"More importantly, Durham has an established history of floating allegations that disintegrate upon inspection.... So now, appropriately, the media is going to perform its due diligence and look into Durham’s charges rather than echo them in credulous headlines.... These stories completely debunk the erroneous Fox News coverage that prompted all the right’s complaints. The charges in the filing — an alleged conflict of interest by a technology executive — fell far short of the broader conspiracy Durham is insinuating. (This is in keeping with Durham’s pattern of using minuscule criminal allegations to make sweeping but unsubstantiated allegations — I described his last filing as a 'Hannity monologue wrapped around a parking ticket.').... The unexciting reality that the mainstream media was going to wait until Monday to report Durham’s hazy allegations was not one they could imagine, because it is premised on following conventions of journalistic objectivity that they can’t fathom."
Writes Jonathan Chait in "John Durham and the Right’s Media Paranoia/They don’t understand how the press is supposed to work" (NY Magazine).
See also "Court Filing Started a Furor in Right-Wing Outlets, but Their Narrative Is Off Track/The latest alarmist claims about spying on Trump appeared to be flawed, but the explanation is byzantine — underlining the challenge for journalists in deciding what merits coverage" by Charlie Savage (NYT).
MEANWHILE: At the NY Post:
Posts
79 comments:
Round up the usual suspects.
"Journalism is about covering stories, with a pillow. Until they stop moving."
Scott Adams today says the NYT sets up a straw man and then knocks it down, mischaracterizing what Fox is in fact reporting.
The right wing story doesn't make sense to me though. What has spying to do with making stuff up? You don't need to spy to make stuff up.
For the NYT to complain about clickbait reporting on the right is not self-aware however.
Chait and Savage sound a bit rattled. It must be emotionally difficult to defend their narratives at the expense of reality.
For once I agree with the Liberal MSM. I HOPE this is true, but Dunham has been all about "Insinuations" and "Implications" with no solid strong evidence for almost 1.5 years (or is it 2 years?).
I'll believe that Dunham has found something, when we get arrests and EXPLICIT facts and evidence in Court documents.
The usual prosecutor drill is use the low level people to turn against the higher level people. Would not have worked in WWII Japan! They respected authority.
Personally, as a William Barr protege - I think Dunham is more interested in covering up the Scandal than exposing it. I'm sure he'll toss out a few bones to show he did SOMETHING. But I doubt he has any intention of going after any of the big fish.
Pretty sure Chait's the one who is confused about how journalism is supposed to work. He is not confused about how it actually works as an advocacy and protection platform for Dems.
When last I checked, the NYT, WaPo, AABC/NBC/MSNBC/CNN etc. all put out weekend papers/news shows, that is a crap argument.
These journalists would have missed their own weddings to trumpet any anti-Trump story, no matter how weak or poorly sourced. Now we are to believe that a Friday court filing requires a weekend of relaxation, followed by careful scrutiny (still nowhere in evidence) in the new week before it is reported.
Chait's a joke.
Ah, so now that Hillary! is in trouble Durham is a drunken wife-beater who molests goats.
Sure.
/eyeroll
Don’t worry. The word watergate was never mentioned.
JC answers why he’s wasting peoples time writing about it.
Thank heavens, Jonathan Chait has arrived to straighten everything out. Have at it, JC. At least you're not ignoring the substance, yet.
Chait is right. We don't understand that the press is populated by partisan lying pieces of garbage who distort everything to fit their partisan agenda.
I feel worst for Drago
Journalistic objectivity?
Really?
I realize they think we're stupid....
Let's start with Hunter's lap top. Explain to me how the way the media buried this story is an example of journalistic objectivity.
"The Press" ran with four years of Russia Russia Russia based on nothing. Literally, absolutely nothing. Because Trump is a Republican. That's how the press is supposed to work. And we all understand that.
underlining the challenge for journalists in deciding what merits coverage
Gee, when they were covering Trump what merited coverage was anything which was alleged -- by a disclosed source or an anonymous one.
