That's nice but it doesn't address why the data was mined and then passed onto political intermediaries? Why did the Clinton campaign have access to this mined data?
In asking the court to determine whether the law firm representing Sussmann has a conflict of interest, Durham filled in the rest of the document with mostly unrelated details that make great grist for the conservative outrage mill. I’ll spare you the nitty-gritty, but here’s the part that the GOP thinks is worth new investigations:
The Government’s evidence at trial will also establish that among the Internet data Tech Executive-1 and his associates exploited was domain name system (“DNS”) Internet traffic pertaining to (i) a particular healthcare provider, (ii) Trump Tower, (iii) Donald Trump’s Central Park West apartment building, and (iv) the Executive Office of the President of the United States (“EOP”). (Tech Executive-1’s employer, Internet Company-1, had come to access and maintain dedicated servers for the EOP as part of a sensitive arrangement whereby it provided DNS resolution services to the EOP. Tech Executive-1 and his associates exploited this arrangement by mining the EOP’s DNS traffic and other data for the purpose of gathering derogatory information about Donald Trump.)
Sounds shady, but
Durham’s filing doesn’t leave the impression that this was any kind of “wiretap,” as Trump had claimed, or hacking to
“infiltrate” his campaign, as Fox News’ headline put it. Even former Trump appointee John Ratcliffe had to admit on Fox News that there was
nothing really illegal about how that data was obtained.
Nor is there any real connection to Clinton herself or her campaign, not in the Sussmann indictment nor in last week’s filing. Instead, it’s former Trump lackey Kash Patel, not Durham, who made that baseless claim to Fox News. Patel also
issued a statement using the word “infiltrate,” which has become key to the current freakout.
Republicans love milking every possible Clinton scandal for all it’s worth. If House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., became speaker, he’d love nothing more than to spend his first years presiding over the
Revenge of the Benghazi Committee, a sequel that absolutely nobody needs. His goal would be getting “Clinton” and “investigation” together in headlines, which gets the base going, even if there’s no malfeasance to uncover.