Clinton Campaign Spied On Trump Tower, Home, and the Executive Office of the President of the United States

 

Hillary Clinton is back in the news this week, or rather, her 2016 campaign is. Special Counsel Durham has made another filing, and it is explosive. It relates to the previous indictment of a lawyer for the campaign, John Sussman, and the actions of his unindicted co-conspirator, "Tech Executive-1," who has been unmasked as Rodney Joffe, a former employee of Neustar, Inc. According to The Wall Street Journal:

The indictment says Mr. Joffe used his companies, as well as researchers at a U.S. university, to access internet data, which he used to gather information about Mr. Trump’s communications.

Mr. Durham says Mr. Joffe’s “goal” was to create an “inference” and “narrative” about Mr. Trump that would “please certain ‘VIPs,’ referring to individuals at [Perkins Coie] and the Clinton Campaign.”

The new shocker relates to the data Mr. Joffe and friends were mining. According to Friday’s filing, as early as July 2016 Mr. Joffe was “exploit[ing]” his “access to non-public and/or proprietary Internet data,” including “Internet traffic pertaining to . . . the Executive Office of the President of the United States (“EOP”).”

The filing explains that Mr. Joffe’s employer “had come to access and maintain dedicated servers for the EOP as part of a sensitive arrangement whereby it provided [internet services]” to the White House. Mr. Joffe’s team also was monitoring internet traffic related to Trump Tower, and Mr. Trump’s apartment on Central Park West.

   "Explosive" seems like an understatement. All of this relates to allegations against a lawyer from a private law firm that was working for the Clinton campaign, but I'm interested in how and why the Clinton campaign wanted access to the EOP's traffic. The WSJ article states that "The filing suggests the data collection continued into the Trump Presidency." That means they started this while Pres. Obama was still in office. We all know that there is no love lost between Obama and Hillary, so maybe she was keeping tabs on him, too.

   Who can forget when endless talking heads on every media outlet, as well as their keyboard cousins at the NYT, WaPo, and elsewhere were shoveling the Trump-Russia collusion BS by the truckload, daily, and winning great ratings, accolades and journalistic awards for it. Of course, they had help from so many people inside the government, who were happy to  help smear the new president.

   All of that is old news, of course. What's new is that the Special Counsel, who seems to be dragging his feet, is still making waves in the political waters, though that is not his goal. (The fact that he made his filing on the Friday of Superbowl weekend shows he's not aiming for political headlines). This article from The Daily Mail said that more Democrats want Hillary to be questioned by Durham, even before the latest Durham filing. If she was also monitoring Pres. Obama's office internet traffic, that's not going to help her with Democrats.

   This all happened a long time ago, by political and media standards. 2016 was SIX years ago! Also, I don't know what all of the statute of limitations are on the various crimes that may have been committed, but I do remember the Rose Law firm. The records of Hillary's work for them were found the day after the statute of limitations expired for the alleged offenses she may have committed while working there. Of course, that was in 1996, for allegations from the '80's.

   I also remember that it's always the Clinton's associates that get charged, and either do the time or die, sometimes suddenly. There seem to be enough layers of legal insulation that Mrs. Clinton isn't in any legal jeopardy, at this point. For the record, I am being facetious about Clinton associates dying suddenly. If the Durham probe gets closer to her, personally, I'll just say I'm not making any predictions.

   All kidding aside, this scandal IS bigger than Watergate. The way the Clinton campaign got elements of the intelligence community, the media, big tech, and academia to collude against not only Trump, but her opponents in the Democratic Party was unprecedented, and beyond the pale. The people in her party that she opposed took over, after her loss. Unfortunately, they were the Socialists, and they ended up using even more devious methods to elect and control the 2020 candidate, who is now our President. 

   What has not happened yet is a full reckoning of what happened in 2016. In the '70's, Republicans called out and denounced what the Nixon administration did. Democrats are still covering up for Hillary, possibly because she has dirt on enough of the leadership to silence them. We'll have to see how this plays out, but maybe Special Counsel Durham is playing a political game, and waiting until 2023 or '24 to start dropping big name indictments. More likely, Durham is only releasing evidence that he can prove, unlike what happened during the SC investigation into Pres. Trump. The humiliation of SC Muller, his team, and their media sycophants must be prominent in his thinking. Trump supporters may moan about "foot-dragging," but you don't see media leaks saying "the walls are closing in" on Hillary. This means Durham's running a tight ship.

   Finally, it is worth noting that the people and crimes he has charged are central to what he is investigating. The media can crow about the convictions that Muller's team got, but none of them had anything to do with the Trump campaign colluding with Russia. Whether or not Hillary herself ever becomes a target of Durham's is irrelevant. He is working up the chain of her campaign, and the chips will fall where they may. If here hands are dirty, and he can prove it, it will come out.

UPDATE: Kimberley Strassel from the WSJ totally destroys the "unbiased techie" narrative in her latest column. Read it here.