First to the web won the clicks.
Yeah, OK. We all saw the headlines produced. The New York Times received a Pulitzer Prize for the coverage of the bogus scandal, and calling it an undisclosed conflict of interest is a one way to describe lying to the FBI, I guess. Hillary paid for the lies to be pushed, it's more than a conflict, the Alpha Bank story was a complete fabrication fed to the FBI by the Hillary campaign.
The New York Times, which also printed the fake "Black Ledger," which was produced by a Ukrainian politician who happened to be present in a meeting in the White House with the "whistle blower" in attendance, representing Biden, and where the firing of the prosecutor was discussed, the made up "ledger" was printed on the front page of the New York Times in August, leading up the the election.
The New York Times is so deep into this scandal, pushing the Alpha Bank lies, lies which Hillary was also pushing, and which are at the center of our current wag-the-dog exercise with Russia in Ukraine, and which are at the center of greatly increased tensions with another nuclear power, the New York Times maybe had best stick to reporting just the news, and recuse themselves from the story. Of course if they do, it will never get reported.
Reading the New York Times trying to come up with a "Byzantine" enough explanation for this to bamboozle their readers is like Aunt Polly listening to Huck and Tom explaining what they were up to this morning. It might be entertaining, but it's not going to touch on the truth very heavily.
If the Alpha Bank story had has a shred of truth to it, then the "it was just conflict of interest" line might hold a little water.
Not a challenge at all. Anything that hurts a Democrat will be ignored. Easy.
'So now, appropriately, the media is going to perform its due diligence and look into Durham’s charges rather than echo them in credulous headlines....'
So like all the due diligence that was done around the Russia collusion hoax...that kind of due diligence?
Pull the other one...
Bitter clingers, counting on the ignorance and incuriousness of their audience of bitter clingers.
Jonathan Chait speaks of "journalistic objectivity"? When donkeys fly, Chait will have objectivity.
The charges in the filing — an alleged conflict of interest by a technology executive — fell far short of the broader conspiracy Durham is insinuating.
No. Chait is once again being an idiot
It's not just conflict of interest. It's that the "technology executive" hacked the DNS servers for the White House and forwarded the records of White House DNS traffic to Democratic operatives so that they could keep tabs on what the Trump White House was searching for on the internet.
Access to WH DNS servers is top secret access only. Forwarding out ANY data from the WH complex without explicit authorization is a Federal offense.
This is fucking huge, especially when one attempts to figure out the number of people involved in positions of trusted authority to make this happen.
I know of what I speak. I did computer support at the Executive Office of the President from 1983 to 1991 and then had three task orders until 1995. I know that environment.
Right wingers pounce!
The unexciting reality that the mainstream media was going to wait until Monday to report Durham’s hazy allegations was not one they could imagine, because it is premised on following conventions of journalistic objectivity that they can’t fathom."
Hard to imagine, perhaps, after years of the mainstream media rushing to publish unsubstantiated if not fabricated claims about Trump based on anonymous sources?
I think we understand how the press is supposed to work.
We also understand that in its 400 our so years it never has.
In the past nobody, certainly not msm, pretended that it worked. They put their prejudices right out front eg; "the Bumfook Democrat" or the "podunk Republican" they never really pretended to be objective. They understood that they basically entertainment.
Fook 'em
John LGBTQBNY Henry
"So now, appropriately, the media is going to perform its due diligence and look into Durham’s charges rather than echo them in credulous headlines.... The charges in the filing — an alleged conflict of interest by a technology executive — fell far short of the broader conspiracy Durham is insinuating."
That's rich. I don't recall such similar cautious, due diligence in the media looking into the various allegations levied against Trump. In fact, I recall them being echoed quite furiously in credulous headlines. But your mileage may vary. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
If only we understood how the press is supposed to work. And if only we had certain special people who were there to explain it to us.
