A technology expert shot back at special counsel John Durham in response to claims that he “exploited” access to internet traffic to build a narrative of collusion between former President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia.
As Trump and his allies argue that Durham has found a “far bigger crime” than what happened in the Watergate scandal, “Technology Executive-1,” known to be former Neustar Senior Vice President Rodney Joffe, issued a statement via a representative to combat the “allegations” made in the special counsel’s recent court filing.
“Contrary to the allegations in this recent filing, Mr. Joffe is an apolitical internet security expert with decades of service to the U.S. Government who has never worked for a political party, and who legally provided access to DNS data obtained from a private client that separately was providing DNS services to the Executive Office of the President (EOP),” a spokesperson for Joffe said in a statement reported by NBC News.
The filing from Durham on Friday was a motion for the Washington, D.C., federal court to look into possible conflicts of interest related to the defense team of Michael Sussmann, an attorney who has been indicted in the special counsel’s investigation on the accusation that he lied to the FBI in a meeting in which he shared since-debunked claims of a secret backchannel between the Trump Organization and Russia’s Alfa Bank by saying he was not representing any clients when he was acting on behalf of the technology executive and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. Sussmann denies any wrongdoing and has pleaded not guilty.
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Trump and his allies are particularly animated over Durham saying his team is gathering evidence to show that Joffe and his associates “exploited” a pending government contract to gain access to internet traffic at the White House, Trump Tower, and other places to establish a narrative tying Trump to Russia.
Joffe’s company, according to Durham, “had come to access and maintain dedicated servers for the EOP as part of a sensitive arrangement” to provide tech services and then “exploited this arrangement by mining the EOP’s [Internet] traffic and other data for the purpose of gathering derogatory information about Donald Trump.” Durham said Joffe tasked those researchers to mine internet data to establish “an inference” and “narrative” tying then-candidate Trump to Russia. Durham said Joffe indicated that he was doing this to please certain “VIPs” at Perkins Coie and on the Clinton campaign.
Although Trump has come out with statements saying such things as, “What Hillary Clinton and the Radical Left Democrats did with respect to spying on a President of the United States, even while in office, is a far bigger crime than Watergate,” neither Joffe nor members of the Clinton team have been charged with a crime in Durham’s investigation.
Durham said Friday that Sussmann “provided an updated set of allegations — including the Russian Bank-1 data and additional allegations relating to Trump” to another U.S. government agency dubbed “Agency-2,” which is reportedly the CIA. Durham said the allegations Sussmann passed along during the Feb. 9, 2017, meeting relied partly 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.”
Under the terms of his contract, “the data could be accessed to identify and analyze any security breaches or threats,” Joffe’s representative said in the statement reported by NBC News. “As a result of the hacks of EOP and [Democratic National Committee] servers in 2015 and 2016, respectively, there were serious and legitimate national security concerns about Russian attempts to infiltrate the 2016 election,” the spokesperson added. “Upon identifying DNS queries from Russian-made Yota phones in proximity to the Trump campaign and the EOP, respected cybersecurity researchers were deeply concerned about the anomalies they found in the data and prepared a report of their findings, which was subsequently shared with the CIA.”
Separately, Sussmann responded to Durham in court Monday night.
His lawyers said in part that the special counsel’s filing “includes prejudicial — and false — allegations that are irrelevant to his Motion and to the charged offense, and are plainly intended to politicize this case, inflame media coverage, and taint the jury pool.”
Steve Tyrrell, acting as an attorney for Joffe, told the Washington Examiner that at the time Sussmann was indicted, his client “had a preexisting relationship with Mr. Sussmann involving unrelated matters and sought his advice, having no idea his firm represented the Clinton campaign.” Joffe’s lawyer also said the indictment against Sussmann “is full of cherry-picked portions of emails and gratuitously presents an incomplete and misleading picture of his actions and role in the events in question” and that “Mr. Joffe stands behind the rigorous research and analysis that was conducted, culminating in the report he felt was his patriotic duty to share with the FBI.”
Shortly after Clinton’s loss to Trump in November 2016, Joffe said in an email, “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,” according to the indictment against Sussmann.
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John Ratcliffe, Trump’s final director of national intelligence who gave Durham 1,000 intelligence documents, rejected the notion that illegal hacking was involved, as has been alleged by some Trump allies, but said there still could be some criminal liability.
“No. I think, based on the allegations, a tech executive and tech company used what was originally lawful access into government servers but to … gain information and to use it for an unlawful purpose,” Ratcliffe told Fox News on Monday. “So what John Durham’s pleading talks about is that Hillary Clinton’s lawyer, Michael Sussmann, took this information from the tech executive and pitched it to the FBI as evidence of Trump/Russia connections that simply weren’t true and that the lawyer, Michael Sussmann, and the tech executive knew not to be true.”
