A reader asks:

if AG Garland was to interfere with the Durham report, then wouldn't it protect Hillary Clinton instead of old Joe?

– MJ McCauley

Thanks, MJ, for your question. Although the Russia Hoax appears to have originated with Hillary and her close associates, Garland is well aware that the Durham investigation potentially implicates two U.S. Presidents, not just one scheming, pantsuited wanna-be. This will require some set-up.

As we’ve discussed, and as Charlie Martin analyzes in a new VIP report for PJ Media (“Quick and Dirty Durham Explainer”), one huge question is how Rodney Joffe’s company, Neustar, got its “sensitive arrangement” to “access and maintain” the servers of the Executive Office of the President (EOP). This access began under Obama during the campaign and continued during the transition after Trump’s unexpected win and, somehow, even into Trump’s term of office. So, we have to ask: how did Joffe win the contract to do this?

And what information was gathered? Durham’s motion just mentions DNS (Domain Name Service) lookups. These are what look up the interminably long internet addresses we’re really calling when we use the shorter, easier-to-remember-and-type domain names. As Martin explains this, it’s like an automatic Directory Assistance.

Joffe would retrieve these DNS lookups from the White House and send them to Team Nerd (that’s what I call them) at Georgia Tech, where they already had an existing project to look at large amounts of internet data and where they were trying to win a Pentagon contract –- that they later got. Their assignment: to develop a narrative tying Trump to Russia, to give to the “VIPs” Durham identifies as people at Perkins Coie and the Clinton campaign.

This kind of internet traffic is usually “anonymized,” which means people’s identities are concealed. But with his intelligence background, Martin says he’d “bet money” that anonymization can be reversed.

One fake narrative that ended up in the hands of the FBI and CIA was that Trump and his associates were using special “rare” Russian cell phones in the vicinity of the White House. Durham’s motion says the special counsel has no found no evidence for this allegation, but, of course, it didn’t have to be real to be weaponized against Trump at the time.

The rest of Martin’s article deals with details that we’ve already examined and will be familiar to you. He says Durham’s recent motion shows he “is laying out a case that Perkins Coie, through Sussmann and with the active participation of Marc Elias, purposefully MANUFACTURED EVIDENCE against Trump that factored into the four-year investigation into ‘Russian collusion.’” He wraps up with questions: “How many crimes is this? I honestly don’t know,” he says. “Perjury? Mail fraud? How many ways does it hit the Espionage Act? For mere mortals, it would be a long time in prison.”

Yes, prison. Martin’s background is intelligence, but he talked to “several lawyer friends” who told him this looks as though MANY laws were broken --- “too many to list.” The consensus was that there’s enough to “send mere politically unconnected mortals to Leavenworth for the rest of their lives.”

https://pjmedia.com/columns/charlie-martin/2022/02/23/quick-and-dirty-durham-explainer-n1561262

As mentioned, that report is “VIP.” But we also found an interesting piece –- more great reporting by Paul Sperry –- about Rodney Joffe that touches on his relationship with (yes) President Obama. The tech executive managed to have a “sensitive arrangement” with Obama’s White House despite being involved in a mail-order scam that sparked federal and state investigations.

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2022/02/17/the_checkered_past_of_the_fbi_computer_contractor_who_spied_on_trump_816761.html

As Sperry points out, to get such a contract, Joffe had to pass a personal background check and obtain the government’s highest security clearances. The FBI has denied comment, but one factor could be that the scam was decades ago, and Joffe “reinvented himself” as a cybersecurity expert during the 1990s.

Still, he got involved with a company called PlasmaNet Inc. that has had to pay millions of dollars in fines for deceptive advertising concerning an online lotto scam. He’s even still listed on their board of directors. In spite of this, he was able to move to Washington DC and land “lucrative, security-related contracts with the FBI and Pentagon requiring top secret clearance.”

In 2006, he joined Neustar, which secures and maintains internet servers for federal agencies, including the White House. His position gave him access to the above-mentioned DNS logs, though these are proprietary. And he started advising White House officials, including President Obama, on cybersecurity matters. So now we’re starting to see how Joffe was acquainted with the President, how he might have landed a “sensitive” contract like this and how Obama might possibly have had knowledge of what he was doing to defeat Trump.

“By 2016,” Sperry writes, “[Joffe’s] access to proprietary internet logs became of interest to operatives for the Hillary Clinton campaign, who appear to have offered him a plum job in a Clinton presidency for help on an opposition-research project on Donald Trump.” (Recall that Joffe also mined data from Trump Tower and Trump’s Central Park West apartment building.)

Sperry does not speculate here about how Clinton’s “operatives” learned of his access to these proprietary logs.

Durham apparently has an August 2016 email from Joffe to Team Nerd privately confessing that he knows those “pings” between Trump Tower and Alfa Bank were “legitimate” and “just part of the marketing world.” He also has an email from Joffe’s lead researcher that says, “the only thing that drives us is that we just don’t like [Trump].” This researcher made it clear that he believed even the most salacious stories in the Steele “dossier.”

Sperry’s report lays out numerous criminal statutes that could be invoked. Really, it’s a must-read, as it has details we’re seeing for the first time about Durham’s focus on Joffe’s businesses, contracts and employees. It appears that Neustar as a company had “a level of involvement...that has not been explained.”

A career Justice Department official advised Sperry that Joffe “has friends in high places.” Not only did he personally advise President Obama, but he also was friendly with then-FBI Director James Comey and had done projects for him going back some 15 years. Logs show he visited Obama’s White House several times.

He’s admitted to a surprising lack of technical knowledge, saying he mostly just connects clients with resources they need. Durham apparently is looking at all those connections ---WHOEVER they might be. Given the ones we already know, plus the briefings Obama got from the FBI and CIA, it’s hard to believe that he and his Vice President were not aware on some level of what was going on. It’s up to Durham to get the evidence.

Of course, we've long known that both Obama and Biden were in the Oval Office on January 5, 2017 –- with Comey, Brennan, James Clapper, Susan Rice and Sally Yates –- for a briefing on the “Russia” narrative and the Mike Flynn case. (Recall that Yates was surprised to learn Obama already knew Flynn's calls had been intercepted.) This piece by Mollie Hemingway from May 2020 takes on enormous new significance today.

Oh, yes, Durham’s scope has to include Obama and Biden, and this is one prosecutor whom Biden had better not try to get fired.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/05/08/obama-biden-oval-office-meeting-on-january-5-was-key-to-entire-anti-trump-operation/