Watergate Redux

In what should be the biggest domestic story of the year Special Counsel John Durham has produced hard evidence of what everyone has known but couldn't prove - the Clinton campaign illegally hacked into Donald Trump's computers, even after he was elected president, in an effort to fabricate a connection between him and Russia that would destroy his presidency.

This isn't quite the same as the president's men breaking into the offices of the DNC at the Watergate hotel in the early 70s, but it's very close.

Jeff Mordock of The Washington Times has the story:

Special counsel John Durham alleged in a court filing Saturday that the Clinton campaign paid for a tech company to hack servers in former President Donald Trump’s residences and the White House to gather derogatory information on him during the 2016 campaign and while he was president.

In the filing, Mr. Durham says the government has evidence that an unnamed tech executive “exploited” an arrangement with the government to monitor Mr. Trump’s internet traffic at Trump Tower, Mr. Trump’s Central Park West apartment, the executive office of the president and an unnamed healthcare provider.

The tech executive was only identified in court filings as “Tech Executive-1”. In previous filings by Mr. Durham, “Tech Executive-1” referred to Rodney Joffe, an internet entrepreneur and internet data expert.

“Tech Executive-1 and his associates exploited this arrangement by mining the [Executive Office of the President] for the purpose of gathering derogatory information about Donald Trump,” Mr. Durham writes.

Evidently, Mr. Trump was correct when he alleged repeatedly during the campaign and his early presidency that his campaign had been spied upon. The media, which scoffed at the allegations, has once again been shown to be embarrassingly unreliable.

I'm not a lawyer, but it would seem that hacking private, and perhaps top secret, computer info for the purposes of making it difficult, if not impossible, for the president to fulfill his constitutional duties should be a crime and should warrant prison terms similar to those meted out to the Watergate conspirators.

And it's not just Mr. Joffe who's in trouble. Whoever put him up top this and whoever knew about it in the Clinton campaign is also not sleeping well these days. One such miscreant appears to be a lawyer named Michael Sussman. Among other things,

Mr. Sussmann has been charged with making a false statement to the FBI about a now-debunked claim of a secret communication channel between the Trump Organization and a Russian bank. He has pleaded not guilty, [but] Saturday’s filing alleges that Mr. Sussmann worked with a technology executive, an internet company and the Clinton campaign to assemble and convey the allegations to the FBI.

Mr. Durham said that billing records show that Mr. Sussmann “repeatedly billed the Clinton campaign” for his work on Russian bank allegations.

The fact that Sussman has been found to have billed the Clinton campaign for his work gives the lie to his earlier insistence that he was spying on Trump on his own. Martha Stewart, of all people, went to jail for five months for lying to federal investigators. Sussman might be looking at much more time than that.

In July 2016, Mr. Sussmann, the tech executive [Joffe] and “U.S. investigative firm” hired by “Law Firm 1” on behalf of the Clinton campaign worked with researchers at Internet companies to put together data and white papers.

Mr. Durham said the tech executive used the researchers to “mine internet data” to establish “an inference” and “narrative” tying Mr. Trump to Russia.

Mr. Durham also alleged that Mr. Sussmann relied on [internet] traffic from Trump Tower, Mr. Trump’s apartment building and the health care provider to give the FBI additional allegations about Mr. Trump.

Those allegations included claims that Mr. Trump and his associates were using rare, Russian-made wireless phones in the vicinity of the White House and other locations, Mr. Durham wrote. The special counsel said he found no support for this allegation.

The rest of Mr. Mordock's article is a bit too complex to explain in detail in a VP post, but the gravamen of the piece is that it appears that the Special Counsel has dispositive evidence that several people were illegally spying on the President of the United States on behalf of Hillary Clinton's campaign which funded their efforts to fabricate a connection between President Trump and Russia.

This means that there will almost certainly be others in the campaign who must've known what was going on, who were actively involved in the criminality, and who will eventually be charged. The big question is, did Hillary herself know about it and did she give the green light to what Donald Trump and others are labeling acts of "treason."

It's hard to believe that underlings would've done this without her approval, but the Clintons have a long history of being able to evade legal sanction for shady behavior - for example, the case of Ms. Clinton's use of an unprotected personal computer to conduct offical state department business and the subsequent "wiping" of the hard drive to delete evidence - so we'll see.

But whether Hillary is prosecuted or not, it's clear that others in her circle will be. It'd be helpful if media outlets other than Fox News and talk radio showed some interest in this. They certainly would if it had been the Trump campaign caught hacking into President Biden's computer traffic.