trail wrote:
trirunnermaybe wrote:
Can someone even explain this whole thing to me? I saw articles earlier today that somehow Clinton was in the
WH servers... doing what?
It is confusing.
This is what I gather. There was a guy doing investigatory work to try to tie Trump to a Russian bank. The end goal was to provide information to the FBI so that the FBI would have to start investigating Trump. This guy allegedly lied to Federal investigators about being paid by the Clinton Campaign to perform this work.
In the course of this investigation, he used non-public DNS server data (DNS is how you convert a domain name, like slowtwitch.com, to a specific IP address). He got access through a company contracted to provide DNS services to the Executive Office of the President of the United States. (aka The White House, I guess). The servers in question, according to the
actual text from Durham, were for DNS services. The goal was to use this data to try to find that Trump-and-associates internet usage was resulting in DNS lookups to Russian-affiliated sites.
It does not appear to be about getting access to a file server, where government files would be stored. I'm not minimizing the importance. Because knowing what Internet sites White House personnel are visiting can certainly be considered government-sensitive information. Metadata collection is a form of eavesdropping.
Possibly some laws broken, for sure. And this is on the nastier, shady side of politics.
Is it Watergate bad if all true? Maybe not a good analogy because Clinton was not, and is not President. Certainly not good if she was aware of it. I'm fine with whatever legal outcome Durham decides.
Durham actually just filed a motion about a potential conflict of interest for Latham Watkins, who is the lawyer for Sussmann. Sussmann is the one accused of lying to FBI about, but Durham's case against Sussmann is basically nothing. Watkins used to represent Marc Elias and Durham may call Elias to the stand, so was saying Watkins may have a conflict.
That is all Durham actually needed to talk about.
But since Durham is not about actual crimes and is more concerned with spreading bullshit, he dishonestly frames the work of Rondey Joffe. First, because the meeting where Sussmann was indicted, Sussmann had no knowledge of any white house DNS information. He only learned of it later during a meeting with CIA, as Durham himself points out. Second, there is no crime here, Durham has known about this the whole time, but let the statue of limitations lapse on anything to do with White House DNS info. There is no crime here. Third, all this was also in Sussmann's original indictment, but Durham just kinda put it in there randomly and had nothing to do what was actually charged.
Now why would Durham wait 5 months after indicting Sussmann to claim Sussmann's lawyer may have a conflict? Because Durham needs something so people don't forget who he is. If there was really a crime here, Durham would have charged someone. He has shown he doesn't need a strong case to charge people. There is obviously nothing here. Also, it is not really obvious there is any conflict in the first place, so why he filed this motion is just wild.
Durham's case against Sussmann is very weak. But he needs to drag the case out as long as possible so that he can keep spreading BS. He does not want it to actually end.
Of course Durham makes this all as confusing as possible and then Kash Patel (who would be Durham's witness on Sussmann's testimony under oath to congress) is then exaggerating what Durham says and then the right wing media repeats what Kash Patel said. Of course Kash Patel has his own issues with the whole trying to destroy the country by overturning the 2020 presidential election, but that is a whole other thing.