No, Hillary Clinton Absolutely Did Not Spy On The Trump White House
There were no wiretaps. There was no spying by anyone but the Russians. This is all horsesh*t.
by Bob Cesca
WASHINGTON, DC – Republicans just can’t quit Hillary Clinton. You may have noticed that Fox News and the Red Hats are in full freakout mode over allegations that the Hillary Clinton campaign spied on Trump. In fact, Trump’s been lying about this one for many years. You might recall when he obsessively tweeted about how he was the victim of a “wire tapp” – two p’s because of the brain worms.
The latest spying accusation emerged from a pretrial motion filed last week by special counsel John Durham, a U.S. attorney out of Connecticut, tasked by Bill Barr to investigate the Justice Department’s handling of the Trump-Russia probe. Durham is busily prosecuting his only catch, Michael Sussman, a cybersecurity lawyer and partner at Perkins Coie, with links to Clinton and the DNC. Durham’s indictment alleges that Sussman lied to the FBI back in late 2016.
Sussman, the filing says, told the CIA in early 2017, after Trump’s inauguration, that someone using Russian cellphones called YotaPhones had connected to servers at the White House and Trump Tower, among others. He did the right thing, of course, given how Russia was engaged in an unprecedented cyber-attack against the United States. If seldom-seen Russian phones were attempting to connect to the White House servers, this could mean more trouble from Moscow.
The filing also mentions “Tech Executive-1,” who happens to be Rodney Joffe, whose IT company, Neustar, was hired to maintain the White House’s data servers. According to the filing, Joffe was the one who told Sussman about the YotaPhone data.
But because Sussman is linked to the DNC and the Clinton campaign, and separately linked to Joffe, then Hillary somehow paid Joffe to spy on Trump, despite there being zero actual linkage between the Clintons and Joffe, who claims to be both apolitical and a contract worker for the White House. Meantime, Fox News and the Trumps keep repeating that Durham confirmed in the filing that the Clintons paid Joffe to “infiltrate” the servers.
This is it. This is why Trump declared in one of his whiny tantrums that the perpetrators should be executed for doing this. “In a stronger period of time in our country, this crime would have been punishable by death,” he shrieked.
The Durham filing notes:
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.
EOP means Executive Office of the President. The White House. But it couldn’t have been information about Trump because when the data was gathered during the Summer and Fall of 2016, Obama was president. The filing also refers to Trump as “then-candidate Trump.” According to Charlie Savage at The New York Times:
…According to lawyers for David Dagon, a Georgia Institute of Technology data scientist who helped develop the Yota analysis, the data…came from Barack Obama’s presidency.
Whoops. So, none of the internet traffic data that was examined by Joffe’s firm was collected during the Trump presidency. The New York Times published a story about the YotaPhone thing back in October 2021 – in other words, this is old news.
Savage also points out that Durham isn’t alleging there was infiltration of anything. The word “infiltrate” comes from former Trump staffer Kash Patel, who’s also the source for this bullshit about Clinton paying Joffe to spy on Trump, which didn’t happen. But none of that stopped Fox News from publishing the headline: “Clinton campaign paid to ‘infiltrate’ Trump Tower, White House servers to link Trump to Russia…” Give these bastards an inch, they take lightyears.
According to a lawyer for Dagon, who worked on the YotaPhone connection: “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.”
Furthermore, as we all know, the Russians attacked the DNC and others in early 2016 with the intention of helping Trump win the election. And they succeeded. This has been confirmed not just by the press but by the then-Republican-controlled Senate Intelligence Committee. So if Russian cellphones were connecting via the internet to both Yota servers in Russia along with servers at the White House, Trump Tower, and Trump’s Central Park West apartment building, there’s all the justification in the world to at least examine the data – data which, again, was collected during the Obama presidency, and which Sussman’s cybersecurity team reported to the CIA.
There were no wiretaps. There was no spying by anyone but the Russians. This is all horseshit, sparked by John Durham’s fishing expedition and Trump’s desperate attempt to distract from the avalanche of legal and financial catastrophes landing on his pumpkin-head.