Washington’s best inside look at how determined Hillary Clinton campaign operatives conspired to bring down former President Donald Trump is contained in the expanded writings of John Durham.
Among his U.S. District Court filings, a new character has emerged in the case of U.S. v. former Clinton campaign attorney Michael Sussmann. David M. Martin is an FBI cyber whiz who knows how the bureau debunked the Democrats’ Russian Alfa Bank-Trump conspiracy story. The question is, as a proposed special counsel trial witness, what will he be allowed to tell us?
One of the researchers on whom Mr. Sussmann relied upon talked in an email about how easy it is to fake internet communications. Another Sussmann-linked computer scientist called Mr. Trump and his friends “thugs.”
We also see that these high-tech spies were able to penetrate one of Mr. Trump’s Wi-Fi routers. In all, the group assembled by tech executive Rodney Joffe snatched proprietary internet traffic from Trump Tower, Mr. Trump’s Central Park West apartment building and the Trump White House in early 2017.
What is impressive is the sheer effort by Clinton devotees in 2016 to take a mass of inconclusive data and try to convince themselves and the FBI that Mr. Trump was a Russian agent.
Mr. Durham is filing these motions as Mr. Sussmann faces trial next month on a charge of lying to the FBI. On Wednesday, Judge Christopher Cooper denied his request to dismiss the case.
The Durham court papers tell of an intense media/data collection operation involving Mr. Sussmann’s then-law firm, Perkins Coie; Clinton campaign general counsel Marc Elias; Mr. Joffe, then a senior vice president at Neustar, an IT firm in Northern Virginia; computer scientists at Georgia Tech University and at other colleges; Fusion GPS, the Clinton-hired investigative firm that gave us the wildly inaccurate dossier; and, finally, D.C. journalists who floated the Alfa-Trump entanglement.
Mr. Durham branded the entire group under the heading of “co-conspirators” — a tag he did not apply in the original September 2021 indictment.
At the top, so to speak, was Mr. Sussmann, a former Justice Department cyber attorney who curated all the data to edit and create “white papers” and internet logs. He presented them to then-FBI General Counsel James Baker on Sept. 19, 2016, with the expressed desire to get candidate Trump under investigation.
That part was successful. Mr. Baker prompted the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane team to open a probe. The failing, as Mr. Durham sees it, is Mr. Sussmann told Mr. Baker he had no client in the game, when in fact he was doing his anti-Trump work for the Clinton campaign who paid his bills. The second failure is that the FBI concluded there was no Alfa Bank-Trump link.
But back in July-August 2016, the data looked promising as Mr. Joffe directed his team to find connections between Mr. Trump and Moscow using nonpublic internet data such as Domain Name System logs. The internet’s “phone book” can tell cyber sleuths who is communicating with each other. DNS converts a domain name, such as an email or web address, into internet protocol numbers unique to a person’s smartphone or desktop.
Mr. Joffe had been promised the top cyber job in a Hillary Clinton administration, he said in an email.
Mr. Durham released expanded email threads to bolster his case that Mr. Sussmann was working for Mrs. Clinton and thus lied to Mr. Baker. The emails show Mr. Sussmann planned a media campaign to place Alfa conspiracy stories in the press before election day. He made contact with one reporter just days before meeting with...
