ONCE AGAIN, YESTERDAY’S “FAR-RIGHT CONSPIRACY THEORY” BECOMES TODAY’S ACCEPTED FACT: WSJ: Trump Really Was Spied On.
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.
White House communications are supposed to be secure, and the notion that any contractor—much less one with ties to a presidential campaign—could access them is alarming enough. The implication that the data was exploited for a political purpose is a scandal that requires investigation under oath.
The filing suggests the data collection continued into the Trump Presidency. Mr. Durham says that on Feb. 9, 2017, Mr. Sussmann met with a second federal agency (“Agency-2”) to provide “an updated set of allegations,” and that these “allegations relied, in part, on the purported [internet traffic] that [Mr. Joffe] and others had assembled pertaining to Trump Tower, Donald Trump’s New York City apartment building, the EOP” and a healthcare provider. . . .
The disclosures raise troubling questions far beyond the Sussmann indictment. How long did this snooping last and who had access to what was found? Who approved the access to White House data, and who at the FBI and White House knew about it? Were Mrs. Clinton and senior campaign aides personally aware of this data-trolling operation?
Mr. Durham’s revelations take the 2016 collusion scam well beyond the Steele dossier, which was based on the unvetted claims of a Russian emigre working in Washington. Those claims and the Sussmann assertions were channeled to the highest levels of the government via contacts at the FBI, CIA and State Department. They became fodder for secret and unjustified warrants against a former Trump campaign official, and later for Robert Mueller’s two-year mole hunt that turned up no evidence of collusion.
Along the way the Clinton campaign fed these bogus claims to a willing and gullible media. And now we know its operatives used private tech researchers to monitor White House communications. If you made this up, you’d be laughed out of a Netflix story pitch.
Indeed. Joffe denies everything and insists that he’s apolitical, which I find . . . unpersuasive.