I see the JournOlist is still alive and getting their stories lined up. Durham is continuing his work. The difference, it seems, between Durham's investigation and Mueller's is that the former is keeping things very quiet, in a tightly run, professional investigation. The latter had an open office with his chief investigators acting as concierge for the NY Times and WaPo teams. Perhaps Chait is not familiar with tight, professionally run investigations that don't leak?
There's much more to come. What was just released is not the story. The Story is yet to come. This was the tease- to use a broadcast term. If only we had special people to explain broadcasting to us as well.
The latest alarmist claims about spying on Trump appeared to be flawed, but the explanation is byzantine
Shorter Savage: I could try to explain it to you, but it's better for us both if you just trust me.
"The unexciting reality that the mainstream media was going to wait until Monday..."
Can you even count the number of breathless reports about the Trump investigation that met us daily, on every network. Reports that NEVER turned out to be true. Yet, how many retraction articles do you recall on those breathless stories?
Indeed, Mr. Chait. Tell me about how journalism works.
It's true I've never ever read about breaking news over the weekend. Never ever. Because journalists really need their beauty sleep.
Will the Pulitzer Committee revoke the prizes for Russian Collusion reporting, I wonder?
The "technology executive" didn't "hack" anything, he used his position and authority to gain access to privileged information that his company handled and used that innocent data regarding marketing emails sent from the Trump Tower, some of which happened to alight at Alpha Bank, to create a false narrative and used that false narrative to smear Trump in hopes of landing a job in the Clinton Administration, or at least at the Clinton Foundation.
Then the lie he concocted was pushed to the FBI, which apparently made little or no effort to see through it. Glenn Greenwald published the story which explained it almost perfectly as marketing email spam, some of which was clicked on, by people interested in Trump International Resorts, or in fact, they may have just opened the emails, which would have sent data requests from Alpha Bank back to Trump Tower and Trump International's marketing servers.
The FBI wanted to be fooled, the same as the New York Times wanted to be fooled. This is the same FBI that lied to obtain FISA warrants to spy on Trump.
For many years there has been a suspicion among FBI Counterintelligence officials that Donald Trump was being manipulated, controlled, recruited and exploited by Russian Intelligence.
In 1994, FBI Counterintelligence began to debrief Yuri Shvets, a former Russian KGB official. Eventually Shvets told FBI Counterintelligence that Russian Intelligence had begun the process of recruiting Trump in 1987.
Gradually, through the course of years, FBI Counterintelligence developed this suspicion about Trump.
In 2011, a Ukrainian lawsuit was filed in New York about alleged embezzlement of money from the Ukrainian natural-gas industry. Some details of the lawsuit's documentation indicated that some of the embezzled money was used to purchases real estate in New York. Some of the purchases were to to be accomplished through a New York real-estate company that was co-owned by Paul Manafort and that seemed to be associated with Fred Trump, the father of Donald Trump.
In 2015, the FBI investigated an international gambling ring that was based in Russian and that operated partially in a suite in Trump Tower.
Based on these and other considerations, some FBI Counterintelligence officials and some top FBI officials -- in particular, FBI Director James Comey -- became paranoid about Trump when he began to run for President in 2015.
In the following years, these few paranoid zealots in the FBI poisoned our country's politics. After Trump was elected, they tried to remove Trump from his elected position.
The "investigation" conducted by Robert "The FBI Whitewasher" Mueller spent a couple of years trying to lure President Trump into an obstruction-of-justice situation that would enable Congress to impeach Trump and remove him from his elected office.
This effort was essentially an FBI operation. Mueller himself was a former FBI Director, and he manned his investigation's staff with FBI officials.
========
The suspicion that Trump was being used by Russian Intelligence was a real belief that obsessed FBI Counterintelligence officials and eventually many other people.
There was a mass hysteria. There was a witch-hunt.
========
Durham seems to be making good progress in exposing much of the nonsense.
However, Durham will not prosecute much major crime. Rather, he will prosecute some process crimes. For example, some individuals fibbed about some details to the FBI. For example, a computer company abused its special access to some Internet data.
