Like Bigfoot, the elusive John Durham has been recently sighted. He surfaced at the courthouse to file a 27-page indictment handed down by his pet grand jury against Clinton conspirator Michael Sussmann. Reporters at Real Clear Investigations tore it apart, then interviewed some back-channel insiders. They followed a spooky rabbit down a Deep State hole and ended up at Georgia Tech. With “a $17 million Pentagon contract” on the line, why not make up a few bogus DNS logs? After all, as the grand jury attributes “Researcher-1” as saying, “the only thing that drives us is that we just do not like [Trump].”
Durham indictment cuts deep
After months of radio silence and total secrecy about exactly what he’s up to, John Durham got his special grand jury to hand down a whopping 27-page indictment of Clinton fixer Michael Sussmann. All the usual suspects are listed in the lineup, from Perkins Coie to Glenn Simpson at GPS.
He’s the one responsible for recruiting the notorious Christopher Steele. Everybody knew Nellie Ohr and others were using their contractor privileges at the NSA to use National Security Agency computers as their private version of Google Search to dig up dirt and feed it to Steele. What we didn’t know is that there was another whole team tasked with the same project. We do now.
Thanks to John Durham and his team of investigators, we learned that Michael Sussmann was charged with making a false report to the FBI. The bombshell is that there are “eight individuals who allegedly conspired with Sussmann.”
Cyberexperts who held lucrative Pentagon contracts and high security clearances are under investigation for potentially abusing them to aid a 2016 Clinton campaign plot to falsely link Donald Trump to Russia https://t.co/QTf5IydSeX
— Mollie (@MZHemingway) October 7, 2021
The indictment doesn’t name them but a couple of the key players already lawyered up and surfaced. They’re screaming that finding controversial links between Trump and Russia was so vital to national security it justified making some up.
Rodney L. Joffe, “who has regularly advised the Biden White House on cybersecurity and infrastructure policies” has been canned from his job as chief cybersecurity officer at Washington tech contractor Neustar Inc. because of what he did before that, while working for Perkins Coie, “a prominent Democratic law firm recently subpoenaed by Durham.”
Joffe “tasked a group of computer contractors connected to the Georgia Institute of Technology with finding ‘anything’ in Internet data that would link Trump to Russia and make Democratic ‘VIPs happy.'” There was $17 million in it for them. RCI has the email.
Edit the logs with notepad
It’s not surprising that a month later, the Georgia group “accused Trump of maintaining secret backchannel communications to the Kremlin through the email servers of Russia-based Alfa Bank.” They did it by handing harmless data to the FBI and telling them it meant more than it did. Now, it seems that Durham found out they may have fudged DNS logs by simply editing them with notepad to fool the FBI into thinking they had solid evidence of Trump-Russia collusion.
The way the grand jury sees it, “federal contractors, who mined private Internet records to help ‘conduct opposition research’ in coordination with the Clinton campaign, were driven not by data but by ‘bias against Trump.'”
According to Durham, “Tech Executive-1,” that’s Joffe, “exploited his access to nonpublic data at multiple Internet companies to conduct opposition research concerning Trump.”
To accomplish that he “enlisted, and was continuing to enlist, the assistance of researchers at a U.S.-based university [Georgia Tech] who were receiving and analyzing Internet data in connection with a pending federal government cybersecurity research contract.”
April D. Lorenzen, “who supplied so-called Domain Name System (or DNS) logs from proprietary holdings” used the alias “Tea Leaves” to evade prosecution. Identified as “Originator-1” in the Durham indictment, “Lorenzen discussed ‘faking’ Internet traffic with the Georgia Tech researchers.” First, “the DNS logs Sussmann and his group presented as evidence to the FBI had been pasted into a text file, where they could have been edited.”
The real smoking gun is the email. “It would be possible to ‘fill out a sales form on two websites, faking the other company’s email address in each form,’ and thereby cause them ‘to appear to communicate with each other in DNS,'” Lorenzen suggested. That’s exactly how they tied Donald Trump to Russia with a neat little bow and handed it to the FBI on a silver plate.
