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Durham probe reveals Clinton campaign paid operatives to fabricate Trump-Russia scam

by mcardinal

Chris Lange, FISM News

 

A filing from Special Counsel John Durham indicates that lawyers for the Clinton campaign paid a technology company to “infiltrate” servers belonging to Trump Tower, and later the White House, in an effort to establish an “inference” and “narrative” to present to government agencies linking Donald Trump to Russia.

The information was revealed in Durham’s Feb. 11 motion that focused on possible conflicts of interest concerning the representation of former Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussman, who is facing charges that he made a false statement to a federal agent. 

According to the indictment, Sussman, who has pleaded “not guilty,” told then-FBI General Counsel James Baker in September of 2016, less than two months before the presidential election, that he was not doing work “for any client” when he presented the agency with “purported data and ‘white papers’ that allegedly demonstrated a covert communications channel” between the Trump Organization and Kremlin-associated Alfa Bank. Durham’s filing, however, revealed that Sussman “had assembled and conveyed the allegations to the FBI on behalf of at least two specific clients, including a technology executive (Tech Executive 1) at a U.S.-based internet company (Internet Company 1) and the Clinton campaign.” 

The filing further shows that Sussmann’s billing records indicate that he “repeatedly billed the Clinton Campaign for his work on the Russian Bank-1 allegations” and, further, that Sussman and the Tech Executive were communicating with the Clinton campaign’s General Counsel, whom sources told Fox News is Mark Elias, an attorney at the law firm Perkins Coie. The filing further states that the tech executive, Sussman, a U.S. investigative firm working for the Clinton campaign, and multiple internet company employees and cyber researchers worked together to “assemble the purported data and white papers.”

According to the document, Tech Executive One used his unique access to private Internet data and the help of researchers at a U.S.-based university to analyze “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,” writes Durham. “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.”

Durham also said information collected in his probe will show that Hillary Clinton operatives acquired Internet traffic data related to “(i) a particular healthcare provider, (ii) Trump Tower, (iii) Donald Trump’s Central Park West apartment building, and (iv) the Executive Office of the President of the United States (EOP).”

The filing goes on to reveal that the Internet company Tech Executive-1 worked for “had come to access and maintain dedicated servers” for the Executive Office of the President as “part of a sensitive arrangement whereby it provided DNS resolution services to the EOP,” according to the document. Durham writes, “Tech Executive-1 and his associates exploited this arrangement by mining the EOP’s DNS traffic and other data for the purpose of gathering derogatory information about Donald Trump.” Durham also writes that Sussmann provided “an updated set of allegations” including the Russian bank data, and additional allegations relating to Trump “to a second agency of the U.S. government” in 2017.

The allegations, according to Durham, “relied, in part, on the 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, and the aforementioned healthcare provider.”  

According to the filing, Sussman met with the second U.S. government agency to present “data which he claimed reflected purportedly suspicious DNS lookups by these entities of internet protocol (IP) addresses affiliated with a Russian mobile phone provider,” claiming that the searches “demonstrated 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,” Durham wrote.

Former President Donald Trump reacted to the filing on Saturday evening, saying Durham’s filing “provides 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.” 

Trump then implied that Hillary Clinton should be prosecuted for her role in the scandal:

This is a scandal far greater in scope and magnitude than Watergate and those who were involved in and knew about this spying operation should be subject to criminal prosecution. In a stronger period of time in our country, this crime would have been punishable by death.

The filing confirms Trump’s claims that the Clinton campaign spied on him leading up to the 2016 election – allegations for which he was ruthlessly mocked by the media.

Following the release of the Durham filing, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) pointed to the fact that then-Clinton senior policy advisor Jake Sullivan, who now serves as the Biden administration’s National Security Advisor, is implicated in the scandal. 

Kash Patel, former chief investigator of the Trump-Russia probe for the House Intelligence Committee under then-Rep. Devin Nunes, said the filing “definitively shows that the Hillary Clinton campaign directly funded and ordered its lawyers at Perkins Coie to orchestrate a criminal enterprise to fabricate a connection between President Trump and Russia” in a statement.

“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 News, adding that the lawyers worked to “infiltrate” Trump Tower and White House servers. 

Patel added that Sussmann relayed the “false narrative” to U.S. government agencies “in the hopes of having them launch investigations of President Trump.” 

Sussmann’s indictment is the third to come out of Durham’s probe.

Russian national Igor Danchenko pleaded not guilty to 2021 charges that he lied about the source of information he provided to Steele for his “dossier” on Trump. Durham in 2020 charged former FBI lawyer Keven Clinesmith with making a false statement for altering an email about Trump campaign aide Carter Page, saying he was “not a source” for another government agency when Page himself said he was a CIA source. The DOJ used Clinesmith’s false assertion to submit its third renewal application to eavesdrop on Page in 2017.

Former Attorney General Bill Barr appointed Durham, then the U.S. attorney from Connecticut, in 2019 to investigate the origins of Crossfire Hurricane, the FBI’s original Trump-Russia probe which began in July of 2016. The Durham appointment followed Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s determination that there was no evidence supporting the fabricated coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia in 2016. 

News of the latest Durham filing prompted Twitter users to point out that the probe into Hillary Clinton’s original accusations against Trump seem to point to her own culpability in orchestrating an elaborate scheme to interfere with a presidential election.

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