However, the big picture is that many people foolishly came to false beliefs about Trump. They became zealots. They really thought Trump was a secret agent of Russian Intelligence.
They were kooky zealots who hated Trump so much that they were convinced by flimsy, stupid "evidence". In general, though, their actions were not criminal.
This is right out of the Clinton's 1990's playbook:
1) Deny everything
2) Attack the attackers
3) Claim you are saving the country
Check, check, and check...
Paranoia is an occupational hazard of counter-intelligence officials. It's their job to suspect that some very important people might be working for foreign Intelligence.
James Comey failed to control such paranoids in the FBI. On the contrary, he himself became paranoid.
Appointing Robert "The FBI Whitewasher" Mueller to investigate the situation was a huge mistake. The investigation should have been conducted by someone from outside the FBI -- by someone capable of skepticism and criticism about the FBI -- by someone who was not suffering from dementia.
Suppose John Durham had been appointed instead of Mueller in 2017. Durham would have tried to figure out what really had happened. Durham would not have hired exclusively Trump-hating FBI officials and Trump-hating lawyers. Durham would not have wasted his efforts trying to lure President Trump into an obstruction-of-justice situation.
Trump should have wiped his servers... you know, with a cloth.
Durham dropped his filing on Friday evening, and now, on Tuesday evening, the liberal media is still grappling with how to spin that filing, oops, I mean “explain why the plain language of the filing is not what it is really about.”
Got it.
ah the founder of New York Magazine, regrets what a trash publication chaitred and others have turned his publlication into, sally quinn admitted he hexed him into an early death, because jealousy
"Due diligence" and "nuance" means the MSM needs time to coordinate its talking points with the Democratic party.
rhhardin said...
"The right-wing story doesn't make sense to me though. What has spying to do with making stuff up? You don't need to spy to make stuff up."
They were doing both activities, spying and framing -- either would serve their purposes.
Lock Her Up!
Lock her up!
YoungHegelian, you are certainly right to say that this is effing huge. I say it's effing huge as well and more shoes will drop as the rats scramble to avoid or reduce jail sentences.
On the tech side, there's the theft and disclosure of the DNS data from the White House and the Office of the President. I think that's 20-year crime. On the receiving side of that data, obviously obtained illegally, I think 15-20 years.
On the planning, design, and conspiratorial organization side of things, they should be looking at disbarment, loss of office, if held, loss of security clearance for life, and possibly 10.
For Hillary, total loss of everything in the eyes of US citizens and thorough damnation in the historical record. That will be her legacy.
This is far worse that what Nixon and his plumbers did.
If only Chait and Savage would read the comments here. America is on to their BS. America hates the Fake News.
Comey worked for the Clinton foundation and as a shot caller for hsbc one of the premier laundries of illicit cash, they carved up what was left of arthur anderson, they swallowed up Safras Republic bank (bill browder was his protege) he was rewarded with the directorship for sabotaging the counter terror efforts, (some might say fatally in the case of the madrid train bombings)
To the FBI's credit, the FBI kept secret its suspicions about Trump colluding with Russian Intelligence.
That suspicion was revealed to the public by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.
Well, now we know where Chait stands. He won't eat his words under any circumstances, so this show is over. I am trying to remember his excoriation of the coverage of the Mueller investigation. Maybe I missed it.
The suspicion about Alfa Bank was not really an FBI concern after Trump became a politician.
In around 2014-2015, the FBI investigated an international gambling ring that was based in Russia and that operated in a Trump Tower suite. The FBI monitored its communications and subsequently seized documents and computers. That gambling ring used Alfa Bank to manage its money.
However, the FBI did not find any evidence that there was any relationship between the gambling ring, the bank, and Trump.
Apparently, however, some Trump-hating American computer experts thought that, nevertheless, there might be some relationship involving Alfa Bank and Trump. The computer experts fished around in the Internet and eventually provided some "evidence" to the FBI, which soon dismissed it as useless.
