future of our nation is getting zero coverage from LameStream, is being talked about all over the world.”

WATCH NOW:

Presidential Historian Reviews Presidents in Film & TV, from 'Lincoln' to 'The Comey Rule'

Strangely, there wasn’t a lot of fact-checking going on down at Mar-a-Lago, but the actual reason that the “LameStream” media hadn’t covered the story was likely because, as the Times notes: (1) Sussmann’s conversation with the CIA had already been reported last October (2) Durham never once said anything about the White House being “infiltrate[d]” (3) the special counsel also never claimed the Clinton campaign had paid Joffe’s company and (4) perhaps most importantly, “the filing never said the White House data that came under scrutiny was from the Trump era.” In fact, lawyers for the data scientist who helped develop the data analysis in question, say this happened during— wait for it—Barack Obama’s presidency.

“What Trump and some news outlets are saying is wrong,” attorneys Jody Westby and Mark Rasch told 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.”

In other words, Trump and company got the whole thing hilariously, mortifyingly incorrect. But fear not: We’re sure they’ll issue a lengthy correction and heartfelt apology to the people whose reputations they impugned—and the ones Trump suggested should be put to death—in no time.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/02/donald-trump-hillary-clinton-white-house-spying

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4959408&forum_id=2#43978975)

the best current statement of what Durham has is this:

https://theconservativetreehouse.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/Durham-Joffe-2-1.jpg

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4959408&forum_id=2#43979104)

i assume that Hillary will use this to argue that Joffe was a rogue badguy.

===

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2022/02/17/the_checkered_past_of_the_fbi_computer_contractor_who_spied_on_trump_816761.html

The Checkered Past of the FBI Cyber Contractor Who 'Spied' on Trump

By Paul Sperry, RealClearInvestigations

February 17, 2022

Messaging Malware and Mobile Anti-Abuse Working Group

Long before FBI computer contractor and Clinton operative Rodney L. Joffe allegedly trolled Internet traffic for dirt on President Trump, he mined direct-marketing contact lists for the names and addresses of unwitting Americans to target in a promotional scam involving a grandfather clock.

Not just any clock, mind you, but a “world famous Bentley IX” model, according to postcards his companies mailed out to millions of people in the late 1980s claiming they'd won the clock in a contest they never entered. There was just one hitch: the lucky winners had to send $69.19 in shipping fees to redeem their supposedly five-foot mahogany prize.

Tens of thousands of folks forked over the fees, only to discover the grandfather clock that arrived was nothing as advertised. It was really just a table-top version made of particle board and plastic and worth less than $10. Some assembly was required.

The scheme generated thousands of complaints, sparking federal and state investigations. Joffe and his then-California partner, Linda M. Carella, were eyed by federal postal authorities and several state attorneys general for allegedly operating a multi-state mail-order scheme. Joffe settled several state lawsuits by agreeing to refund hundreds of thousands of dollars mainly to elderly victims, according to several published reports at the time.

Joffe and his attorney did not respond to requests for comment. But in a phone interview, Carella told RealClearInvestigations that Joffe ran the operation. “I was just the secretary, the receptionist,” Carella, 76, said from her home in Florida, where she is now retired. She did say she picked up the returned postcards and checks from mailboxes.

Carella said she quit after the investigation: “I said I don’t want anything more to do with this … I have not seen Rodney since then.” But Joffe pressed on with his direct-mail marketing business before packing up for Arizona a few years later. Federal and state tax lien records reveal Joffe -- who also sent out mailers for skin care and other beauty products -- owed more than $110,000 in back taxes on his property in Los Angeles in 1995.

St. Joseph News-Press (Mo.), July 1988

A 1988 consumer article in the St. Joseph (Mo.) News-Press citing Joffe’s role in the alleged grandfather clock scam.

St. Joseph News-Press

Joffe’s checkered past now has national security ramifications after the South African-born computer expert was outed as a key player in Special Counsel John Durham’s ongoing Russiagate probe. To date he has not been charged with a crime. But in a September indictment of former Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann, and a court filing last week, Durham has suggested that Joffe (identified as “Tech Executive-1”) was at the center of an effort to monitor President Trump’s communications and then share the information with Clinton associates.

