Durham's investigation of the investigation

So much wrong with my post, you lead with agreeing that it’s NOT illegal for Steele to have done this work? Wow! I was so far off base.

You then move on to agreeing there’s no evidence Clinton knew anything about Steele, just that “somebody in the campaign knew him”. Ok. Sounds like I’m 2 for 2 so far.

For the 3rd act, you suggest somebody wrote about the Dossier before the election. Cool story, but the Dossier didn’t leak until Jan 2017 by Buzzfeed news. Sounds like I’m perfect 3 for 3! Awesome! Yes, some aspects leaked early. Isn’t that how that works, in like, every election? Isn’t that the purpose of digging for issues? To try and leak damaging stuff? What do you think the Hunter laptop was? What was Giuliani in Ukraine? That stuff isn’t illegal either, necessarily, depending on how it’s obtained. Though Trump extorted the Ukraine President by withholding military aid, that is a massive line that was crossed (as well as whatever that nonsense with the ambassador was). A criminal line IMO. Similarly, I think his cronies working with Wikileaks and Russian hackers in ‘16 was criminal (speaking of things that shouldn’t be done). It’s important to understand Trump was in no way “exonerated” for any of that, Mueller simply did not find enough to charge a conspiracy, but he did find multiple issues with obstruction. With Ukraine it’s right there in front of you, Republicans were just too cowardly and craven to do the right thing. Party over country.

You then move on to something I didn’t address specifically, the “AlphaBank” assertion. Clinton “addressed” it after it was in the public discourse. Ok? So? If it was false or feel defamed, they should sue her. Pretty simple.

The one thing I do agree with you is that the FISA court seems to be too weak, perhaps allowed to much leeway into investigating a couple of these fringe figures. But as there was some shadiness about them, I’m not prepared to see them as innocent victims or that their civil liberties were violated. Carter Page, for example, actually seemed to relish his 15 minutes. An odd dude.

 

The Dossier was publicly know about and being reported on before the election. Claiming it was not, is very incorrect. It was being fed to reporters and the FBI in order to so that the Clinton Campaign could point to things like Reid's letter to the FBI claiming there was a lot of smoke about Trump colluding with the Russians. It was the Clinton Campaign that took the Alfa Bank info to the FBI and then promoted it when it was leaked. This was a concerted effort between the campaign, Fusion GPS, and Steele to sway thre election.

And I think you mean the Dossier was not published until Jan of '17. It had been shared with multiple outlets on the condition they not say where it came from. Fusion GPS worked extremely hard to hide the fact they and Steele were the ones showing it to reporters from multiple outlets.

I've seen nothing that states HRC knew but the senior members of her campaign admitted they were being briefed on the Dossier and that means they had to know it was from Steele. When it's your campaign, you are responsible for its actions. See Hindenburg quote about the one in charge getting the glory for a win and the blame for a loss.

I'm begging you, please go read Spooked. All of this is covered. And it is written by a former NYTimes investigative reporter. It's not some right wing hack writing on this topic. I doubt you will but since you seemed to be interested in this topic and what went on, I'm recommending it again.

The only thing it appears we are going to agree on is that Carter Page is one weird dude.

 

Mueller did not find enough evidence to charge conspiracy BECAUSE of the obstruction. There is a reason people obstruct justice: To keep the facts of a crime secret. That's also a reason why obstruction is a very serious crime, and NOT a "process crime".

 

The argument here seems to boil down to the fact that it was bad for Hillary to use a foreign agent to help expose all the foreign agents helping Trump.

It should also be mentioned in all of this nonsense that the FBI was investigating both Trump and Hillary before the election but Comey only publicly spoke about her emails and nothing about Russia's lickspittle.

 

Epstein killed himself, her email server's hard drive, and cell phones were smashed by vandals. There is nothing to see here.

 

Epstein was in Trump DOJ custody. It’s certainly a curious take that Clinton had him killed, though there were likely dozens of powerful people that wanted him dead - and would have paid good money for that to happen. Trump has just as much pointing in this direction as the rest of ‘em.

 

Sarcasm? I'm new here?

 

Not sure. It depends on whether or not you like the Clinton's.

 

If I did, I certainly would not admit it.

 

You're a prosecutor?!?!?!?

Saying you can't take an indictment at face value?!?!?!

 

New reporting from the NYT about this breathless, right wing kerfuffle:

...Fox News inaccurately declared that Mr. Durham had said he had evidence that Hillary Clinton’s campaign had paid a technology company to “infiltrate” a White House server. The Washington Examiner claimed that this all meant there had been spying on Mr. Trump’s White House office. And when mainstream publications held back, Mr. Trump and his allies began shaming the news media.

