Media Vapors: How Special Counsel John Durham Has Triggered a Media Meltdown

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by Jonathan Turley

Pediatricians call it “breath-holding spells.” It was when children hold their breath when upset until they experience syncope, or passing out. The media in Washington appears close to a collective faint over the recent filings of Special Counsel John Durham. While the media has largely buried or downplayed the alarming disclosures by Durham on the origins of the Russian conspiracy claims, Durham keeps adding new details implicating top Democratic figures in what he describes as an ongoing investigation. You can only hold your breath so long and Durham shows no signs that he is done by a long shot.
 
The latest disclosures by Durham are difficult for many in the media to cover because they directly refute years of prior coverage. Many in the media lampooned Donald Trump for claiming that the FBI and the Clinton campaign spied on Trump Tower and his campaign. Yet, we later learned that the FBI did spy on the campaign. In 2020, the media largely ignored that finding.
 
That is when the first stage of syncope began:  the “prodrome” with signs of media “discomfort, extreme fatigue, weakness, yawning, nausea, dizziness, and vertigo.
 
Now, Durham has told a court that he has evidence that Clinton operatives  “exploited” access to systems at the Trump Tower, Trump’s apartment building, and “the Executive Office of the President of the United States.” The operation allegedly not only targeted the campaign and the Trump Tower but continued after the election.
 
We are now in the second syncopal phrase: loss of media consciousness.
 
There is no way to cover this story without many admitting that it facilitated a false narrative created by the Clinton campaign, including attacking those who suggested that the Clinton campaign would ever engage in such disreputable conduct.
 
The filings reveal more details on how the Clinton Campaign’s funded and directed the development of the now debunked narrative of a conspiracy between Russian and the Trump campaign. What is also notable in the filing is the extent to which the Clinton campaign used lawyers to carry out this work, including hiding its funding while denying connections to the work of figures like Christopher Steele.
 

 
The new information was revealed in a filing raising conflicts of interest in the law firm of Latham Watkins, which is representing indicted former Clinton lawyer Michael Sussmann. The firm has represented other Clinton related figures. It was a fitting objection in a case where a circle of Democratic lawyers and law firms have featured prominently as well as the liberal think tank, Brookings Institution.  The cross pollination of these law firms is one of the least discussed elements in the scandal.
 
The Durham filings repeatedly return to the work of Perkins Coie, a firm with a long and deep connection to the Democratic Party. The Clinton campaign used a screen of lawyers to hide that it was behind the Russian conspiracy claims.
 
The key to many of these operations is someone referred to by Durham as “Campaign Lawyer-1,” who is widely believed to the then Perkins partner and Clinton Campaign General Counsel Marc Elias. Elias was called before the grand jury. It was Elias who made the key funding available to Fusion GPS, which in turn enlisted Steele to produce his now discredited dossier on Trump and his campaign. The firm listed the payouts as “legal fees.”
 
During the campaign, a few reporters did ask how the possible connection to the campaign, but Clinton campaign officials denied any involvement. It was only weeks after the election that journalists discovered that the Clinton campaign allegedly hid payments for the Steele dossier as “legal fees” among the $5.6 million paid to Perkins Coie. New York Times reporter Ken Vogel said at the time that Elias denied involvement in the anti-Trump dossier. When Vogel tried to report the story, he said, Elias “pushed back vigorously, saying ‘You (or your sources) are wrong.’” Times reporter Maggie Haberman declared, “Folks involved in funding this lied about it, and with sanctimony, for a year.” Elias also reportedly sat next to campaign chair John Podesta when he also reportedly denied the connection.
 
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Sussmann was indicted for allegedly hiding his representation of the Clinton Campaign as he spread a different Russian collusion allegation involving the Trump Organization and Russia’s Alfa Bank. (Elias is also referenced in meetings on that operation). Sussmann filed a response this week and asked the Court to strike the entirety of the factual section of the Durham filing as unsubstantiated and sensational. (That could open the door for Durham in response to substantiate these claims even further).
 
