Tech exec used access to White House computers to look for dirt on Trump, says

A tech executive “exploited” his access to computer data at the White House to find “derogatory information” about President Donald Trump, a special counsel appointed during the Trump administration said in a court filing Friday.

John Durham, appointed by then-Attorney General William Barr in 2020 to probe the origins of the FBI’s investigation of Russian election interference, said “Tech Executive-1,” not named in the filing but first identified by The New York Times as Rodney Joffe, used his access to domain name system, or DNS, data to compile information about which computers and servers the White House servers were communicating with.

Trump and his allies said the disclosure was proof that Trump was under surveillance while he was in office. “They were spying on the sitting president of the United States,” Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, told Fox News on Sunday. “And it goes right to the Clinton campaign.” In a statement Monday, Trump said the alleged spying was “the biggest story of our time, bigger than Watergate.”

The filing does not specify whether any of the data collection occurred while Trump was in office. It also does not allege that the content of any communications from the Executive Office of the President (EOP) or any parties were compromised or read and there’s no indication data collection went beyond identifying where the internet traffic came from and where it went.

Cybersecurity expert Rob Graham told NBC News that what Joffe appeared to have been doing was a search for domain names and addresses to which a computer had tried to connect.

When you type in the name of a website like Google.com, Graham said, DNS will translate it to a specific IP address and a specific group of servers. Monitoring such traffic reveals only that one computer or server is trying to reach another, he said, not the contents of a person’s screen or messages.

The disclosure about Joffe, who has not been charged, came in a filing in the court case of Michael Sussmann, a lawyer whom Durham’s office indicted in September in connection with allegations of lying about his relationship with the 2016 Hillary Clinton presidential campaign. 

In the filing Friday, prosecutors said “Tech Executive-1” gave Sussmann data about communications between computer servers at the EOP, two Trump-owned buildings in New York and an unrelated medical firm with Russian-made cellphones near the White House.

According to prosecutors, Sussmann gave the data to an unnamed federal agency at a meeting on Feb. 9, 2017, 20 days into the Trump administration, and said the data “demonstrated that Trump and/or his associates were using supposedly rare, Russian-made wireless phones in the vicinity of the White House and other locations.”

“The Special Counsel’s Office has identified no support for these allegations,” the filing said.

According to prosecutors, Sussmann did not disclose to the agency, identified…