Following Radio Silence on Durham Filing, NY Times Writer Spins Like a Top for Hillary Clinton

 

When the bombshell news broke last weekend that Hillary Clinton’s campaign had obtained data from servers at the White House, Trump Tower, former President Donald Trump’s residence, and a health care provider, spliced it, presented it to the FBI and the CIA as evidence that Trump had colluded with the Kremlin to win the 2016 election and requested that they promptly investigate, the legacy media obediently ignored it.

By Monday, the story had become so huge in the conservative media, they realized they probably had to address it because they are ostensibly journalists after all.

The New York Times’ assigned “crackerjack” reporter Charlie Savage to the task. In his article, entitled “Court Filing Started a Furor in Right-Wing Outlets, but Their Narrative Is Off Track,” Savage writes that Durham’s Friday filing “set off a furor among right-wing outlets about purported spying” on Trump.

Throughout the piece, Savage brings up irrelevant details, i.e. straw men, in Durham’s motion and tries in vain to knock them down, rightly knowing that most of his readers will never read the actual document.

He tells readers that “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.”

Savage calls Special Counsel John Durham’s criminal inquiry into the origins of Crossfire Hurricane, the FBI’s bogus investigation into the Trump campaign, “the inquiry into Russia’s 2016 election interference.”

He identifies former Perkins Coie partner Michael Sussmann, who was the attorney for Clinton campaign, the DNC, the DSCC and the DCCC, who repeatedly billed the Clinton campaign for his services throughout this period, and who was indicted in September for lying to the FBI, as simply a “cybersecurity lawyer with links to the Democratic Party.”

Big links Charlie. Big, deep, well-documented links.

Savage claims that none of the actions taken by either Sussmann or Rodney Joffe were illegal. He may be right. But the actions were completely unprecedented in political campaign history, unethical at best, and some may ultimately be found to be illegal.

Joffe, who is Tech Executive-1 in Durham’s motion (and in his September indictment of Sussman), was the top security officer at Neustar Inc., a major tech company that was under contact with the Executive Office of the President. His position with Neustar gave him access to White House server data which he provided to Sussmann to build the Clinton campaign’s fraudulent narrative that Trump was an agent of Russia.

Savage writes: “In a statement, a spokesperson for Mr. Joffe said that ‘contrary to the allegations in this recent filing,’ he was apolitical, did not work for any political party, and had lawful access under a contract to work with others to analyze DNS data — including from the White House — for the purpose of hunting for security breaches or threats.”

Joffe was not “working” for the Democratic Party and he did have lawful access to this data. That is where the truth ends.

Having “lawful access” to something does not mean that one can take it and pass it on to others who don’t have access to it. If I work for the IRS, thus having access to an individual’s tax returns, that doesn’t entitle me to provide them to someone outside the IRS. I’m pretty sure that’s not allowed.

The highly partisan Joffe had a personal incentive in this fraud and that was his hope of obtaining a top cybersecurity position in what they all believed would be the Hillary Clinton administration. In an email included in the Sussman indictment, Joffe writes: “I was tentatively offered the top [cybersecurity] job by the Democrats when it looked like they’d win. I definitely would not take the job under Trump.”

Additionally, The Washington Examiner’s Conn Carroll points out that “Joffe was the one who had originally approached Sussmann with the bogus story about Trump’s relationship with Alfa Bank. Are we to believe that Joffe, a supposed cybersecurity expert, had no idea Sussmann worked for Hillary Clinton and the Democrats? Or that Sussmann’s firm, Perkins Coie, represented the Clinton campaign and every Democratic organization in D.C.?”

Carroll notes another absurd claim in Savage’s piece. Savage wrote, “the filing never said the White House data that came under scrutiny was from the Trump era.”

But Durham’s motion states (emphasis added):

6. The Indictment further details that on February 9, 2017, the defendant provided an updated set of allegations – including the Russian Bank-1 data and additional allegations relating to Trump – to a second agency of the U.S. government (“Agency-2”). The Government’s evidence at trial will establish that these additional allegations relied, in part, on the purported DNS traffic that Tech Executive-1 and others had assembled pertaining to Trump Tower, Donald Trump’s New York City apartment building, the EOP, and the aforementioned healthcare provider. In his meeting with Agency-2, 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.

“If the ‘data’ used by Sussmann in the CIA meeting was not ‘from the Trump era,’ then why does the indictment say Sussmann claimed the data showed ‘Trump and/or his associates were using supposedly rare, Russian-made wireless phones in the vicinity of the White House?'” Carroll argues.

And Carroll draws the following conclusion: “Joffe knew exactly who Sussmann was when he first came to him with his Alfa Bank story. Sussmann, being the political operative he is, knew exactly how to weaponize that information, enlisting and informing the Clinton campaign and their top lawyers, and then planting the story with friendly members of the press.”

Dan Bongino found another grossly misleading passage in the article. Savage writes:

After Russians hacked networks for the White House and Democrats in 2015 and 2016, it went on, the cybersecurity researchers were “deeply concerned” to find data suggesting Russian-made YotaPhones were in proximity to the Trump campaign and the White House, so “prepared a report of their findings, which was subsequently shared with the C.I.A.”

A spokesman for Mr. Durham declined to comment.

“The White House constantly monitors White House DNS data for signs of foreign interference. This is not what Durham is alleging,” Bongino told viewers.

Savage omits the fact that Joffe was also monitoring traffic around Trump Tower and other Trump locations and Sussman took this data, manipulated it to fit their objectives.

“Sharing the data with the CIA via a lawyer working with the Clinton campaign who’s trying to paint a story, according to the allegations, of Trump’s ties to Russia, not surveillance around the White House, he leaves all of those key points out.”

Savage is trying to make readers believe, Bongino explains, that this everyday function of security agents monitoring DNS data of the EOP, discovered this nefarious activity.

“That’s not what this was. … The YotaPhones controversy is only part of it because it was clearly a pretext for them to say, ‘Russians are spying around the White House.’ (he winks and nods) ‘You get what I’m saying? Okay, we think Trump is colluding with the Russians. Let’s say Russian spying is the reason we’re spying on the Trump server.’

“Saying the Russians spy on the United States is not a reason to then go give information about the White House’s web activity to Hillary Clinton.”

“Whenever there’s a real scandal that needs to be covered up, the Democrats know, they don’t even have to say anything, they just know with a wink and a nod they can go to their activists embedded in the media … and know they’ll run cover for them.”

“This guy Charlie Savage is a humiliating embarrassment to humankind. You can always tell that there is a real leftist scandal brewing by the eagerness of Charlie Savage to do his Soviet Pravda operation,” Bongino said.

Savage is not a stupid man, yet he is willing to humiliate himself repeatedly as a shill for the left.

I’ve often wondered how liberals all manage to act in unison when adverse (to them) news breaks, even down to using identical phrases to describe events. Do the network and newspaper chiefs schedule a conference call to agree on how exactly a story should be spun and precisely what words to use?

 

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