Former prosecutor and assistant FBI director Chris Swecker said the credibility issues that cropped up from Joffe’s early career raise questions about how he managed to pass an FBI personal background check and obtain the government’s highest security clearances and win several bids for sensitive federal contracts, although he noted that such background checks were often ridiculed in the bureau as “a joke.” In addition, the federal mail-order probe involving Joffe’s companies might not have raised serious red flags since the case was opened decades earlier and was settled without any charges or judgments against Joffe.

The FBI declined comment.

Another part of the answer as to why Joffe’s past remained buried may involve how successfully he appears to have reinvented himself during the 1990s.

He relocated then to Phoenix from Los Angeles and changed the name of his mass-marketing firm American Computer Group to “Whitehat Data Services.” Instead of targeting consumers, he developed a reputation as a cyber-security expert and, ironically, a champion of consumers battling abusive direct-marketers and spammers.

Perhaps it was a sign of his redemption. But Joffe soon joined the board of PlasmaNet Inc., a marketing network that until recently operated FreeLotto.com, an online sweepstakes game. PlasmaNet has had to pay millions of dollars in fines for deceptive advertising. Echoing the grandfather clock scam, PlasmaNet led consumers to believe they won free prizes when in fact they had to pay $14.99 a month to claim them. RCI has learned that FreeLotto.com was a customer of UltraDNS, an Internet resolution company founded by Joffe. Business incorporation records show Joffe remains a PlasmaNet director.

A decade later, Joffe moved to Washington, where he eventually landed lucrative security-related contracts with the FBI and Pentagon requiring top secret clearance.

In 2006, Joffe joined Neustar Inc., a Beltway computer contractor that, among other things, secures and maintains Internet servers for federal agencies, including the White House. This high-level position gave the alleged former grandfather clock wheedler access to a proprietary archive of Internet traffic records – both public and nonpublic – known as "DNS logs." These logs reveal the back-and-forth pinging that computers and cellphones generate when they communicate with Internet servers, including ones transmitting emails.

It also put him in the same orbit with political VIPs. Joffe started advising not only FBI brass but White House officials, including President Obama, on cybersecurity matters. By 2016, his access to proprietary internet logs became of interest to operatives for the Hillary Clinton campaign, who appear to have offered him a plum job in a Clinton presidency for help on an opposition-research project against Donald Trump. (Shortly after Clinton's loss to Trump in November 2016, Joffe said in an email: "I was tentatively offered the top [cybersecurity] job by the Democrats when it looked like they'd win. I definitely would not take the job under Trump.”)

One of those operatives was ex-Clinton attorney Sussmann, indicted by Durham last fall in connection with allegations of lying about his work on the project for the campaign.

In the indictment and recent court filings that widen the case, Durham accused Joffe of exploiting Neustar’s nonpublic data to monitor Trump’s Internet activities even after the 2016 election – through early 2017. He shared the sensitive information with Sussmann, who in turn gave it to the CIA. The prosecutor said Joffe mined data from Trump Tower, Trump’s Central Park West apartment building and even the Executive Office of the President “for the purpose of gathering derogatory information about Donald Trump.”

According to court papers, Joffe cherry-picked data to create a "narrative” that Trump was secretly communicating with the Kremlin as part of the Clinton campaign’s effort to make the GOP nominee look like he was compromised by Russia, a foreign adversary. Before the election, Joffe led a team of computer researchers vying for a major Pentagon contract to link Trump to Russian Alfa Bank through private DNS logs. He handed off their findings to Sussmann who fed the data to the FBI to drive an investigation and bad press against Trump.

“The data was highly manipulated,” said Robert Graham of Atlanta-based Errata Security, an independent cyberforensics expert who examined the logs and debunked the link at the time. He suspects Joffe and his biased crew set out to invent a connection between Trump and Russia.

“A link between Trump and Alfa bank wasn’t something they accidentally found, it was one of the many thousands of links they looked for,” he added. “The purpose was to smear Trump.”

Though Graham as a Clinton supporter shares Joffe’s disdain for Trump, he said the suspicious server data were easily explained as innocent spam traffic. Graham noted that Trump didn’t even have control over the domain in question: trump-email.com. It was created by a hotel marketing firm that inserted Trump’s name in the domain.

