Psaki won’t comment on Clinton-linked tech exec ‘mining’ WH records
White House press secretary Jen Psaki declined to comment Wednesday on special counsel John Durham’s allegation that tech executive Rodney Joffe mined “non-public” White House internet records to find dirt on former President Donald Trump.
Fox News correspondent Jacqui Heinrich asked Psaki during her regular briefing if there was still a DNS resolver server extracting White House data and whether its alleged review by a Hillary Clinton ally constituted “spying.”
“Durham says there was an outside company with ties to the Clinton camp monitoring server data info on the Executive Office of the President through the Obama administration, possibly into the Trump administration,” Heinrich began her questioning.
“Do you know if there’s still a system picking up server data on the EOP and if not, when it stopped?”
“I know you asked my colleague a few questions about this the other day, but I would point you — any questions about this to the Department of Justice,” replied Psaki, referencing Heinrich raising the matter at a Monday briefing with deputy press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre.
“Is what was described in the filings there — monitoring internet traffic — is that —generally speaking, would that be considered something along the lines of spying?” Heinrich followed up.
“Again, I would point you to the Department of Justice,” Psaki said.
Trump cited Durham’s Friday filing as evidence that he was the victim of a “hoax” linking him to Russia in the 2016 election. However, Joffe said through a spokesperson he did nothing wrong.
Joffe, a now-retired senior vice president at Virginia-based company Neustar who is identified as “Tech Executive-1”, “exploited … domain name system (‘DNS’) Internet traffic pertaining to … the Executive Office of the President,” as well as two Trump properties and a healthcare provider, the Durham filing said.
“[Neustar] had come to access and maintain dedicated servers for the EOP as part of a sensitive arrangement whereby it provided DNS resolution services to the EOP,” the filing went on. “[Joffe] and his associates exploited this arrangement by mining the EOP’s DNS traffic and other data for the purpose of gathering derogatory information about Donald Trump.”
Clinton campaign attorney Michael Sussmann allegedly gave the DNS records to the CIA in early 2017. Sussmann is awaiting trial for allegedly lying to the FBI about his links to the Clinton campaign while hawking a later-debunked theory linking Trump to Russia-based Alfa-Bank.
The Friday court filing alleged that “[Joffe] indicated that he was seeking to please certain ‘VIPs’ referring to individuals at [Sussmann’s law firm] and the Clinton Campaign.”
A DNS resolver server helps fulfill computer requests to visit websites — such as WhiteHouse.gov. But the precise data points analyzed and circulated by Joffe and Sussmann have not been divulged.
A spokesperson for Joffe said Monday that he is “an apolitical internet security expert … who legally provided access to DNS data obtained from a private client that separately was providing DNS services to the Executive Office of the President (EOP).”
“Under the terms of the contract, the data could be accessed to identify and analyze any security breaches or threats,” Joffe’s rep said.
“As a result of the hacks of EOP and DNC servers in 2015 and 2016, respectively, there were serious and legitimate national security concerns about Russian attempts to infiltrate the 2016 election,” the statement continued. “Upon identifying DNS queries from Russian-made Yota phones in proximity to the Trump campaign and the EOP, respected cyber-security researchers were deeply concerned about the anomalies they found in the data and prepared a report of their findings, which was subsequently shared with the CIA.”
Sussmann’s legal team said in a court filing Monday that the DNS records in question dated to former President Barack Obama’s administration’s and not Trump’s, which began on Jan. 20, 2017. The rebuttal also said Sussmann “never billed the Clinton Campaign” for the Feb. 9, 2017, meeting where he gave the records to the CIA.
The significance of Joffe’s access to DNS records and potential privacy concerns remain murky, in part because it’s unclear what exactly was accessed and shared. Joffe has declined The Post’s request for an interview.
A 2020 document from the federal Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency emphasized that US agencies should pursue encryption when selecting from private-sector DNS resolver servers to enhance “user security and privacy by preventing eavesdropping and manipulation of DNS data.”
In recent years, the government has taken an increasingly active role in the process of hardening the security of federal DNS services.
