Monitoring of Trump Internet Traffic Sparks New Dispute in Durham Probe

Legal memos filed in recent days in the case against a former lawyer for the 2016 Clinton campaign, Michael Sussmann, reignited disputes over special counsel John Durham’s continuing probe into the origins of the FBI’s investigation into ties between the Trump campaign and Russia. Durham said in a filing that his office would show at Sussmann’s trial that people affiliated with Donald Trump’s Democratic opponent, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, worked to exploit nonpublic internet traffic data they had access to, including from the White House, to establish a narrative tying Trump to Russia. The filing suggested the data included the early days of the Trump presidency. Sussmann’s lawyers called the allegations misleading and irrelevant, and said the White House data predated Trump’s inauguration.

The dispute revolves around a highly technical analysis of internet-traffic data by security researchers in late 2016 and early 2017. Such data are frequently shared in the cybersecurity community, and obtaining it doesn’t require any computer intrusion or special legal permission, though it is technically proprietary. The data only show connections between computers and don’t reveal content of communications, and nearly all internet users generate such data as they use the web.