John Durham speaks at a conference in New Haven, Conn., on Sept. 20, 2018. (Courtesy of the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Connecticut)
Complete article is at NTD News.
Special counsel John Durham’s team alleged Saturday that a Democrat-aligned tech executive was paid to spy on former President Donald Trump’s residences and the White House while he was president.
Lawyers for the Clinton campaign allegedly paid the technology executive to infiltrate servers that belonged to the Trump Tower and the White House, Durham said in court filings (pdf), in order to establish an “inference” and “narrative” to tie Trump with the Russian government. Durham’s office made the claim in his probe that had brought charges against Michael Sussman, a lawyer who had worked on behalf of the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign and who is currently charged with making a false statement to the FBI.
Durham alleged 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,” according to a section in the court filing, titled, “Factual Background.”
Billing records that he obtained suggest Sussman “repeatedly billed the Clinton Campaign for his work on the Russian Bank-1 allegations” and that the unnamed technology executive met and communicate with Mark Elias, a left-wing lawyer and operative who has filed numerous election-related lawsuits on behalf of the Democrats. Sussman previously pleaded not guilty and accused Durham of acting in a politically motivated manner.
Durham further wrote that Sussmann “provided an updated set of allegations—including the Russian Bank-1 data and additional allegations relating to Trump” to another federal agency that isn’t the FBI. Claims that Sussman provided in a meeting in February 2017 relied 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 Durham.
Sussmann, his court filing added, “provided data which he claimed reflected purportedly suspicious DNS lookups by these entities of internet protocol addresses affiliated with a Russian mobile phone provider” in the February 2017 meetings. Sussman also asserted that such DNS lookups “demonstrated that Trump and/or his associates were using supposedly rare, Russian-made wireless phones in the vicinity of the White House and other locations,” which Durham described as false.
“The Special Counsel’s Office has identified no support for these allegations,” Durham wrote. “Indeed, more complete DNS data that the Special Counsel’s Office obtained from a company that assisted Tech Executive-1 in assembling these allegations reflects that such DNS lookups were far from rare in the United States.”