Doesn’t this guy take notes?
Wasn’t Durham considered a qualified, respected lawyer before this? Sad.
I’m not seeing this “forgotten” evidence as particularly damning to either side; on the whole it appears to be a minor point. But it does contribute to the view that Durham is disorganized and rushed through the indictment to beat the clock in hopes that he could throw everything at the wall and something might stick. Which, at the moment, doesn’t seem likely.
How much longer is this going to drag on? We were assured “We will all find out soon enough.” Have we found out anything yet?
Has it been two weeks yet?
I agree with @SpacemanSpiff_II.
Durham made 1) a (possibly) incorrect assertion about Baker’s interview with Sussman - though, we don’t know that, since we’re not sure what Durham’s basis was for the charge and Baker’s belief that it went down in a different way is based on his recollection not notes/transcripts, so it is very possible that he was wrong - and, 2) Durham forgot about a phone that he gathered for a different case, four years prior.
For these two items, the author is saying that “his team continues to admit in court filings that they have been buffeted by new, easily obtainable evidence post-charging”. To our knowledge - including this article and every other article on the subject - the only thing that Durham’s team have admitted to is a failure to identify Baker’s old phone. They have never, to my knowledge, mentioned Baker’s public statement and never written to the judge anything based on Baker’s statement. There is only one thing that they’ve admitted to messing up on and it is a fairly reasonable one.
This isn’t to say that Durham’s case is rock solid and well-crafted, just that the author’s description is not factually based. It’s a mental dismissal of something that he’s already decided is nonsense, and he’s using the flimsiest of evidentiary basis for his own view to write it off.
It may turn out to be nonsense but this particular admission is not the proof of that. Baker’s statement was pertinent and concerning, but we’ll have to wait and see what supporting documents Durham has for the perjury accusation.
And that would be meaningful if Baker’s statement didn’t keep changing.
I direct you to this portion of the article and below:
There’s a problem, however.
The new filing suggests that Baker provided conflicting accounts of the meeting. Sussman’s lawyers attached two separate DOJ documents in which Baker appears to offer differing descriptions of what took place.
I expect crayon on a Denny’s placemat, at this point.
Based on what’s been disclosed so far, Durham’s basis is 1) although Baker at one point said he did not recall that Sussmann told him he wasn’t working for a client, he says that he now does recall this, and will testify to this effect under oath, 2) contemporaneous notes by the FBI assistant director showing that Baker told him at the time that this is what Sussmann told him, and 3) several other FBI/DOJ officials who similarly recall things in line with the indictment and/or have contemporaneous notes to that effect.
Countering that, the defense argues 1) that Baker has not been consistent in his recollections as above, and 2) the truth is that Sussman was not talking to Baker on behalf of any client.
I didn’t see anywhere that Durham actually “gathered” the phone. Just that he had discussed possibly doing this in connection with an unrelated investigation, and therefore was at some point aware that OIG had the phone. If you have a source that Durham actually got the phone, please post it.
On looking at Durham’s actual filing, it seems pretty clear that he never actually got the phone(s).
The timeline of events is described in Paragraph 3. On 2/9/18, the OIG’s office informed an associate of Durham that the OIG’s office had requested custody of one of Baker’s phones. On 2/12/18, there was a call with the OIG agent and others including Durham in which “the cellphones likely were discussed”. On or about 2/15/18, the OIG’s office actually got the phone.
That’s all there is, apparently.
Good criticisms.
Latest filing from Durham - as part of a legal representation conflict of interest issue - alleges the following:
Sussman was working with a certain tech executive who had access to all sorts of non-public and/or proprietary internet data including (via a government services contract) from the Executive Office of the President, and also connections to researchers who had access to internet traffic data due to a pending government contract, He (the tech exec) prevailed on the researcher group to do some data mining and come up with something which would support a Trump-Russia connection, and Sussman then presented the resulting cherry-picked data in misleading fashion to a government agency.
See: Microsoft Word - Conflicts-Motion-7.docx (courtlistener.com) Paragraphs 4-6.
Of course, this is only the prosecutor’s view, and the defense would quite possibly have a very different take on things. But it seems highly interesting, at the very least, and suggests there may be more developments and possibly indictments to come.
It seems odd to me that this has gotten very little coverage in the MSM. And what coverage it did get seems to be largely the result of Trump suggesting - in the Trumpian way that so becomes him - that whoever was responsible for this heinous crime deserves the death penalty. But in any event, it’s out there.
I’m curious as to how much of this allegedly illegal conduct occurred within the 5 year statute of limitations.
Because, IIRC, the reason they rushed the Sussman indictment was that the statute of limitations was about to expire, the clock started running the day of the FBI interview when he allegedly lied.
Which wpukd mean that the underlying conduct, the thing he allegedly lied about, has passed.
And I’m not too shocked at hearing that Democrats attempted to find dirt on opponents. Not after these revelations.
