Why would the FBI put a known con-man in charge of computer security for the most sensitive computer systems in the U.S.?

What would prompt the corrupt FBI to put a known swindler and con-man in charge of computer security for the most sensitive computer systems in the country?  What could prompt the so-called "intelligence community" of the U.S. gruberment to give this same person the highest possible security clearance?

If you said "To help the thoroughly corrupt Hilliary Clinton win in 2016, and then when that failed, to cripple Trump and ensure the Democrats re-took control of congress," you win.

Last week Special Counsel John Durham identified Rodney Joffe as being a key figure in an effort to falsely accuse Donald Trump of "colluding with Russia"--a charge relentlessly pushed by the FBI and the Lying Mainstream Media for at least four years.

To date Joffe has not been charged with a crime. But in a September indictment of former Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann, and a court filing last week, Durham has suggested that Joffe (identified as “Tech Executive-1”) was at the center of an effort to monitor President Trump’s communications and then share the information with Clinton associates.

Former prosecutor and assistant FBI director Chris Swecker said Joffe’s past scams raise serious questions about how he managed to pass an FBI background check and obtain the government’s highest security clearances, although Swecker noted that the fraud case against Joffe was decades and was settled without any charges or judgments against Joffe.

If you conned ten-thousand elderly Americans out of millions of dollars, would you get off without charge or judgments?  Not damn likely.  Yet somehow...

"The FBI declined comment."  Damn right they did.

Another part of the answer as to why Joffe’s past remained buried may involve how successfully he appears to have reinvented himself during the 1990s.

Around the year 2000 Joffe moved to Washington, where he eventually landed lucrative security-related contracts with the FBI and Pentagon.  Those contracts required a top-secret clearance.  If you'd been involved in a massive con, a cursory search would have revealed it, and you almost certainly couldn't get a clearance.  Yet somehow...

In 2006, Joffe joined Neustar Inc., a Beltway computer contractor that, among other things, secures and maintains Internet servers for federal agencies, including the White House. This high-level position gave the him access to a proprietary archive of Internet traffic records – both public and nonpublic – known as "DNS logs." These logs reveal the back-and-forth pinging that computers and cellphones generate when they communicate with Internet servers, including ones transmitting emails.

In his new position Joffe advised not only FBI executives but also White House officials, including Obama.  But curiously, Joffe claims he never really knew the details of computer security, claiming his skill was in recruiting and paying real experts to do that.

In any event his position had him advising White House officials, including Obama, on cybersecurity matters. By early 2016 his access to proprietary internet logs became of interest to operatives for the Hillary Clinton campaign.  (After the 2016 election Joffe wrote an email saying "I was tentatively offered the top [cybersecurity] job by the Democrats when it looked like they'd win.)

One of those Clinton operatives was attorney Michael Sussmann, indicted by Durham last fall in connection with allegations of lying about his work on the project for the campaign.  

That indictment accused Joffe of monitoring Trump’s Internet activities months after the 2016 election – through early 2017.  Joffe shared this sensitive information with Sussmann, who in turn gave it to the CIA. The prosecutor said Joffe mined data from Trump Tower, Trump’s Central Park West apartment building and even the Executive Office of the President “for the purpose of gathering derogatory information about Donald Trump.”

According to court papers, Joffe used the proprietary DNS pings to create a "narrative” that Trump was secretly communicating with the Kremlin.  Joffe gave those findings to Sussmann, who fed the data to the FBI to drive an investigation and bad press against Trump.  The Clinton campaign then used the FBI investigation to make it appear that the GOP nominee was colluding with Russia to win the election.

The Media then ran with this narrative for four years, even though it was found with a couple of months to have been fabricated by the Clinton campaign.   

“The data was highly manipulated,” said Robert Graham of Atlanta-based Errata Security, an independent cyberforensics expert who examined the logs and debunked the link at the time. He suspects Joffe and his biased crew set out to invent a connection between Trump and Russia.

“A link between Trump and Alfa bank wasn’t something they accidentally found, it was one of the many thousands of links they looked for,” he added. “The purpose was to smear Trump.”

Graham said the supposedly "suspicious" server data were innocent spam traffic.  Graham noted that Trump didn’t even have control over the domain in question: trump-email.com.  Instead that domain was created by a hotel marketing firm that simply used Trump’s to get clicks.

Even though Joffe encouraged Sussmann to give the DNS data to the FBI as possible evidence of Trump-Russia collusion, in August of 2016 Joffe emailed his reseachers admitting that the host for the trump-email.com domain  “is a legitimate valid [marketing] company,” and that “We can ignore it, together with others that seem to be part of the marketing world.” He also urged his team to keep searching for data that would “give the base of a very useful narrative."

