Lawyers for Hillary Clinton’s failed 2016 American presidential campaign worked to link her opponent, Donald Trump, to Russia in order to improve her chances of winning the election. Special Counsel John Durham has revealed he discovered that the former First Lady of the United States paid a technology company to infiltrate servers her fellow candidate used at Trump Tower and eventually the White House. The Democratic contender set out to establish an inference and wrongful narrative against the Republican candidate to show government agencies that he was unfit for the presidency..
Durham filed a motion last Friday, February 11 that focuses on potential conflicts of interest related to the representation of former Clinton campaign lawyer, Michael Sussmann. The latter has been charged with making a false statement to a federal agent, to which he has pleaded not guilty.
The indictment against Sussmann states that he lied to then-FBI General Counsel James Baker in September 2016, less than two months before Trump won the presidential election. The lawyer said that he wasn’t doing work for any client when he requested and held a meeting with the government agency. During the meeting, he presented purported data that allegedly demonstrated a covert communications channel between the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank, which has ties to the Kremlin, a fortified complex in the center of Moscow
The truth of that data is now being disputed by Durham’s filing, which reveals that Sussmann had assembled and conveyed the allegations to the FBI on behalf of at least two specific clients. Those clients include a technology executive at a U.S.-based internet company and the Clinton campaign. The filing said states that Sussmann’s billing records reflect that he “repeatedly billed the Clinton Campaign for his work on the Russian Bank allegations.”
The filing went on to reveal that Sussmann and the technology executive met and communicated with another law partner, who was serving as General Counsel to the Clinton campaign. That law partner is reportedly Marc Elias, who once worked at the law firm Perkins Coie.
Durham’s filing also states that in July 2016, the tech executive, who’s referred to as , Tech Executive-1 in the lawsuit, worked with U.S. investigative firm Sussmann. The investigative firm was retained by the law firm working on behalf of Clinton’s campaign, as well as numerous cyber researchers and employees at multiple internet companies to assemble the purported data and white papers.
“In connection with these efforts, Tech Executive-1 exploited his access to non-public and/or proprietary Internet data,” the filing states. “Tech Executive-1 also enlisted the assistance of researchers at a U.S.-based university who were receiving and analyzing 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,” Durham states. “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 states that the internet company that 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.” His lawyer also claimed that “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 added that the allegations “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.”
In Sussmann’s meeting with the second U.S. government agency, Durham says the lawyer “provided data which he claimed reflected purportedly suspicious DNS lookups by these entities of internet protocol (IP) addresses affiliated with a Russian mobile phone provider.” The filing also claims that the lookups “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, adding that the “lookups were far from rare in the United States.
“In his meeting with Agency-2 employees, the defendant also made a substantially similar false statement as he made to the FBI General Counsel,” Durham also wrote. “In particular, the defendant asserted that he was not representing a particular client in conveying the above allegations.”
“In truth and in fact, the defendant was representing Tech Executive-1–a fact the defendant subsequently acknowledged under oath in December 2017 testimony before Congress, without identifying the client by name,” Durham also wrote in the filing.
Former President Trump reacted to the filing on Saturday evening, February 12, by saying Durham’s claims “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.
“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,” the businessman also said. “In a stronger period of time in our country, this crime would have been punishable by death.”
Trump added: “In addition, reparations should be paid to those in our country who have been damaged by this.”
