benchmark said:
Kimberley A. Strassel - WSJ
Who Are Those 'Techies' Who Spied on Trump?
Quote:
The researchers claim that by July 2016 they were alarmed by the security implications of their data, mined from government information. Yet they didn't go to the government. Mr. Joffe instead went to Democrats - namely Mr. Sussmann, the Perkins Coie lawyer who in the summer of 2016 was regularly identified in the press as an attorney for the Democratic National Committee. The Sussmann indictment notes a meeting Mr. Joffe had with Marc Elias, the Perkins Coie attorney for the Clinton campaign. And a deposition by a Fusion GPS staffer as part of continuing Alfa Bank litigation says Mr. Joffe attended a meeting with Peter Fritsch, a co-founder of Fusion GPS. Was he still confused about the partisan nature of this project?
He certainly couldn't have been two years later. By that point, the roles Perkins Coie and Fusion played in funneling information to the FBI for Clinton were well known, while Fusion had gone on to team up with former Democratic staffer Dan Jones to keep advancing the claims. Mr. Joffe sat for that October 2018 New Yorker piece that pushed the Alfa claims, anonymously calling himself "Max" and admitting in the piece that he'd continued to help that effort long after the election, providing Mr. Jones's team with 37 million internet records to examine. (A deposition in the Alfa litigation identified Mr. Joffe as Max.)
Here's the most revealing bit: "Max" also explained to the New Yorker how vitally important it was in 2016 to make sure the threat his team discovered was "known before the election." Which was why he and his lawyer first went with their information to the press. The Sussmann indictment says Mr. Sussmann tried peddling the data to the New York Times in late August 2016. He didn't approach the FBI until the middle of September. Mr. Joffe's spokesperson declined to comment.
Let's connect a few more dots during this time period. Late spring-summer 2016.
Perkins, Coie is also counsel for Google, which at that time is a large shareholder in a private company called Crowd Strike (has since gone public) and also foundations and PACs for Obama.
The Hillary email scandal is still a thorny issue in the FBI until Comey takes the step of calling a press conference to exonerate her on July 5th. Which was a few weeks after the Bill Clinton/Loretta Lynch tango on the tarmac. Also during this time frame, Strzok made a few attempts to get FISA warrants on unknown people connected to the Trump campaign that were actually denied by the FISA courts.
And of course there was the alleged "hack" of the DNC and DNCCC and the involvement of Assange and wikileaks. Fusion, GPS has made a run at Trump directly using the Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya meeting with Kushner, Don Jr and Manafort at Trump Tower.