Durham added details showing how Perkins Coie used its attorney-client relationships to further the Russian conspiracy operation for the campaign. He alleges that Elias and Sussmann hired an Internet executive, Rodney Joffe, to help build the foundation for the claims. Joffe alerted Sussmann about the Alfa Bank claims by July 2016, and “over the ensuing weeks, and as part of their lawyer-client relationship,” Sussmann and Joffe “engaged in efforts with Campaign Lawyer-1 .”
 
The use of lawyers to shield such work is nothing new in Washington. During the Nixon Administration, lawyers were used extensively to maintain slush funds and enable “dirty trick” operations.
 
What is striking about the Durham filings is the audacity of the Perkins Coie operation. While the funding was buried away, the lawyers were seemingly unconcerned about approving such efforts or personally reaching out to sympathetic government and media figures. They were, to some degree, justified in their sense of immunity.

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The Democrat party has nothing to say about their exposed corruption and the media is part of the Democrat party.

The worst Domestic enemies of America is the DNC,ANTIFA,BLM and their willing acompleces in the M.S. Media who cover up for them

We already know the M.S. Media are the democrats trusted Bootlickers in just about all the elections their urging us to always vote for Democrats nd nothing has change with CNN/NYT’s and the rest of them all

Feb 16, 2022 – What you need to know about the John Durham filing that Trumpworld is fuming over

The right-wing media sphere erupted this week over a legal filing from the special counsel John Durham, who is investigating the origins of the FBI’s Russia probe, that former President Donald Trump and his allies said presented definitive proof that his political opponents illegally “spied” on him.

Trump declared in a statement that the filing provided “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,” adding that such conduct “would have been punishable by death” in a “stronger period of time in this country.”

The man is an unhinged, bombastic bullshitter, but he got his mindless little cult parrots squawking about treason and death sentences—which should serve as a warning to anyone who might consider voting for this lunatic in the future.

Trump’s claim that such activity would have at any time in American history been “punishable by death” is overblown, since the only crime Durham has accused anyone of committing is lying to the FBI. No one involved in the investigation has been charged with illegally spying on the Trump campaign or White House, or with a capital crime.

But the special counsel’s investigation has in the past uncovered evidence of a connection between a lawyer with connections to the Clinton campaign named Michael Sussmann and a technology executive who Durham claims “exploited” internet data legally gathered from the White House and Trump Tower. Friday’s filing also suggests that Sussman exaggerated evidence of a connection between Trump and Russia in meetings with law enforcement agencies, and lied about why he was doing it.

What the Durham filing actually says

The filing contains almost no new information. It’s not an indictment, meaning that no new criminal conduct was alleged. Instead, it relates to a conflict-of-interest matter in Durham’s ongoing case against Sussmann, who worked at the law firm Perkins Coie, which represents the Democratic National Committee.

Sussmann was charged last year with lying to the FBI while trying to get it to investigate an allegation that the Trump campaign used a secret email server to communicate with Russia’s Alfa Bank during the 2016 campaign. The FBI has not uncovered any evidence of such a connection.

Durham’s Friday filing said there’s a potential conflict because the law firm representing Sussmann, Latham Watkins, previously represented Perkins Coie and the lawyer Marc Elias, who testified before Durham’s grand jury.

It also details a February 2017 meeting in which Sussmann flagged to the CIA that internet data he had obtained suggested someone using a Russian-made smartphone was connecting to White House and Trump Tower networks. The New York Times reported on this meeting last year.

The filing says Sussmann got the data from an unnamed technology executive who Durham said “exploited” DNS traffic to gauge if there was a link between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives during the 2016 election.

Multiple media outlets have reported that the executive is Rodney Joffe, who works at the American tech company Neustar.