Durham has a copy of this email.

In previous statements, lawyers for Joffe and the researchers he recruited have said they had no political ax to grind but were merely monitoring Trump to track a credible national security threat related to Russia. But Joffe’s lead researcher – Manos Antonakakis of the Georgia Institute of Technology – revealed in one email obtained by Durham that “the only thing that drives us is that we just don’t like [Trump].”

Question is, of course, is it legal to use private DNS data to spy on a presidential candidate--let alone after that person has been elected President.

Recent court filings indicate Durham and his prosecutors aren’t buying the "concerned patriot" defense.

In an interview with RCI, former FBI official Swecker said that as he sees it, “Joffe, who worked for Neustar at the time, had a contract with either the Executive Office of the President [i.e. Obama] or the [presidential] transition team, and he used information gleaned from that relationship to provide that private information to the Clinton campaign. He also engaged researchers at Georgia Tech who were working on a government contract and being paid by the U.S. government.”

In a public statement, a spokesman for Joffe argued that the then-Neustar executive had authority to mine the White House data: "Under the terms of the contract, the data could be accessed to identify and analyze any security breaches or threats,” including concerns about Russian interference in the election.

Durham’s office is looking closely at Washington-based Neustar, and firms Joffe founded while working there. Sidebar: Joffe has created more than two dozen startups across several states, some of which have no employees, revenue or even offices.  

Sources told RCI that Durham’s office is looking closely at Washington-based Neustar – which Joffe left in September following Sussmann’s indictment – and two Internet firms Joffe operated while still working there: Packet Forensics and Vostrom Ventures, both of which are controlled by Vostrom Holdings Inc. and also have offices in the greater Washington area.

Durham’s investigators have interviewed several current and former employees at all three companies, and obtained thousands of pages of subpoenaed documents from them, recent court filings reveal. In September 2016, Sussmann billed Neustar for “communications regarding confidential project,” a reference to Joffe's mission to find a “secret hotline” between Trump and the Kremlin via Alfa Bank's servers. That Sussmann billed Neustar for this work suggests a level of involvement by the company that has not been explained.

A month earlier, Joffe had tasked employees at his two small Internet startups to search for any Internet data (including private DNS holdings) reflecting potential connections or communications between Trump or his associates and Russia. Joffe emailed them a five-page dossier – the “Trump Associates List” – to guide their queries. As RCI first reported, the list included highly personal information on Trump campaign advisers Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, George Papadopoulos and Carter Page. Steve Bannon appears to have been added to the list later as another target, the emails released by Judicial Watch reveal.

Packet Forensics reportedly landed a recent Pentagon contract to manage a large chunk of Internet domains owned by the military. Interestingly, that contract was awarded the day Joe Biden was inaugurated.

Joffe’s company also sells wiretapping equipment that allows federal authorities to spy on private web-browsing by using fake Internet security certificates.  (Legitimate websites use real "certificates" to verify secure connections.)  Packet's device lets agents see an individual's online transactions without obtaining a warrant.

Over the past decade, Packet Forensics has landed almost $40 million in federal contracts, according to publicly disclosed contract information. Joffe’s firm counts the FBI and the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency among its customers. The contracts generally involve cybersecurity. Joffe monitors the computers of government officials for threats, including as it turns out, even investigators in the office of Justice Department watchdog Michael Horowitz, recent court filings reveal.

The former scammer's recent success with the Democrats seems rooted in a simple fact: “He has friends in high places,” said a career Justice Department official. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, pointed out that Joffe personally advised President Obama on cybersecurity and other issues, and was also close to former FBI Director James Comey.

Secret Service entrance logs reveal Joffe visited the White House several times during the Obama administration.  And in 2013, Comey gave Joffe an award recognizing his work helping agents investigate a cybersecurity case. Sources told RCI that Joffe has also worked as an FBI informant on various cybersecurity cases opened by the bureau over roughly the past 15 years.
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So once again we see the now-too-common story of the FBI surveilling American citizens who haven't been charged with a crime.  Except in this case the FBI was spying on both a presidential candidate, and the elected president.  And if the White House gave Joffe the contracts and clearances needed to do that, you can bet everything that Obama approved it. 

Source: RealClearInvestigations

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2022/02/17/the_checkered_past_of_the_fbi_computer_contractor_who_spied_on_trump_816761.html