Hillary Clinton ignored questions about allegations that her 2016 presidential campaign helped orchestrate a spying operation against rival and then-candidate Donald Trump.
A Daily Mail reporter confronted the former secretary of state in New York City on Tuesday about the fresh controversy that has arisen out of special counsel John Durham‘s investigation.
“Did you pay to spy on the Trump campaign?” Laura Collins, the outlet’s chief investigative reporter, asked Clinton in one video. “When are you going to comment on the spying allegations, Hillary?”
Clinton, who was wearing a face mask, waved, didn’t respond, and kept walking into a building. The news outlet said she was arriving at daughter Chelsea’s apartment in Manhattan. Clinton similarly ignored questions upon leaving a restaurant in Queens.
Durham, who is conducting a criminal inquiry into the origins and conduct of the Russia investigation, submitted a court filing Friday in the case against Michael Sussmann, an attorney indicted 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 a technology executive and Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. Sussmann denies any wrongdoing and has pleaded not guilty.
SUSSMANN WANTS DURHAM FILING ABOUT TRUMP WHITE HOUSE SNOOPING STRICKEN FROM RECORD
What led former President Donald Trump and his supporters to engage in a new wave of spying allegations was Durham saying the technology executive, known to be Rodney Joffe of Neustar, “exploited” access to internet traffic at Trump Tower, the White House, and other places to build a narrative of collusion between Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia.
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. A spokesperson for Joffe has since fired back, saying, “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.
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Clinton was vocal about the Alfa Bank allegations when they began to emerge publicly in the closing weeks of the 2016 election. On Oct. 31 of that year, Clinton tweeted, “Computer scientists have apparently uncovered a covert server linking the Trump Organization to a Russian-based bank.” Clinton also shared a lengthy statement from Clinton campaign adviser Jake Sullivan, now President Joe Biden’s national security adviser, who claimed, “This secret hotline may be the key to unlocking the mystery of Trump’s ties to Russia.”
Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz said in his December 2019 report on the Russia investigation that the FBI “concluded by early February 2017 that there were no such links” between Alfa Bank and the Trump Organization.