This is pretty much the same (obviously false) story that Durham has been pushing all along.
He did flesh out some details about the CIA meeting like two days after the statute of limitations expired on anything that might have occurred at that meeting. This tells me that Durham knows that no one committed a crime here but really wanted to get that story out.
But at least we agree that “presenting cherry-picked data in a misleading fashion” to federal law enforcement is a serious crime, right?
Not good news for Peter Navarro, Mark Meadows and all the other people that handed off all that election fraud bullshit to the DOJ last year.
To be clear, the SC filing does not specifically that allege any of this activity was illegal, let alone indictable, though it would tend to suggest that possibility.
The context of the disclosures is to alert the court that there may be issues involving Sussman’s legal representation by the Latham firm. This is because Latham was also involved with some of the other players in Sussman’s actions which are at issue and may be conflicted in this regard; the current filing fleshed out the connection of some of these other players to the case.
I imagine the mere fact that the other players’ actions are not clearly illegal wouldn’t render the COI issue moot. I don’t know about SOL, but I suspect that this too wouldn’t suffice.
It’s interesting that you bring up cherry picking. Here’s a quote from Durham’s latest filing.
Tech Executive-1 tasked these researchers to mine Internet data to establish “an inference” and “narrative” tying then-candidate Trump to Russia.
Do those quote marks around “an inference” and “narrative” with no indication of what he’s quoting seem a little bit like cherry picking?
If there was aa full sentence where Joffe directed people to make stuff up to link Trump to Russia you can be damn sure Durham would have quoted that sentence. The fact that he is sniping out short phrases and individual words means that no such direction from Joffe exists.
Durham’s specific statements in the document are confusing.
He first says that the company collected information connecting Trump Tower and Prince Hospitals to Alfa Bank. But then it’s not clear if he switches subject to a separate discussion of Russian cellphones pinging IP addresses from a mobile phone carrier in Russia, or if the Alfa Bank “evidence” was that people in Trump Tower had cellphones pinging a Russian cellphone carrier, not Alfa. I.e. that it really was fake and meaningless evidence from the beginning.
My feeling is that he drops discussion of Alfa and switches over to the cellphone issue to avoid discussing the evidence brought in by Clinton’s people.
The other thing I note is:
He would seem to be implying that he has documented proof that the tech guy explicitly asked for his team to fake up some evidence tying Trump to Russia.
He seems to be giving Trump the material necessary for him to sue the one guy for defamation or something along those lines - which is probably reasonable - but it seems like he’s alluded to a number of potential crimes along the way: fraud, hacking, etc.
Fraud appears to have a 7 year statute of limitations and I believe that it would have become a crime once the tech executive accessed information illegally (e.g. similar to insider trading - it’s fraud to use information that you’re not privy to, for financial gain) and again when he sent the information over the internet (assuming that state lines were crossed).
It’s strange that there’s no charges being brought against the tech executive.
I think the filing was reasonably clear as to these issues.
Per Paragraph 2, on September 19, 2016, Sussman had a meeting with Baker, at which he presented his evidence about “Russia Bank-1”, aka Alfa Bank. Sussman was indicted for allegedly lying to Baker about whether he was representing a client in this meeting.
Per Paragraph 6, on February 9, 2017, Sussman provided “an updated set of allegations”, including both 1) the original allegations about Russia Bank-1 and also 2) “additonal allegations relating to Trump” to “Agency-2” (media reporting that this is the CIA). The “additional allegations” are what allegedly relied on the gathering of DNS data described in Paragraphs 4-5.
The point of all this in this particular filing is that some of the people involved with gathering data for the “additional allegations” are/were also connected to Latham, such that Latham may have a conflict of interest in representing Sussman.
I think “fake” is too strong of a term. Cherry-pick and misleading are more accurate.
If you run to a government agency and say “we found ~1,000 lookups of Russian Phone Company-1 IP addresses affiliated with Trump Tower”, that could be completely accurate, but by omitting that this was out of 3 million such lookups in the US, and that they were over a period beginning in 2014, then you’re skewing the picture considerably.
I don’t think you can make anything out the fact that the Tech Exec has not been indicted. Partly because he might yet be be indicted in the future. But also because it’s unclear to what extent such actions constitute a crime. Even Sussman has not been indicted for this (yet?) and he’s the guy who allegedly presented this to the government. Possibly it’s a judgment call as to how significant these lookups are, and while their dubious significance might support the overall picture of what Sussman was doing (and thus be relevant to the actual charge that he deceived Baker as part of a campaign) they might not support charges on their own.
He would like people to infer that Joffe instructed people to cook stuff up, but there’s no way he has proof that Joffe did so. If he did, he would include it in the indictment or leak it. Instead we get indirect statements that quote partial sentences and sometimes single words.
This is what cherry picking to push a narrative looks like.