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.”

Court Filing Started a Furor in Right-Wing Outlets, but Their Narrative Is Off Track

 

Paywalled, but DNS data is important. I have a simple anology to hopefully make it easier to understand. DNS, or Domian Name System, maps IP addresses to hostnames. Basically, everything on the web, and on local networks runs on IP addresses. This identifies what network it is a part of (first part of the IP address) and the nodes address (last part of the address). That's a lot of numbers to remember. It's easier to think about it like this:

You have 500 contacts in your phones address book. Imagine that it's just phone numbers. The phone numbers represent IP addresses. If you wanted to call your buddy Billy, you have to know his number. With named contacts they would show up as Billy - 229-555-1234. DNS is what binds the name Billy to 229-555-1234, making contacts a hell of a lot easier to find.

Imagine that everytime you wanted to go to Gator Country, you had to remember some set up numbers, ex 51.81.93.12 or something like that... OR you just type Gatorcountry.com. DNS is what enables you to type the friendly name of gatorcountry.com instead of an IP address. Also, say the website changes hosts and the IP address changes, how do you get there? DNS allows you to still hit Gatorcountry.com while the IP address change is transparent to the user.

Where this is relevant is since DNS makes or breaks things and now-a-days everything relies on DNS, DNS lookups is a very important tool for monitoring. Some tools like Unified Threat Management appliances or Intrusion Detection\Intrusion Detection and Prevention Systems can take DNS queries (via something like a mirrored port) and compare lookups to known black-listed/country specific hosts. You could have malware connecting to Command and Control server via hostname. Users would not realize this, but detection equipment could pick up on a host on the network trying to resolve CandC.somesite.ru.

I don't see the act of monitoring DNS as nefarious.

 

1. Disinformation
2. Rubes love disinformation, especially School Out West grads
3. This is computer-related disinformation which is even harder for rubes to figure out
4. So when in doubt, rubes just believe how Fox News presents it

 

Well dang. Back to the drawing board. Except now that the story has made the right-wing media rounds, millions of right-wingers will forevermore insist that the Clinton campaign was spying on the Trump WH.

 

Mission Accomplished!

 

And if the Republicans were in control of Congress, after purposely lying about it for months on end, they would have dozens of hearings, expecting anybody they subpoenaed to do what the Trump acolytes are NOT doing now: voluntarily following the law and testifying.

Like almost ALL Republican kerfuffle's, this one is based on purposeful misrepresentations by Republicans who know the truth!

 

Rightwing media was all over this story for a day or two. Even earlier today, the lede story on the Fox website was "Walls closing in ..." on Clinton and gang. Now it's well down the page with this headline:

 

Had some time to read up on the new information Durham included.

The new information included in the filing was that Tech Executive-1, Joffe, had a government contract through his employer that allowed him access to DNS traffic. Apparently one of the contracts was with the Executive Office of the President (EOP). Joffe had some researchers data mine the DNS traffic of the EOP, Trump Tower, and another Trump residence, and they came up with the a report that a Clinton Campaign lawyer took to the CIA and the FBI.

These are the things that are still unclear:
1. Did a government agency client ask Joffe's company to write the report? Or did Joffe use his access to the data to develop the report on his own? I think Durham is saying that Joffe did it on his own but I'm not positive of that.

2. When was Joffe looking at DNS traffic from the EOP before or after Trump was elected? The NYTimes is saying it was during the Obama Admin, while the WSJ is saying it was during Trump's time in office.

There was also a lot in the filing about a conflict of interest in the law firm representing Sussman. I'll leave it to any lawyer that wants to explain that bit.

 

Looks like Sussman has problems with the Bar. There isn’t enough public information about that yet that I have seen to fairly assess. But, it sure looks like he testified falsely in saying he did not represent the campaign. His firm did, even if he somehow believed the campaign was not the client for the purposes of obtaining the DNS data. The fact is that the campaign was an existing client when he represented the Tech Executive on a matter the campaign paid for. So, Sussman was representing the campaign and the Tech Executive at the same time. He needed to make full disclosures to both about what he was doing To both, including any potentially adverse information to both. And he had fiduciary duties of care to both. To asses this deeper, we would need to see any conflict waivers he received. As for the firm representing Sussman, it is a conflict because Sussman was an employee of the firm when he so acted and was also representing the campaign. The firm may have exposure.