Hillary Clinton’s Other Dossier

The 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign’s bogus Steele dossier of allegations against Donald Trump deserves its infamy in the annals of political abuses. But if a Friday filing by Justice Department special counsel John Durham is accurate, the creation of yet another Clinton-backed bundle of deceptions was no less appalling.

Brooke Singman of Fox News reported on Friday:

“Lawyers for the Clinton campaign paid a technology company to “infiltrate” servers belonging to Trump Tower, and later the White House, in order to establish an “inference” and “narrative” to bring to government agencies linking Donald Trump to Russia, a filing from Special Counsel John Durham says.

“Durham filed a motion on Feb. 11 focused on potential conflicts of interest related to the representation of former Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann, who has been charged with making a false statement to a federal agent. Sussmann has pleaded not guilty.”

The current case hinges on whether Mr. Sussmann, then at the Perkins Coie law firm, was honest about his work for the Clinton campaign. But the other alleged abuses described by the special counsel in Friday’s filing appear to be far worse. Mr. Durham’s story of the extreme lengths that Clinton allies allegedly went to gather information and then misrepresent it to harm Mr. Trump will leave many readers asking how any of this could possibly have been legal.

Jerry Dunleavy at the Washington Examiner posts a copy of the Durham filing, which lays out the alleged effort by Mr. Sussmann and others to tie Mr. Trump to the Russian Alfa Bank by harvesting internet data from Trump Tower and even the White House and then selectively disclosing it to government officials:

As set forth in the Indictment, on Sept. 19, 2016 – less than two months before the 2016 U.S. Presidential election – the defendant… met with the FBI General Counsel at FBI Headquarters in Washington, D.C. The defendant provided the FBI General Counsel with purported data and “white papers” that allegedly demonstrated a covert communications channel between the Trump Organization and a Russia-based bank…

Mr. Durham’s filing alleges that a technology executive enlisted the help of various corporate and university researchers to assemble a sort of digital dossier:

“In connection with these efforts, Tech Executive-1 exploited his access to non-public and/or proprietary Internet data. Tech Executive-1 also enlisted the assistance of researchers at a U.S.-based university who were receiving and analyzing large amounts of Internet data in connection with a pending federal government cybersecurity research contract. Tech Executive-1 tasked these researchers to mine Internet data to establish “an inference” and “narrative” tying then-candidate Trump to Russia. In doing so, Tech Executive-1 indicated that he was seeking to please certain “VIPs,” referring to individuals at Law Firm-1 and the Clinton Campaign.”

As a tiny baby step toward accountability, can taxpayers at least be assured that the characters who participated in this outrage will never again receive any federal contracts? Wait, the story from Mr. Durham gets worse:

“The Government’s evidence at trial will also establish that among the Internet data Tech Executive-1 and his associates exploited was domain name system (“DNS”) Internet traffic pertaining to (i) a particular healthcare provider, (ii) Trump Tower, (iii) Donald Trump’s Central Park West apartment building, and (iv) the Executive Office of the President of the United States (“EOP”). (Tech Executive-1’s employer, Internet Company-1, had come to access and maintain dedicated servers for the EOP as part of a sensitive arrangement whereby it provided DNS resolution services to the EOP. Tech Executive-1 and his associates exploited this arrangement by mining the EOP’s DNS traffic and other data for the purpose of gathering derogatory information about Donald Trump.)”

As if it wasn’t bad enough that an executive at a technology company was allegedly abusing the company’s relationship with the White House to run a hostile data-collection program, the data were then allegedly misrepresented to suggest a routine occurrence was evidence of some nefarious Trump plot. The special counsel’s filing describes another meeting between Mr. Sussmann and an official of a federal agency in which the lawyer allegedly described the data from the Trump offices:

“…the defendant provided data which he claimed reflected purportedly suspicious DNS lookups by these entities of internet protocol (“IP”) addresses affiliated with a Russian mobile phone provider (“Russian Phone Provider-1”). The defendant further claimed that these 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. The Special Counsel’s Office has identified no support for these allegations. Indeed, more complete DNS data that the Special Counsel’s Office obtained from a company that assisted Tech Executive-1 in assembling these allegations reflects that such DNS lookups were far from rare in the United States. For example, the more complete data that Tech Executive-1 and his associates gathered – but did not provide to [the government agency] – 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 U.S.-based IP addresses. Fewer than 1,000 of these lookups originated with IP addresses affiliated with Trump Tower. In addition, the more complete data assembled by Tech Executive-1 and his associates reflected that DNS lookups involving the EOP and Russian Phone Provider-1 began at least as early 2014 (i.e., during the Obama administration and years before Trump took office) – another fact which the allegations omitted.

To sum up the special counsel’s argument in this case, an appalling abuse of private and public resources to gather dirt on Donald Trump did not turn up any dirt. So the alleged perpetrators just pretended they had found something significant and tried to persuade federal agencies that Mr. Trump had disturbing connections to Russians. Mr. Sussmann maintains that he is not guilty and deserves the presumption of innocence just like everybody else.”

As for the political campaign that was paying the bills, was there anything that Hillary Clinton would not do to her 2016 opponent?