Trump Allegation of Illegal Spying From Durham Filing Misses the Mark

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Trumpworld erupted over a new court filing from special counsel John Durham. They said the filing contains definitive proof that Democrats illegally spied on Trump in 2016 and 2017. But the filing says nothing of the sort. LoadingSomething is loading.

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’s 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,” adding that such conduct “would have been punishable by death.”

Ronna Romney McDaniel, the chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, blasted out a tweet demanding “accountability” and saying Durham’s filing showed “the Trump campaign and White House were illegally spied on, paid for by the Clinton campaign.”

But, as is often the case when Trump renews allegations that he was the target of an elaborate domestic espionage effort orchestrated by the Clinton campaign, the facts say differently.

What the Durham filing actually says

For one, Friday’s 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 Michael 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 unfounded allegation that the Trump campaign used a secret email server to communicate with Russia’s Alfa Bank during the 2016 campaign.

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 tested 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. Despite Trump’s claim that the Clinton campaign “paid” operatives to spy on him, the filing does not say that Neustar was on his payroll.

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, and the executive office of the president (EOP). 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.

Trump and his allies have pointed to this allegation — that some of the internet data that Joffe mined was connected to two Manhattan properties Trump and the White House — as being the smoking gun that proves he was spied on by his political opponents.

But, as Durham pointed out later in the filing, these DNS lookups started as early as 2014 and continued until early 2017. In other words, the majority of them took place when Barack Obama was in office, directly undermining Trump’s claim that he was politically targeted by them.

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 of all of the data they used was nonprivate DNS data from before Trump took office.”

A spokesperson for Joffe told The Times 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 .

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, told Insider contractor. “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.”

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

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.

In this case, 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. But “spying” or “hacking” indicates that someone illegally accessed the data in the first place. None of the details outlined in Friday’s filing rise to that level.

“If I give you a key to my house and you use it to come in and read my diary, I will certainly be angry with you, but it’s not like you committed burglary,” The Post’s Philip Bump wrote.

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.

That doesn’t mean Durham won’t bring more serious charges down the line related to Democratic efforts to establish a Trump-Russia link. It just means that Friday’s filing doesn’t lay out any such efforts that would constitute what Trump has described as treasonous conduct punishable by death.

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