John Durham issued a motion in court in DC saying that Hillary Clinton’s allies paid a company to spy on Trump — both as a presidential candidate, and as the president — using certain cell phone data.
The legal motion was issued in the case of former Clinton attorney Michael Sussmann, who was charged with giving false information to the FBI about partnering with the Clinton campaign when discussing a false link between Donald Trump and Russia.
Sussmann was one of the partners at Perkins Coie, which is known for representing Democrats and which paid for Fusion GPS to create false Russia “dossier” on then-candidate Donald Trump, at the behest of the Clinton presidential campaign and the DNC.
Durham’s legal filing deals with a possible conflict of interest with Sussmann’s legal help from the Latham & Watkins LLP firm, which also helped other people in the investigation “whose interests could conflict with the defendant.” This includes Perkins Coie, Perkins Coie attorney Marc Elias, and the Clinton presidential campaign itself. If they are also exposed or charged with criminal acts, the firm could face a conflict of interest with their various defendants.
The filing then says that Sussmann was linked to an effort to get data from a project led by DARPA at a U.S. university to spy on Donald Trump and his partners — at the Trump Tower, at Donald Trump’s private home, and at the D.C. Office of the Presidency after Trump became President. Their aim was to get damaging intel that would then build the “Russia collusion” narrative against Donald Trump.
The filing goes on to explain that collusion claims were based on technical hookups from these sites with a Russia-based mobile phone carrier, but failed to say these connections were common in the United States and had started in 2014 — i.e. during the Obama White House, long before Trump.
The news from John Durham’s filing are already being said to be like Watergate, which started when GOP operatives broke into the DNC offices during the ’72 presidential campaign. In this circumstance, however, the spying was not only the Trump campaign but kept going after the presidential election, once Donald Trump was in office.
