The Investigation (With Coverup) Continues

On Saturday, The Washington Examiner reported that Special counsel John Durham has issued trial subpoenas for members of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign and the Democratic National Committee. Before you get too excited about this, consider the following:

The Conservative Treehouse reported on April 16th:

Thanks to a more detailed filing by John Durham last night {pdf here, h/t Techno}, we can now see the guardrails, rules and general direction the prosecution is taking.

In essence, the underlying Trump-Russia conspiracy theory material from the Clinton campaign, via Rodney Joffe to Michael Sussmann, was fabricated – likely for a dual purpose:

(A) to coverup and make excuses for the stunningly embarrassing, potentially unlawful and politically terrible April 2016 DNC email leaks, which showed the DNC Club internally working to secure the nomination for Hillary Clinton, while trying to destroy her primary opponent, Bernie Sanders.

and

(B) to create the political Russia narrative against Trump, to be deployed later in the general election.

Within the general direction Durham is following, the FBI was duped by a purposeful and manipulative intent from the Clinton campaign.  Meanwhile, the CIA [Agency-2] did not buy into the technological evidence saying it was not “technically plausible” and was “user created and not machine/tool generated.”  

…The prosecutorial approach by John Durham positions all of the corruption outside the institutions of government, thereby protecting them.

The swamp is deep and in control. The government agencies that were totally out of control will not be held accountable by the Durham investigation.

The Washington Examiner reports:

Hillary for America also tried to intervene Tuesday, saying it was “asserting attorney-client privilege and work protection” related to Perkins and Fusion. The filing included declarations from Clinton campaign Chairman John Podesta, Clinton campaign manager Robbie Mook, and Elias.

“The Special Counsel continues to overreach: he seeks to admit evidence that the law squarely forbids, he seeks to prove unduly prejudicial allegations he has not charged, and he seeks to prove conduct that is utterly irrelevant to the one discrete crime he has charged,” Sussmann’s lawyers argued Friday night.

Durham also “seeks to prevent Mr. Sussmann from introducing relevant — indeed essential — exculpatory evidence in the form of testimony from his former client, Rodney Joffe,” Sussmann’s lawyers said Friday.

Durham pushed back Saturday.

“The goal of the joint venture could not have been more clear: it was to gather and disseminate derogatory non-public information regarding the internet activities of a political candidate and his associates,” he wrote.

“And that venture was far from collateral to the charged crime. Indeed, the above-described joint venture was the very project that led Tech Executive-1 to rely upon the defendant’s services; the very project that gave rise to the Russian Bank-1 allegations; the very project that prompted agents of the Clinton Campaign to meet with Tech Executive-1; and the very project that caused the defendant to meet with the FBI General Counsel and lie to him about the clients who were behind all of this work,” Durham said.

Durham has declined to promise that Joffe won’t be indicted at some point in the future, but if Joffe is not granted immunity to testify at trial on Sussmann’s behalf, then the charges should be dismissed, the defense team argued.

On Saturday, The Conservative Treehouse reported:

The current court battle is circling around various lawyers and groups saying they have attorney-client privileges in order to attempt to avoid document production and/or testimony that will put them in legal jeopardy.   The Clinton Campaign is claiming communication with Fusion is privileged. Fusion is claiming communication with Perkins Coie is privileged.  Perkins Coie is claiming they hired Fusion GPS for legal services, etc. etc. etc.

It takes much more time, but John Durham is working through each of the privilege claims in court, and so far, he has been successful in compelling compliance.

♦ A frequent question:  Why didn’t Durham charge Rodney Joffe yet?   It’s a good question, and the answer is likely because he’s building that case around something else.  Here’s my suspicion.

You will remember, back in 2016, 2017 and 2018, when I said the Clinton team seem to have some kind of “direct portal” into government databases.  There was some process clearly evident where the Clinton campaign itself had access to government databases.

We speculated about all kinds of contractors helping her, etc.  This is entirely separate from what Fusion GPS and other participants were doing to data-mine information.  This is not the people inside government connected to spygate (NSA, Fusion, etc), this is a portal specific to the Clinton campaign itself.

I always called this network the “Clinton Portal“, and the fingerprints from it just kept surfacing as the media described Trump-Russia connections, and then campaign officials would amplify.  I’ve said that since mid 2016, and I retained that view throughout.  Clinton’s campaign operation was data mining some government database, somehow.  The question was who and how?

Rodney Joffe is the explanation that answers that question.  Joffe exploiting contractor access to government databases (GA Tech via DARPA), in combination with his access to data from Neustar, gave him a unique position.  Joffe was Clinton’s Portal.

My hunch is that Durham is holding back on Joffe because accessing government databases, via a government contract (DARPA) that was not given for that intent, is a bigger set of charges.