“Hints of a Trump-Alfa connection have always been the dishonesty of those who collected the data,” Graham said.

Manos Antonakakis: Joffe's lead researcher said in an email that “the only thing that drives us is that we just don’t like [Trump].”

gatech.edu

Even though Joffe encouraged Sussmann to present the server data to the FBI as possible evidence of foreign espionage, he privately confessed to his reseachers in an August 2016 email obtained by Durham that the host for the trump-email.com domain “is a legitimate valid [marketing] company” – Boca Raton, Fla.-based Cendyn. “We can ignore it,” Joffe said, "together with others that seem to be part of the marketing world.” He urged his team to keep searching for data that would “give the base of a very useful narrative."

In previous statements, lawyers for Joffe and the researchers he recruited have said they had no political ax to grind but were monitoring Trump to track a credible national security threat related to Russia. But Joffe’s lead researcher – Manos Antonakakis of the Georgia Institute of Technology – revealed in one email obtained by Durham that “the only thing that drives us is that we just don’t like [Trump].” Other emails, released this week by Judicial Watch through a Freedom of Information Act request, show that Antonakakis believed even the most salacious – and debunked – rumors in the Clinton-commissioned Steele dossier.

Recent court filings indicate Durham and his prosecutors aren’t buying their "concerned patriot" defense. Some see a crime in exploiting high-security government contracts for political purposes.

“In my opinion, Joffe is someone who should be indicted and probably will be,” former FBI official Swecker said in an RCI interview.

“As I see it,” Swecker explained, “Joffe, who worked for Neustar at the time, had a contract with either the Executive Office of the President or the [presidential] transition team, and he used information gleaned from his contractual relationship to provide that private information to the Clinton campaign. Depending on the actual facts on the ground, it could constitute mail or wire fraud, and if it were an actual government contract, perhaps fraud against the government – that is, the Executive Office of the President.”

Added Swecker: “There could be other criminal statutes [invoked] as well" -- including conspiracy -- "but to me, the key issue is his contractual relationship. He also engaged researchers at Georgia Tech who were working on a government contract and being paid by the U.S. government.”

In a public statement, a spokesman for Joffe argued that the then-Neustar executive had authority to mine the White House data: "Under the terms of the contract, the data could be accessed to identify and analyze any security breaches or threats,” including concerns about Russian interference in the election.

Joffe Internet Firms in Durham’s Sights

While not charged with a crime, Joffe, despite being subpoenaed, does not appear to be actively cooperating with Durham’s investigation. He does not show up on a discovery document recently filed by Durham listing people interviewed by investigators or the grand jury. Asked if Joffe has received a target letter, his attorney Steven Tyrrell did not answer. On Twitter, Joffe has removed all his tweets dating back to 2014.

Neustar

Durham’s office is looking closely at Washington-based Neustar, and firms Joffe founded while working there. Joffe has created more than two dozen startups across several states, some of which have no employees, revenue or even offices.

Neustar

Sources told RCI that Durham’s office is looking closely at Washington-based Neustar – which Joffe left in September following Sussmann’s indictment – and two Internet firms Joffe operated while still working there: Packet Forensics and Vostrom Ventures, both of which are controlled by Vostrom Holdings Inc. and also have offices in the greater Washington area.

Durham’s investigators have interviewed several current and former employees at all three companies, and obtained thousands of pages of subpoenaed documents from them, recent court filings reveal. In September 2016, Sussmann billed Neustar for “communications regarding confidential project,” a reference to Joffe's mission to find a “secret hotline” between Trump and the Kremlin via Alfa Bank's servers. That Sussmann billed Neustar for this work suggests a level of involvement by the company that has not been explained.

A month earlier, Joffe had tasked employees at his two small Internet startups to search for any Internet data (including private DNS holdings) reflecting potential connections or communications between Trump or his associates and Russia. Joffe emailed them a five-page dossier – the “Trump Associates List” – to guide their queries. As RCI first reported, the list included highly personal information on Trump campaign advisers Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, George Papadopoulos and Carter Page. Steve Bannon appears to have been added to the list later as another target, the emails released by Judicial Watch reveal.