A mysterious effort was made to make Sergey Millian into a link between Alfa Bank and Trump. However, I don't think that this was an FBI effort.
Rather, I think that effort was done by Christopher Steele. I think that Steele recruited a Millian employee who had access to Millian's business computer. I think this employee used that computer to use Alfa Bank to arrange a company medical-insurance policy that was funded from an Alfa Bank account. Then the Trump-hating computer experts tried to use that link somehow in their research.
Maybe Durham will explain that mystery. However, I think the FBI had nothing to do with those particular shenanigans involving Alfa Bank.
Dammit I was just thinking I needed more advice from Jonathan “I hate George Bush” Chait. Having been an award-winning editor back when news was mostly formed by facts I probably am, what’s the word, ignorant of “how the press is supposed to work.” Please tell Johnny.
"The way the press works" is that stories you want to bury are released on Friday afternoon. Durham didn't understand stand that. So what? How does that affect the truth and significance of his charges.
I suppose another reading is that Durham expected that reporters wouldn't look into his charges if he released them on Friday, but the so diligent reporters really are scrutinizing them carefully. That's a ridiculously self-serving view of the media. And Durham wants his story to be buried by releasing it on Friday thinking reporters won't investigate? That makes no sense.
In any case is it really still true that the media takes weekends off?
Over the next 9 months more and more corrosive stuff is going to come out about Hillary.
It's a replay of when Hillary ran for president. Just awful revelations each week for months and months and months... leading up to a disgust of what kind of creature she is.
I don't know if they will dig up enough to send her to jail but.. they will dig up enough to make sure she never gets even the Democrat nomination to run for president.
She is toast. Past history. And her name is Mudd.
The NYT faked the Palin-as-murderer story.
From the FBI's perspective, the suspicion about Alfa Bank and Trump is a peripheral issue. After the FBI broke up the gambling ring in Trump Tower and examined the ring's materials, equipment and communications, the FBI recognized that such suspicions were a dead end.
Later, however, the suspicion about Alfa Bank and Trump was picked up by an amorphous group comprising Christopher Steele, Michael Sussman, the Trump-hating computer experts, Hillary Clinton, etc.
It seems that Steele tried implicate Sergey Millian in this suspicion. Millian headed a Russian-American Chamber of Commerce, and so Millian had an account at Alfa Bank. I think that Steele recruited an employee of Millian to spy on Millian for Steele. This employee used Millian's computer to transact some business through Alfa Bank, and those transactions were studied by the Trump-hating computer experts.
This suspicion about Alfa Bank was just nonsense on stilts. As if Trump would communicate secretly with Russian Intelligence through Alfa Bank!
Nevertheless, Sussman tried to convince the FBI to study seriously this Alfa Bank nonsense.
When doing so, Sussman concealed from the FBI that he was getting paid by the Clinton campaign to push this and other nonsense onto the FBI. What Durham has done recently is to insist that separate lawyers must be hired to represent various people in legal proceedings that are developing.
The essence is that Sussman pushed anti-Trump research onto the FBI while concealing from the FBI that he was being paid ultimately by the Clinton campaign. It's just a process crime, but Sussman might agree to implicate people in the Clinton campaign.
There is a tangled mess of relationships involving Sussman, Steele, etc. that separate lawyers must be hired.
The leftwing press who pushed the fake Russian collusion story... are now aiding Hillary and bashing Durham.
wow are we shocked.
Will the Repubs pounce,
or will they exercise their inner Bob Dole or Mittens?
Russian hookers bouncing on a pissed hotel bed a much simpler tale to tell.
After five of Liddy's operatives were arrested inside the DNC offices on June 17, 1972, G. Gordon Liddy was tried and convicted in March of 1973. Nixon was forced to resign in August 1974, after a whole summer of well-run show trials, err, congressional hearings.
