Hillary Clinton broke her silence on Special Counsel John Durham’s filing in federal court last week. Naturally, she gave her reaction to the questions coming at her now via Twitter. She calls it all a “fake scandal” at the hands of Trump and Fox News, because of course she did. Hillary points to a Vanity Fair piece as confirmation of her opinion.
The Vanity Fair piece was published the day after a New York Times piece ran with some details that were meant to clear up any confusion between what was being reported in conservative media outlets and what was in the filing from Durham.
The New York Times published a piece on February 14 that explained why objections to the reporting of the story are relevant. The piece points to the fact that the work performed by Mr. Joffe’s company was not paid for by the Clinton campaign. Joffe was a client of Mr. Sussman’s and his company was investigating malware in the White House. That malware investigation goes back to the Obama administration. Sussman, a cybersecurity lawyer with links to the Democrat Party is accused of lying to the FBI. The allegation is that Sussman lied during a September 2016 meeting (the Obama administration) with an FBI official about Trump’s possible ties to Russia. Durham never mentions the word “infiltration” in his filing.
There were many problems with all this. For one, much of this was not new: The New York Times had reported in October what Mr. Sussmann had told the C.I.A. about data suggesting that Russian-made smartphones, called YotaPhones, had been connecting to networks at Trump Tower and the White House, among other places.
The conservative media also skewed what the filing said. For example, Mr. Durham’s filing never used the word “infiltrate.” And it never claimed that Mr. Joffe’s company was being paid by the Clinton campaign.
Most important, contrary to the reporting, the filing never said the White House data that came under scrutiny was from the Trump era. According to lawyers for David Dagon, a Georgia Institute of Technology data scientist who helped develop the Yota analysis, the data — so-called DNS logs, which are records of when computers or smartphones have prepared to communicate with servers over the internet — came from Barack Obama’s presidency.
“What Trump and some news outlets are saying is wrong,” said Jody Westby and Mark Rasch, both lawyers for Mr. Dagon. “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.”
It was Sussman who told the CIA in February 2017 about “odd internet data”. He said a Russian-made smartphone “may have been connecting to networks at Trump Tower and the White House, among other places.” Trump was in the White House by February 2017. It is alleged that Sussman received the information from his client, Joffe. Joffe’s company, Neustar, according to Durham’s filing, helped maintain internet-related servers for the White House. The filing claims that Joffe and his associates “exploited this arrangement” by mining certain records to gather derogatory information about Mr. Trump.
So, about the Vanity Fair piece.
Trump & Fox are desperately spinning up a fake scandal to distract from his real ones. So it's a day that ends in Y.
The more his misdeeds are exposed, the more they lie.
For those interested in reality, here's a good debunking of their latest nonsense.https://t.co/iYY8Uxuogx
— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) February 16, 2022
It quotes the NYT and reminds the reader that Durham was appointed in the Trump era. The filing by Durham was a pre-trial motion concerning the charge against Sussman, so it is not specifically against Hillary’s campaign. The piece sums up the NYT’s article and it dinged Trump for misstating Durham’s name. Trump’s response referred to “Robert” Durham, not John Durham.
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.
“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.”
So, that’s that. Case closed, there’s nothing to see here. Except this is Hillary Clinton we’re talking about. The media was obsessed with the Steele Dossier and that was completely debunked. It was a product paid for by the Clinton campaign. That was all a ruse put forward by Team Hillary and then used as an excuse as to why she lost the presidential election to Trump. Journalists who covered the Clinton campaign in 2016 wrote a book about the campaign and how her team came up with blaming a Trump-Russia connection as the reason she lost. Liberals are expected to get out and pooh-pooh this latest story. Few in the media are mentioning anything about Durham’s filing except FNC. However, these are not FNC’s allegations, these are from John Durham’s investigation.
Hillary is eager to pin it all on conservatives because that is what she does. She famously coined the term “vast right-wing conspiracy” when she was defending her husband’s behavior, remember? Hillary is vile. Nothing is too low for her when her back is up against the wall. It is in the filing that Joffe and his associates “exploited this arrangement” by mining records to gather derogatory information about Trump, not some claim pulled out of the air by some FNC news anchor. The “good debunking” to which Hillary refers in her tweet comes from the NYT and repeated in Vanity Fair. Correct me if I’m wrong but weren’t both of those outlets also all in about the Steele Dossier and Russia, Russia, Russia for more than two years?
Hillary never specifically gets her own hands dirty. She has people around her to do that. She’ll never be held accountable for any of this but people like Sussman will be facing legal consequences. That is how this works. Hillary is a pro at it. If you’ve followed the Clintons for long, or certainly since their days in Arkansas, you know there is nothing too far-fetched to consider about them. All her scandals are fake ones, according to her. Apparently people are speaking to Durham’s team. We’ll see how it all plays out.
Via Hot Air