Later that month, then-FBI Director James Comey told the House Intelligence Committee there was nothing to the claims. In March 2017, the then-president claimed former President Barack Obama had his “wires tapped” at his eponymous New York skyscraper.
It’s not the first time Mr Trump has made unfounded allegations of political espionage against prominent Democrats.
The next day, Mr Trump seized on the allegations - which had nothing to do with the subject of the filing - to proclaim that Mr Durham’s court filing contained “indisputable evidence that my campaign and presidency were spied on by operatives paid by the Hillary Clinton Campaign in an effort to develop a completely fabricated connection to Russia” and suggest that the alleged “crime” was “far greater in scope and magnitude than Watergate” and would have merited the death penalty “in a stronger period of time”.
#Clinton campaign paid to infiltrate trump tower trial#
The filing contained a section asserting that the government “will establish” at Mr Sussmann’s trial that a “tech executive” he represented - an internet pioneer and malware expert called Rodney Joffe - had “exploited his access to non-public and/or proprietary Internet data,” specifically internet traffic from Domain Name System requests pertaining to a Michigan health insurance company connected to ex-education secretary Betsy DeVos’s family, two Trump-owned New York buildings, and the White House. On Friday, Mr Durham’s office submitted a court filing asking a federal judge to direct Mr Sussmann’s lawyers to consider recusing themselves from his case. In September, Mr Durham charged Daniel Sussmann, a lawyer who once worked for a firm representing the Clinton campaign, with making a false statement to the FBI while trying to tip agents off about an alleged computer connection between the Trump Organization and a Russian bank. Former president Donald Trump’s latest claim to have been spied on by someone directed by or associated with Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign has found a welcome reception in conservative media, but experts say the former president’s basis for making such claims is as detached from reality as his previous attempts to cloak himself in a mantle of victimhood.īanned from Twitter, the twice-impeached former president has since Saturday issued a succession of emailed statements reacting to a court filing from the office of John Durham, formerly the US Attorney for Connecticut, and currently a special counsel charged with the authority “to broadly examin the government's collection of intelligence involving the Trump campaign's interactions with Russians” during the 2016 election.
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