Packet Forensics reportedly landed a recent Pentagon contract to manage a large chunk of Internet domains owned by the military. The bid was awarded the day Joe Biden was inaugurated president. The massive cyberspace will allow Joffe’s firm to set up dedicated digital infrastructure, including servers and software, to comb through private Internet traffic for the purported purpose of monitoring suspicious activity.

Joffe’s company also sells wiretapping equipment that allows federal authorities to spy on private web-browsing through fake Internet security certificates, instead of real ones that websites employ to verify secure connections. Once installed, Packet's device lets agents see an individual's online transactions without obtaining a warrant.

Over the past decade, Packet Forensics has landed almost $40 million in federal contracts, according to publicly disclosed contract information. Joffe’s firm counts the FBI and the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, among its customers. The contracts generally involve cybersecurity. Joffe monitors the computers of government officials for threats, including as it turns out, even investigators in the office of Justice Department watchdog Michael Horowitz, recent court filings reveal.

State incorporation records show that Joffe has created more than two dozen startups across 20 states, some of which have no employees, revenue or even offices.

'Friends in High Places'

Joffe’s second-act success in government seems rooted in a simple fact: “He has friends in high places,” proferred a career Justice Department official. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, pointed out that Joffe personally advised President Obama on cybersecurity and other issues, and was also close to former FBI Director James Comey.

Secret Service entrance logs reveal Joffe visited the White House several times during the Obama administration. And in 2013, Comey gave Joffe an award recognizing his work helping agents investigate a cybersecurity case. Sources told RCI that Joffe has also worked as an FBI informant on various cybersecurity cases opened by the bureau over roughly the past 15 years.

Sussmann’s attorneys have pointed to that acclaim to explain why Sussmann trusted the findings from Joffe he shared with the FBI. “Far from being a stranger to the FBI, [Joffe] was someone with whom the FBI had a long-standing professional relationship of trust and who was one of the world’s leading experts regarding the kinds of information that Mr. Sussmann provided to the FBI,” Sussmann’s lead defense lawyer Sean Berkowitz of Latham & Watkins said in a court filing last year.

A recent court paper filed by Durham in the Sussmann case suggests he may be looking into Joffe’s relationship with the FBI. The document, which discloses information to Sussmann’s lawyers as part of the discovery process, reveals that a criminal grand jury in D.C. has obtained “approximately 226 emails from within the FBI’s holding involving a company founded by [Joffe].” Durham does not identify the company, but sources told RCI it is Packet Forensics. The 226 emails were generated in 2016 alone. All told, the FBI has a total of approximately 17,000 emails that reference Joffe’s company – and those are just from a search of the bureau’s unclassified files.

Durham said that his investigators are “also conducting other searches and communicating with other government agencies regarding [Joffe’s] companies.”

The 67-year-old Joffe is commonly described as an award-winning and highly respected computer expert. But colleagues say he is more of an operator.

Graham said he’s “a quite average” computer programmer and network analyst. “He’s more of an executive than an operations guy.”

In a 2015 promotional video by Neustar, Joffe disclosed that his real gift is recruiting other experts, making phone calls to people in high places, and providing the resources needed for projects.

"I’m not the smart guy in the room. I’m really the dumb guy that carries the bags – but fortunately in those bags, I have a lot of money," Joffe said with a grin. "So my role has really been carrying the bags of money to help whenever I can when folks in the [cyber-security] community want things. I’m really happy to be able to do that kind of thing."

"So those are the things I really do,” he added. "I’m not really good at actually understanding spam and finding that. I’m not any of those things. I couldn’t have an intelligent conversation about the techniques and methods used.”

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4959408&forum_id=2#43982427)

Who Are Those ‘Techies’ Who Spied on Trump?

‘Benevolent posse’ or partisans for Hillary Clinton? John Durham has the answer.

By Kimberley A. Strassel

Feb. 17, 2022 6:36 pm ET

The usual suspects are already circling the wagons around the techie “experts” who spied on Donald Trump. If their defense feels tired, it’s because we’ve been through it before. It’s Christopher Steele all over again.

Special counsel John Durham destroyed the last shreds of Mr. Steele’s credibility last year, proving that the paid-for-hire spook had relied on fabrications for the infamous dossier the Federal Bureau of Investigation used in its Trump probe. The special counsel is now dismantling that other big claim of Trump-Russia “collusion”—the Alfa Bank narrative. The wonder is that the press and others are stepping up for another humiliation—when the disturbing actions of the creators of the Alfa narrative are already so easy to document, and in their own words.

