This thread is going to end up like your Epstein thread. Disappointed once again. But we shall see.
Posted February 14, 2022 10:26 p.m. EST
By Charlie Savage, New York Times
WASHINGTON — When John Durham, the Trump-era special counsel investigating the inquiry into Russia’s 2016 election interference, filed a pretrial motion Friday night, he slipped in a few extra sentences that set off a furor among right-wing outlets about purported spying on former President Donald Trump.Upon close inspection, these narratives are often based on a misleading presentation of the facts or outright misinformation. They also tend to involve dense and obscure issues, so dissecting them requires asking readers to expend significant mental energy and time — raising the question of whether news outlets should even cover such claims. Yet Trump allies portray the news media as engaged in a cover-up if they don’t.
The conservative media also skewed what the filing said. For example, Durham’s filing never used the word “infiltrate.” And it never claimed that Joffe’s company was being paid by the Clinton campaign.
Most important, contrary to the reporting, the filing never said the White House data that came under scrutiny was from the Trump era. According to lawyers for David Dagon, a Georgia Institute of Technology data scientist who helped develop the Yota analysis, the data — so-called DNS logs, which are records of when computers or smartphones have prepared to communicate with servers over the internet — came from Barack Obama’s presidency.
“What Trump and some news outlets are saying is wrong,” said Jody Westby and Mark Rasch, lawyers for Dagon. “The cybersecurity researchers were investigating malware in the White House, not spying on the Trump campaign, and to our knowledge, all of the data they used was nonprivate DNS data from before Trump took office.”
In a statement, a spokesperson for Joffe said that “contrary to the allegations in this recent filing,” he was apolitical, did not work for any political party and had lawful access under a contract to work with others to analyze DNS data — including from the White House — for the purpose of hunting for security breaches or threats.
After Russians hacked networks for the White House and Democrats in 2015 and 2016, it went on, the cybersecurity researchers were “deeply concerned” to find data suggesting Russian-made YotaPhones were in proximity to the Trump campaign and the White House, so they “prepared a report of their findings, which was subsequently shared with the CIA.”
A spokesperson for Durham did not respond to a request for comment.
