The Illusive YotaPhone White Paper
Joffe's Silliest Dirty Trick
This morning, the indispensable Margot Cleveland announced in the Federalist that she had procured the long sought after YotaPhone White Paper. Persistent open records questions to Georgia Tech have once again payed off, delivering what is assumed to be the ‘technical’ paper Michael Sussmann delivered to the CIA in February of 2017 as part of an elaborate attempt to tie then President Donald Trump to Russia.
Before and after the 2016 election, Clinton campaign lawyer Sussmann conspired with an NSA linked tech executive named Rodney Joffe to manufacture and deliver sketchy allegations against Donald Trump to government entities, exploiting Joffe’s access to technical experts and (sometimes sensitive) communications data.
Sussmann was indicted (and later acquitted) by Special Counsel John Durham for making a false statement to the FBI concerning his role in delivering these allegations to the FBI in September of 2016.
What Durham did not charge, however, were similar statements Sussmann allegedly made to the CIA during his February meeting in Langley Virginia. It was at this meeting that Sussmann delivered two thumbdrives he attributed to unnamed contacts and containing three ‘white papers’ along with some amount of data purported to support them.
The accusations contained in Sussmann’s white papers concerning Trump related communications with Russia based Alfa Bank were roundly debunked by technical experts. But in a surprise contained in Durham’s court filings, Sussmann was said to have made a new allegation unique to the CIA meeting regarding Russian produced ‘YotaPhones’.
This new story claimed that these supposedly rare Russian phones were detected an inordinate number of times in multiple Trump related networks, indicating some connection to Russian entities and the Trump orbit.
According to documents provided by Durham, the CIA immediately dismissed this supposed evidence as both incomplete and technically implausible. The YotaPhone claims were excluded from the Sussmann trial as irrelevant to the FBI false statement, and the actual white paper backing it has been glaringly absent from public view until now.
In my next post, we are going to examine this newly released white paper in depth and try to understand how such a badly written and technically absurd construct ever saw the light of day.
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Part II found here.
Part III found here.