An indicted former Clinton campaign attorney on Tuesday vigorously pushed back against accusations by special counsel John Durham, saying the special counsel was trying to politicize the criminal case and prejudice the jury.
Attorneys for Michael Sussmann, the former Clinton campaign lawyer, filed a motion in federal court slamming Mr. Durham’s accusations of a broad spying operation against Donald Trump.
Elsewhere, the technology executive identified in the case spoke out and leftist columnists at various media outlets went to work trashing the investigation.
The response began when Mr. Sussmann’s attorneys demanded that a federal judge remove sections of Mr. Durham’s latest filing, arguing it could “taint the jury pool.”
Mr. Sussmann has pleaded not guilty to one count of lying to the FBI about now-debunked accusations tying Mr. Trump to a Russian bank.
In a filing over the weekend, Mr. Durham said attorneys from Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign funded the infiltration of servers at Mr. Trump’s residence at Trump Tower and later the White House to gin up “derogatory information” about him.
Mr. Sussmann’s attorneys tore into the special counsel’s investigation in a fiery court motion. They said Mr. Durham dropped the bombshell “to make this case a partisan affair and to inflame media coverage.”
The attorneys also called for Mr. Durham to be sanctioned for “conduct which abuses the judicial process.”
“Unfortunately, the special counsel has done more than simply file a document identifying potential conflicts of interest,” the attorneys wrote. “Rather, the special counsel has again made a filing in this case that unnecessarily 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.”
A spokesperson for Mr. Durham declined to comment.
Mike Davis, founder of the conservative Article III Project, noted that Mr. Durham earned the support of Connecticut’s two Democratic senators when he was appointed as the state’s U.S. attorney.
“He’s never seriously been accused of being a partisan,” Mr. Davis said. “If he were, the two Democrat senators would never have recommended him to be the U.S. attorney. Calling the special counsel a partisan is entirely baseless and projection.”
A spokesperson for Rodney Joffe, who has been identified as “Tech Executive-1” in Mr. Durham’s filings, defended the Internet pioneer’s work.
The spokesperson appeared to confirm that the CIA was the second federal agency that Mr. Sussmann reached out to in a bid to establish a “narrative” trying Mr. Trump to Russia.
In Mr. Durham’s Feb. 11 filing, he says Mr. Sussmann “assembled and conveyed” accusations linking Mr. Trump and Russia to the FBI on behalf of two clients, including a technology executive.
Mr. Durham also said Tech Executive-1 had researchers “mine Internet data” to establish “an inference” tying Mr. Trump to Russia. Tech Executive-1 also “exploited” his access to Mr. Trump’s domain name system (DNS) traffic to monitor the president’s Internet data, Mr. Durham said.
“In doing so, Tech Executive-1 indicated that he was seeking to please certain ‘VIPs,’ referring to individuals at Law Firm-1 and the Clinton campaign,” Mr. Durham wrote.
Mr. Joffe’s statement confirms he is the tech executive. He has not been charged with any crime.
The spokesperson described Mr. Joffe as an “apolitical Internet security expert with decades of decades of service to the U.S. government” and that he legally obtained access to DNS data from a private client that was providing DNS services to the Executive Office of the President.
“Under the terms of the contract, the data could be accessed to identify and analyze any security breaches or threats,” the statement said. “As a result of the hacks of EOP and DNC servers in 2015 and 2016, respectively, there were serious and legitimate national security concerns about Russian attempts to infiltrate the 2016 election.”
Mr. Joffe’s spokesperson suggested that the second government agency mentioned in the Durham filing was the CIA.
“Upon identifying DNS queries from Russian-made Yota phones in proximity to the Trump campaign and the EOP, respected cyber-security 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,” the statement said.
In Mr. Sussmann’s meeting with the second government agency, he provided data that he said was evidence of suspicious DNS lookups from a rare Russian mobile phone provider, Mr. Durham reported.
Mr. Sussmann said this information demonstrated that Mr. Trump and his associates were using rare, Russian-made phones in the vicinity of the White House, according to Mr. Durham’s filings.
“The Special Counsel’s Office has identified no support for these allegations,” Mr. Durham wrote, and such lookups were “far from rare” in the U.S.
Elsewhere, after days of coming under fire for ignoring Mr. Durham’s accusations, some in the media blasted his recent filing.
The New York Times’ sole article detailing Mr. Durham’s revelation dismissed his filing as “mostly wrong or old news.”
Reporter Charlie Savage said the filing raised “dense and obscure issues” that required so much mental energy that it raised the question of whether news outlets should even cover Mr. Durham’s claims.
The New Yorker ignored the gist of Mr. Durham’s accusations. Instead, it focused on conservatives’ gripe that the court filing wasn’t getting attention in mainstream media.
“Durham dropped his filing on a Friday night, when reporters, like most people, are ending their workweek,” the outlet wrote. “More importantly, Durham has an established history of floating allegations that disintegrate upon inspection.”
The New Yorker insisted that the dearth of media coverage was not a result of liberal bias but rather because the story was filed on a weekend and media needed time to verify Mr. Durham’s accusations.
“The unexciting reality that the mainstream media was going to wait until Monday to report Durham’s hazy allegations was not one they could imagine because it is premised on following conventions of journalistic objectivity that they can’t fathom,” the magazine said.
Correction: A previous version of this story erroneously put quotations marks around a word that was not used in the Durham filing.
• Jeff Mordock can be reached at jmordock@washingtontimes.com.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.