What Durham outlined doesn’t amount to domestic political espionage

Durham’s filing said some of the internet data that was mined was connected to two Trump buildings in New York City, the executive office of the president (EOP), and an unrelated Michigan hospital company that had also interacted with the Trump server.

It added that Joffe had access to this data because his employer had a set of “dedicated servers” for the White House as part of a “sensitive arrangement” in which it provided DNS resolution services to the White House.

As Durham pointed out later in the filing, these DNS lookups started as early as 2014, when Barack Obama was in office, and continued until early 2017.

Lawyers for one of the researchers who worked with Joffe highlighted that in a statement to The Times: “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.”

A spokesperson for Joffe told NBC News that “contrary to the allegations in this recent filing,” he had legal access to the DNS data under a contract that allowed Neustar to comb through the data, including from the White House, to look for security threats.

“As a result of the [Russian government’s] hacks of EOP and DNC servers in 2015 and 2016, respectively, there were serious and legitimate national security concerns about Russian attempts to infiltrate the 2016 election,” the spokesperson continued. “Upon identifying DNS queries from Russian-made Yota phones in proximity to the Trump campaign and the EOP, respected cyber-security researchers were deeply concerned about the anomalies they found in the data and prepared a report of their findings, which was subsequently shared with the CIA.”

The Washington Post reported that internet providers frequently let third parties collect DNS lookups because the information can be helpful for tracking bad actors.

DNS services like the one offered by Neustar essentially “monitor your traffic in the event that you might be sent to a malicious site,” Karim Hijazi, the CEO of the cybersecurity firm Prevailion and a former intelligence community contractor, told Insider. “They’ll stop the traffic, limit it, or redirect it to somewhere safe. So by definition, if you’re using a service like Neustar’s, your activity is being monitored because that’s what you’re buying.”

Durham’s filing noted that the lookups took place on a broader scale as well.

According to the filing, Sussmann claimed the 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.”

But “the more complete data” that Joffe and his associates gathered “reflected that between approximately 2014 and 2017, there were a total of more than 3 million lookups of Russian Phone-Provider-1 IP addresses that originated with US-based IP addresses,” the filing said. Fewer than 1,000 of those lookups came from IP addresses affiliated with Trump Tower, it added.

The information Durham laid out raises questions about the ethics of Joffe using the data his company had legal access to for purposes that went beyond the scope of what the firm was hired to do. And it’s true that Durham has alleged that criminal conduct occurred. But the crime that’s being alleged is lying to the FBI, not domestic political espionage or anything related to spying or hacking.

That doesn’t mean Durham won’t bring more serious charges down the line related to Democratic efforts to establish a Trump-Russia link, or that Sussmann and his source didn’t behave unethically. It just means that Friday’s filing doesn’t lay out any such efforts that would constitute what Trump has implied is treasonous conduct punishable by death.

Trump does tend to project. It’s one of his routine defense mechanisms.

Last edited 2 years ago by Greg

You had to go to business insider INDIA to find someone near left covering the story that is hilarious. This is only the 2nd Hillary/Obama goon to be indicted. Establishing connections, exposing liars. We already knew Trump was spied on, congressional testimony, we know who did it we know who paid for it there are many books written about it, best sellers none of the authors have been sued.
The grand jury came to the conclusion this guy could be lying when he said he was only acting as a concerned citizen, while not disclosing who he was getting paid by. Now he gets a trial, just because a man is indicted does not make him guilty, it just says there is plenty of evidence to charge him.

HillaryGate: 4 Special Counsel Revelations Tying Spygate to Crooked Hillary Clinton’s Campaign

The Clinton Campaign Paid for Russian Disinformation to Be Peddled to the Feds and Media via the Steele Dossier

The Clinton Campaign Paid for Fake Intel Supplied by a Clinton Crony and Long-Time Democrat to Feed to the FBI and Press

The Clinton Campaign Peddled More than the Steele Dossier

Joffe’s Pro Bono Support of Clinton

Last edited 2 years ago by TrumpWon