While most media outlets have been focused on the Russian invasion of Ukraine and America’s energy crisis, very little coverage has been given to the revelations that recently came from special counsel John Durham’s investigation into the origins of the FBI’s extensive and intrusive investigation into Donald Trump and his campaign. While it was already known that the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign funded the fabricated Steele Dossier to the tune of potentially millions of dollars, according to Durham, Democrats can also be linked to extensive spying and disinformation operations that targeted both Trump and his campaign.
Michael Sussman is a cybersecurity lawyer who worked for Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2016. Sussman was also an associate at the left-wing law firm Perkins Coie and represented the Democratic National Committee after they were hacked in 2016. Following the hacking of the DNC back in 2016, Sussman utilized communications with the FBI that stemmed from his representation of the DNC as their lawyer to peddle bold and baseless assertions about Trump. Back in September, Sussman was indicted for lying to the FBI. Durham states that Sussman concealed his political connections to Democrats while simultaneously pushing a since-debunked conspiracy to the FBI that Trump was connected to Russia’s Alfa Bank. Durham has also announced that Sussman was feeding the same false claims about Trump’s ties to Russia to the CIA in an obvious attempt to further smear his political adversary.
Sussman and his lawyers have argued that the charges against him should be dropped due to claims that Durham’s indictments are politically motivated. However, special counsel Durham has denied these baseless allegations. To quote his most recent filing, “As an initial matter, defense counsel has presumed the Government’s bad faith and asserts the Special Counsel’s Office intentionally sought to politicize this case, inflame media coverage, and taint the jury pool. That is simply not true.”
In February, Durham released another filing. This time, the primary focus of the filing was “Tech Executive-1,” Rodney Joffe. Joffe is a cybersecurity expert who formerly worked at Neustar, Inc. beginning in 2006 until suddenly retiring at the same time as the announcement of Sussman’s indictment in September of 2021. Among other partnerships, Neustar works with the government to monitor and secure servers for multiple federal agencies. Joffe’s employment at Neustar allowed him to access “DNS logs”, a secret archive of internet traffic records that contains both public and private data. Durham’s filing alleges that Sussman, Joffe, and Joffe’s associates at the Georgia Institute of Technology worked with Clinton’s campaign firm to “exploit” access to “non-public and/or proprietary internet data.” Leaked emails obtained by prosecutors from August of 2016 show that Joffe tasked a collection of contractors at the Georgia Institute of Technology to use their data access to find “anything” that could link Trump to Russia ahead of the November election. Joffe also told his group of associates that “the VIPs would be happy” if the operation was successful. Although many may think these actions are criminal, Joffe has yet to be indicted due to the fact that the aforementioned surveillance occurred as part of covert public-private agreements and contracts that the government has largely refused to reveal.
Among the data that Durham says was “exploited” is information from “a particular healthcare provider,” “Trump Tower,” and “Donald Trump’s Central Park West apartment building.” Most shockingly, Durham’s filing states that the sinister mission against Trump continued after he was sworn in as president and that “the Executive Office of the President of the United States (EOP)” was targeted. Notably, Joffe was offered a high-income job by Democrats if they were to have won in 2016. To quote another leaked email from Joffe, “I was tentatively offered the top [cybersecurity] job by the Democrats when it looked like they’d win.” Regardless of the fact that Democrats lost in 2016, documents obtained by Judicial Watch indicate that Joffe still managed to earn a lucrative contract with the Pentagon’s DARPA from 2016–2021, likely accessing highly sensitive information throughout the entirety of Trump’s administration.
The infamous “Steele dossier,” which was funded by both the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign through radical lawyer Marc Elias and used as part of the basis for the wasteful FBI investigation into the Trump campaign’s alleged connections to Russia, has since been debunked. After being arrested back in 2017, Igor Danchenko, one of the primary sources of the Steele dossier itself, admitted that most of the information discussed in the Steele dossier was “rumor and speculation.” Danchenko is also a Russian citizen and a former employee of the Brookings Institution. Ironically, declassified CIA records state that Russians have attempted to infiltrate the Brookings Institute with operatives posing as “scholars” since the 1980s. The FBI was seemingly aware of this possibility back in 2017, with other declassified documents “indicating the potential for Russian disinformation influencing Steele’s election reporting.”
The FBI also used some of the sensational allegations made in the Democrat-funded Steele dossier to obtain a classified Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (FISA) warrant against Trump associate Carter Page back in 2016. Throughout the investigation into Page, there were “at least 17 significant errors or omissions” by the FBI, according to an Inspector General report from 2019. This led to Durham’s first indictment in his investigation being delivered to Kevin Clinesmith. Clinesmith pleaded guilty in August of 2020 to falsifying an email when he was working as a lawyer for the FBI back in 2016 in an effort to extend a secret FISA court warrant against Page. The above details caused the Justice Department to determine that two of the four FISA warrants utilized to surveil Page were invalid. In spite of these facts, Clinesmith was only sentenced to probation and community service. Sussman, and anyone else that Durham may indict, should not receive lenient sentences for such heinous crimes.
According to Durham, the primary goal of the Clinton-linked operation against Trump was “to establish an inference and narrative tying then-candidate Trump to Russia.” Sadly, this effort was successful in the left-wing media bubble. Buzzfeed, CNN, MSNBC, and other outlets each covered the details within the Steele dossier as if they were certified facts. Each of the above organizations, therefore, helped in the dissemination of Russian propaganda, whether willingly or unwillingly, in an ironic attempt to falsely tie Trump to Russia. Unsurprisingly, each of the above media groups has also been the quietest with regard to their coverage of the Durham investigation, and any limited coverage they do provide seems to be aimed at discrediting or downplaying the investigation.
In reality, Trump had no malicious connections to Russia and there was no evidence that his campaign colluded with the Russian government. Instead, it was the Democrats that created an artificial scandal by introducing the Russian collusion hoax as a deflection from the multiple scandals involving both Clinton and the DNC. Despite this fact, Democrats in both Congress and the media forced American taxpayers to waste millions of dollars on the Mueller investigation, which spent approximately $32 million in taxpayer funds looking into the largely fabricated allegations against Trump and his associates. Trump recently responded to the revelations from the Durham investigation by releasing a statement calling the situation “a far bigger crime than Watergate.” Senator Ted Cruz agreed with this claim in February, saying the operation directed at Trump was potentially even bigger than Watergate. To quote Cruz, “If this is true, it’s a lot bigger than Watergate. That was a bungled, third-rate burglary. It was wrong. People went to jail for Watergate. And people need to go to jail for this if these allegations are true.”
Due to the fact that Durham’s revelations are damaging to the left and their narrative, some Democrats have outlandishly begun to agree with Sussman’s claim that Durham is politicizing the investigation into the origins of the false Russian collusion allegations against Trump and his campaign. However, the truth is that Durham is not a politically motivated prosecutor. Durham has previously worked on investigations at the directive of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama. If anything, Durham could be more accurately described as apolitical.
To preserve Durham’s investigation and his apolitical status, 46 Republican senators recently sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland demanding that he respect the independence of Durham’s investigation and provide Durham with all the resources necessary to complete his investigation. Durham’s investigation is currently fully operational, but Democrat attacks on Durham are sure to accelerate as the release of his final report approaches.
Given Durham’s history, nobody truly knows what will come next from his investigation. Still, two things are absolutely certain: Donald Trump and his campaign were targeted by Democrat-linked spying and disinformation campaigns, and Durham’s investigation into the origins of each is not yet over.