[RETRACTED] Durham Probe of Plot Against Trump Grows Damning: 'Someone in Gov Gave Them Permission,' DC Insider Says
RETRACTION, Feb. 22, 2022: This article was based on comments by Kash Patel that mischaracterized material in a court filing by special counsel John Durham on Feb. 11. No one in the government is alleged to have given “permission” to tech executive Rodney Joffe to access the network and gather information about Trump, as Patel implied and our headline repeated. Rather, Durham’s filing alleged that Joffe “exploited” already-existing access related to a federal contract to provide “DNS resolution services” to the Executive Office of the President. The article also repeated the false but oft-reported claim that Durham alleged that Hillary Clinton or her campaign paid technology executives to “infiltrate” Donald Trump’s computer in search of damning information regarding his relationship with Russia. The document makes no such allegation, and certainly contains no information backing up Patel’s claim that the Clinton campaign “paid millions and millions of dollars to go out and buy false information from a tech executive.” Because these claims appear throughout the article, The Western Journal has chosen to retract it, rather than revise it. The article appears as originally published below, except that in several cases the spelling of Michael’s Sussmann’s name has been corrected. We apologize to Mr. Sussmann for the error.
Speculation has emerged that the former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s campaign’s tentacles reached into the Trump White House as part of the conspiracy to smear the 45th president.
On Friday, special prosecutor John Durham rattled the political world with a court filing that alleged lawyers for the Clinton campaign hired a technology company to infiltrate computer servers and lay a false trail that would implicate the Trump campaign of having contacts with Russia, according to Fox News.
Durham, hired to investigate the early stages of the Trump-Russia hoax and root out misconduct, has secured the indictment of Michael Sussmann, a lawyer who represented the Clinton campaign, who has been accused of lying to the FBI. In November, Democratic operative Igor Danchenko, a contributor to a since-discredited dossier of claims concerning Trump, was charged with five counts of making false statements to the FBI.
They didn’t just spy on Donald Trump’s campaign.
They spied on Donald Trump as sitting President of the United States.
It was all even worse than we thought. https://t.co/z991l7Mc9r
— Mark Meadows (@MarkMeadows) February 12, 2022
On Monday, Kash Patel, a former chief of staff to the acting secretary of defense in the waning days of the Trump administration and one of the investigators who exposed the Steele dossier of claims against Trump as a fraud, offered his take on the Durham filing.
In an interview with Newsmax host Greg Kelly, Patel called the actions of those involved in the Russia hoax, “the biggest criminal conspiracy against a sitting president in the United States history.”
Members of Team Clinton “were paid millions and millions of dollars to go out and buy false information from a tech executive,” he said.
“And here’s the worst part. They secured a, quote, ‘sensitive arrangement’ with someone in government to gain access to White House servers. That means someone in government gave them permission and paid the contracting tech executive company’s firm to allow that work to happen,” he said.
Listen to Kash Patel ??
Trust Durham pic.twitter.com/o4kVPShWW2
— ??❤️Vanessa❤️?? (@VanessaL1776) February 16, 2022
Although Durham’s focus ends in early 2017, when the Trump administration was just sliding into its desks, Patel’s speculation aligns with extensive leaks from within that plagued the administration for much of its first months.
“That could only have been done with the utilization of the intelligence community willingly. And that, to me, is the biggest criminal scandal that we have yet to talk about,” he said.
The whole Patel interview with Newsmax is below:
Durham’s new filing stated that Sussmann, who insisted he was not working for anyone when he tried to tempt the FBI into investigating Trump, “had assembled and conveyed the allegations to the FBI on behalf of at least two specific clients, including a technology executive (Tech Executive 1) at a U.S.-based internet company (Internet Company 1) and the Clinton campaign.”
At the time, Sussmann was an attorney with the law firm of Perkins Coie, which represented the Clinton campaign.
Sussmann’s “billing records reflect” that he “repeatedly billed the Clinton Campaign for his work on the Russian Bank-1 allegations,” the filing states.
Kash Patel: “John Durham has interviewed 24 people in the grand jury to include, CIA case officers, FBI agents and directors, leadership in the Clinton Campaign cycle, and they’ve indicted her lawyer. So this is just starting. It’s how you build a criminal conspiracy case.” pic.twitter.com/SA7uF2G264
— Daniel Chaitin (@danielchaitin7) February 16, 2022
“In connection with these efforts, Tech Executive-1 exploited his access to non-public and/or proprietary Internet data,” the filing stated. “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,” the filing stated. “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.”
“Law Firm-1” is unnamed in the filing but is described as “a large international law firm that was then serving as counsel to the Clinton Campaign.” That describes Perkins Coie.
The filing stated that Tech Executive-1 and his associates exploited domain name system 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).”
The firm Tech Executive-1 was with “had come to access and maintain dedicated servers” for the Executive Office of the President as “part of a sensitive arrangement whereby it provided DNS resolution services to the EOP,” according to the filing, which added, that “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.”
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