The Alfa story came to life in October 2016, when Franklin Foer of Slate was gulled into writing that a largely anonymous “benevolent posse” of “computer scientists,” “spurred by a sense of shared idealism,” had discovered data showing secret communications between the Trump Organization and Russia-based Alfa Bank. Cybersecurity professionals instantly ridiculed the data as nonsense, and the FBI dismissed it, but the liberal media kept it alive. In October 2018, the New Yorker’s Dexter Filkins devoted a 7,600-word panegyric to the “self-appointed guardians of the Internet” who continued to flog the claims.

In recent court filings, Mr. Durham explains that these tech experts—including Rodney Joffe, formerly of Neustar, Inc.—were in cahoots with the same crew as Mr. Steele, using the same playbook. They worked with Democratic lawyers at Perkins Coie and opposition-research firm Fusion GPS, with the goal of dredging up “derogatory” information on Mr. Trump that would please “VIPs” in the Clinton campaign. The techies did so, the Durham indictment says, in part by mining protected internet data that had been supplied to a government contractor—allowing them to snoop on the White House as well as Trump Tower and Mr. Trump’s Manhattan apartment

Mr. Joffe’s legal team continues to insist he is “apolitical” and wasn’t aware his lawyer, Michael Sussmann, was billing Team Clinton. (A grand jury impaneled by Mr. Durham indicted Mr. Sussmann in September on a charge of making a false statement to the FBI. Mr. Sussmann pleaded not guilty.) The press initially tried to ignore the story, then resorted to parsing the definition of “spying,” justifying the accused, and trashing Mr. Durham.

The problem for the last-gaspers is that the techies they seek to defend have already put too much on the record that suggests their real concern was a President Trump, not national security. Start with the company that the “apolitical” Mr. Joffe kept. One of his colleagues involved in the project and referenced in the Sussmann indictment is Paul Vixie, whose Twitter feed sports a long record of liberal, anti-Trump sentiments. Another member of the circle—who took on the job of publishing the Joffe data—is L. Jean Camp, an Indiana University computer-science professor and Clinton supporter who called on Americans to join the “resistance” against Mr. Trump. So much for the media’s description of a gang of politically innocent nerds.

The researchers claim that by July 2016 they were alarmed by the security implications of their data, mined from government information. Yet they didn’t go to the government. Mr. Joffe instead went to Democrats—namely Mr. Sussmann, the Perkins Coie lawyer who in the summer of 2016 was regularly identified in the press as an attorney for the Democratic National Committee. The Sussmann indictment notes a meeting Mr. Joffe had with Marc Elias, the Perkins Coie attorney for the Clinton campaign. And a deposition by a Fusion GPS staffer as part of continuing Alfa Bank litigation says Mr. Joffe attended a meeting with Peter Fritsch, a co-founder of Fusion GPS. Was he still confused about the partisan nature of this project?

He certainly couldn’t have been two years later. By that point, the roles Perkins Coie and Fusion played in funneling information to the FBI for Clinton were well known, while Fusion had gone on to team up with former Democratic staffer Dan Jones to keep advancing the claims. Mr. Joffe sat for that October 2018 New Yorker piece that pushed the Alfa claims, anonymously calling himself “Max” and admitting in the piece that he’d continued to help that effort long after the election, providing Mr. Jones’s team with 37 million internet records to examine. (A deposition in the Alfa litigation identified Mr. Joffe as Max.)

Here’s the most revealing bit: “Max” also explained to the New Yorker how vitally important it was in 2016 to make sure the threat his team discovered was “known before the election.” Which was why he and his lawyer first went with their information to the press. The Sussmann indictment says Mr. Sussmann tried peddling the data to the New York Times in late August 2016. He didn’t approach the FBI until the middle of September. Mr. Joffe’s spokesperson declined to comment.

The defenders of Mr. Steele’s dossier also spent years insisting that the oppo researcher was nonpartisan and his work beyond reproach—only to be humiliated. The media is stepping out again at its peril. There’s plenty to show an ugly tale already—and Mr. Durham will likely have plenty more to come.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4959408&forum_id=2#43999868)