Please follow the links above to see exactly what is  happening here. It is brilliant sleight of hand.

Quietly Paying The Fine After You Have Broken The Law

When charged with a crime that has a penalty of a cash payment, the quickest way to get that charge and the crime off of the front pages of the media is to quietly pay the fine. If you’re a Republican, that might not work, but if you are Democrat, it will definitely kill the story.

On Saturday, The Epoch Times reported the following statement by Kash Patel, regarding the violations by the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2016:

“So the Hillary Clinton campaign is not contesting it, they’re paying the fine. It’s basically admitting that they did this and they’re out is: ‘we just don’t want a protracted legal deal, as if the Hillary Clinton campaign and DNC ever shied away from taking something or someone to court,” Patel added.

(Hillary) Clinton’s campaign and the DNC agreed to pay a combined $113,000 to the FEC, according to documents made public on March 30, after the commission found probable cause that the entities violated federal law by describing payments that ultimately went to the Fusion GPS research group as going toward legal services and consulting.

“It shows them how wrong they were to violate the law and spend political campaign dollars on hit job, opposition research pieces for then-candidate Trump, all of which, [to] remind the audience, was then used intentionally by the FBI—even though they knew it was false—to go to a federal secret court and surveil a presidential candidate and later a president of the United States.”

The article concludes:

In October 2020, Durham (Special counsel John Durham) was appointed by the Dept. of Justice as special counsel to investigate the FBI’s handling of Russiagate. His recent filings revealed that internet traffic at Trump Tower and the White House was accessed to fabricate ties between Trump and Russia.

The filing, which was submitted late on Feb. 11 in connection with the indictment of Michael Sussmann, a former attorney to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, reveals that Rodney Joffe, a tech executive who was working with Sussmann, had exploited access to domain name system (DNS) internet traffic pertaining to the Executive Office of the President of the United States (EOP) as well as Trump Tower and Donald Trump’s Central Park West apartment building.

“This FEC fine is another step towards accountability. But [for] me as a former federal prosecutor, maybe I’m biased, but the ultimate step of accountability which the American public is waiting for,comes in the form of indictments, especially to those people who violated their oath of office,” Patel said.

Indictments would be nice, but unfortunately it is becoming very obvious to most Americans that only Republicans get indicted when they break the law.

 

Why Are The Names Always The Same?

On February 15th, The Washington Free Beacon reported that the Biden campaign paid nearly $20,000 to Neustar Information Services, the cybersecurity firm at the center of Special Counsel John Durham’s investigation into the origins of the Trump-Russia probe, in 2020 for accounting and compliance work,

The article reports:

The campaign paid Neustar Information Services in 2020 for accounting and compliance work, according to Federal Election Commission records. According to Durham, Neustar’s chief technology officer, Rodney Joffe, accessed sensitive web traffic data that the company maintained on behalf of the White House executive office in order to collect “derogatory” information about Donald Trump. Joffe allegedly provided the information to Hillary Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann, who in turn gave it to the CIA during a meeting in February 2017. Durham charged Sussmann in September with lying to the FBI about his investigation of Trump.

The Biden campaign’s payments raise questions about whether Joffe continued snooping on Trump in the most recent election. The Biden and Clinton campaigns are the only two presidential committees to have ever paid Neustar, according to Federal Election Commission records. Biden’s campaign paid Neustar $18,819 on Sept. 29, 2020, the records show. The Clinton campaign paid the firm $3,000 in May 2015 for mobile phone services. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee paid $3,000 to Neustar in 2017. Neustar executives and staffers contributed $17,906 to Biden’s campaign, FEC records show.

The article concludes:

Joffe began helping the Clinton campaign in mid-2016 after he found what he claimed was suspicious Internet chatter between the servers of Russia’s Alfa Bank and Trump’s real estate company, the Trump Organization. Sussmann shared Joffe’s findings with journalists and then-FBI general counsel James Baker. Sussmann is accused of lying to Baker during a Sept. 19, 2016, meeting by denying that he was investigating Trump on behalf of the Clinton campaign.

According to Durham, Clinton campaign lawyers told campaign officials, including Jake Sullivan, about the Alfa Bank claims. Sullivan later joined the Biden campaign and currently serves as national security adviser. His wife is counselor to Attorney General Merrick Garland, who oversees the Durham probe and has final say over a release of a report of the investigation.

Federal investigators have debunked Joffe’s allegations of secret channels of communication between Trump and Russia. The Justice Department inspector general said the FBI determined by February 2017 that there was no basis to the Alfa-Trump allegation. Durham said in his court filing on Friday that his investigators found “no support” for the information Sussmann gave the CIA.

The swamp that is the deep state runs deep and wide.