This stuff started in 2016 and has continued for the past six years. As Dementia Joe is fond of saying, although he may not remember why, "C'mon, man!" Send someone to jail already!
Thank you, Mr. Chait. The same press that blew every tiny thing about Russiagate into a huge deal, treating unsubstantiated allegations as incontrovertible fact, now thinks that they should be very very careful before even reporting on the counter-Russia-gate. Makes perfect sense, for them.
Althouse I think you need a "journalism-ethics bullshit" tag. This extraordinary and inviolable commitment to the standards of their profession only apply when they don't want to cover a story. When they get hold of something that helps the narratives they support, full speed ahead. Most of us have seen through this for a long time now.
This is separate from whether Durham's charges are what the right is saying they are. I have no idea. But for mainstream journalists to now cloak themselves in professionalism is a joke.
Accuracy Matters... https://youtu.be/hRZUXlD0FBI
New York Times deploys the Chewbacca Defense!
It has become clear that there is no recovery nor cure for Hillary Derangement Syndrome.
6 years later and she still has a penthouse rent free in your heads.
I have to wonder what you and her are doing rent free in your head. Hope your wives aren't jealous.
"More importantly, Durham has an established history of floating allegations that disintegrate upon inspection"
People living in glass houses shouldn't throw stones
I don't know whether Chait is right that Durham over-promises or if he is simply capitalizing on the reality that there are rarely consequences for misbehavior that furthers a left-wing cause. I had to laugh at this:
I described his last filing as a 'Hannity monologue wrapped around a parking ticket.'
It's a good line, but quoting yourself like this is poor form. All it tells me is Chait has so few good lines that he needs to use them more than once.
I didn't realize that the work of professionals ends on friday at 5pm. Buncha lazy people.
Someone suggested to the Trump-hating computer experts that there might be some secret communications between a particular Trump-Tower computer and the Alfa Bank computer -- and these communications were part of a Russian plot to affect the USA's Presidential election in 2016. So, those patriotic computer experts collected they data that they were able to collect.
* On day X, the Trump Tower computer contacted Alfa Bank
* On day Y, the Alfa Bank computer contacted the Trump Tower computer.
And so forth. This collection of data continued past the election.
The patriotic computer experts hoped that this collected data might help the US Intelligence Community to investigate the Trump-Russia plot.
The computer experts gave the data to Michael Sussman, who offered it to the FBI and CIA.
However, the data was worthless. It did not prove anything about any such plot.
The computer experts thought they were doing a good thing, and so they have told Durham everything they knew and did in this situation. Perhaps they violated some clause in a government project. If so, they will get their wrists slapped.
Durham is using this situation to pressure Sussman in process crimes. When Sussman offered the data to the FBI and to the CIA, he concealed the fact that his effort was being guided and funded ultimately by Hillary Clinton's campaign.
Durham is pressuring Sussman to squeal about that guidance and funding.
======
The suspicion about Alfa Bank is nonsense on stilts. If Trump and Russian Intelligence were colluding to affect the USA Presidential election, they would not communicate through Russia's Alfa Bank.
The FBI and CIA had nothing to do with the Alfa Bank nonsense and were not interested in such data.
In general, the CIA had practically nothing to do with the suspicion that Trump was colluding with Russian Intelligence.
Rather, this suspicion developed within the FBI -- specifically, within the FBI Counterintelligence Division.
The FBI did not think that Alfa Bank was involved. Rather, the FBI thought that Trump and Russian Intelligence were communicating mainly through Carter Page.
Bunch of tabloids are mad because their stories ended up being fake, and they were the ones conned by the Clinton Cartel.
Notice that there is no substantive refutation of the allegations from the Hillary fans here.
rhhardin writes, "The right wing story doesn't make sense to me though. What has spying to do with making stuff up? You don't need to spy to make stuff up.
