The truth about Hillary's spies

 Kimberley Strassel:

Truth about techies who targeted Trump

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In recent court filings, Durham explains that these tech experts — including Rodney Joffe, formerly of Neustar, Inc. — were in cahoots with the same crew as Steele, using the same playbook.

They worked with Democratic lawyers at Perkins Coie and opposition-research firm Fusion GPS, with the goal of dredging up “derogatory” information on Trump that would please “VIPs” in the Clinton campaign. The techies did so, the Durham indictment says, in part by mining protected Internet data that had been supplied to a government contractor — allowing them to snoop on the White House as well as Trump Tower and Trump’s Manhattan apartment.

Joffe’s legal team continues to insist he is “apolitical” and wasn’t aware his lawyer, Michael Sussmann, was billing Team Clinton. (A grand jury impaneled by Durham indicted Sussmann in September on a charge of making a false statement to the FBI. Sussmann pleaded not guilty.) The press initially tried to ignore the story, then resorted to parsing the definition of “spying,” justifying the accused and trashing Durham.

The problem for the last-gaspers is that the techies they seek to defend have already put too much on the record that suggests their real concern was a President Trump, not national security.

Start with the company that the “apolitical” Joffe kept. One of his colleagues involved in the project and referenced in the Sussmann indictment is Paul Vixie, whose Twitter feed sports a long record of liberal, anti-Trump sentiments. Another member of the circle — who took on the job of publishing the Joffe data — is L. Jean Camp, an Indiana University computer-science professor and Clinton supporter who called on Americans to join the “resistance” against Trump.

So much for the media’s description of a gang of politically innocent nerds.

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. Joffe instead went to Democrats — namely 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 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 Joffe attended a meeting with Peter Fritsch, a co-founder of Fusion GPS. Was he still confused about the partisan nature of this project?

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There is more.

The scam is unraveling and the players and their connections to the Clinton campaign are hard to ignore unless you are a Democrat partisan.