Nevertheless, the history of spying is more replete with "making stuff up" than not. Sometimes a spy makes stuff up because that's his mission, which may be to confuse his handlers, the classic double agent scenario, e.g. the Garbo affair that helped keep two panzer divisions waiting for the "real" D-Day in the Pas-de-Calais that never happened, or to discredit true information that could advantage the enemy. However, most of the time spies make shit up to keep getting paid, and it is one of the primary duties of an intelligence officer to know when a "Joe" is being truthful and when he's being an asshole since most spies are desperate, greedy people rather than ideological heroes risking their lives for democracy or the worker's paradise, that's most of the time.
Mark said...6 years later and she still has a penthouse rent free in your heads.
Ummm...not getting the concept? People are reacting to a current news story. That's not what living rent free means.
Mark said...6 years later and she still has a penthouse rent free in your heads.
Poor little Mark. He trusted and believed the lying Propaganda media and now his head is going to explode as the truth trickles out. Get help Mark. You are going to need it.
"So, those patriotic computer experts collected they data that they were able to collect."
Except we know this is not true, not leastways because any computer "expert" with reason to have access the data for his job knew that the data proved nothing whatsoever. I say this as a former data-comm tech, back in the day, as a part time job when I was back in school, who had the ability to put a data scope on sensitive data, and save it to files, should I so choose.
The left is spinning so hard it’s a miracle they can still stand up in the face of such dizziness. The interesting story is going to see how they obfuscate to convince themselves that there is nothing to see here. It’s a study in self-delusion.
Btw, what exactly is the left’s explanation for how the Russian collusion fake story came about? Or are they still claiming that Trump was a collider with Vlad?
Good summary, what Mike wroteabove. As a Trump hating computer expert, that's just about how I see it, minus a few inferences.
Law360, New York (February 16, 2022, 11:38 AM EST) -- Former New York Observer editor-in-chief Kenneth Kurson pled guilty Wednesday to two misdemeanor cybercrime counts for allegedly spying on his wife's computer in the midst of their divorce and will serve no jail time as part of a plea deal with the Manhattan district attorney. Kurson, a close friend of former President Donald Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner, was previously pardoned by Trump for related federal charges.
Maybe Durham should have the NY DA negotiate with Sussman.
The traffic to Alpha Bank was marketing emails from Trump's international resort business. This email went all over the world to all kinds of people, when the email is opened, messaging goes back and forth between the workstation opening the emails, and the servers in Trump Towers, producing back and forth traffic. Every email marketing campaign produces similar traffic and thousands of them produced traffic between their servers and Alpha Bank. Still the New York Times and the Hillary campaign pushed this as nefarious, when in fact it was benign, as benign as email spam can be, anyway. This data was private. Joffe had access to it due to his position in a project contracted to the government.
This is interesting:
n the filing, Durham says Sussman in February 2017 presented officials at a U.S. government agency — the CIA — with information derived from internet traffic that Sussmann said showed that “Trump and/or his associates were using supposedly rare, Russian-made wireless phones in the vicinity of the White House and other locations.”
The Durham team said it has identified no support for those allegations, and said the “purportedly suspicious” data Sussmann was drawing from actually showed that internet traffic involving the Executive Office of the President and the Russian phone provider had begun at least as early as 2014 — when Barack Obama was in the White House.
The court filing says Sussmann relied on data gathered by a technology executive he worked with whose company, according to Durham, helped maintain servers for the White House.
The executive, Rodney Joffe, enlisted the help of computer researchers who were already analyzing large amounts of internet data through a federal government cybersecurity research contract, tasking them with mining information to establish an “inference” tying Trump to Russia, the court filing says. The researchers exploited domain name system internet traffic at locations including Trump Tower, Trump’s Central Park West apartment building and the Executive Office of the President, or EOP, Durham said.
I guess that "tapped his phone lines" is close enough, unless you are looking for an extremely lawyerly denial.
It's amazing how Hillary's defenders here just keep walking past the fact that the FBI lied to the FISA court in order to spy on Trump based on easily seen through nonsense from the traitorous Clinton campaign.
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