Political | Process

John Durham, the special counsel appointed by former President Trump to investigate the FBI’s probing of Russian interference in the 2016 election, alleged in court.

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• In a court filing submitted Friday, Durham’s office said that the executive, who is referred to in legal filings only as “Tech Executive-1” but has been identified in news reports as Rodney Joffe, used his company’s access to nonpublic government domain name system (DNS) data through a pending cybersecurity contract as he was analyzing supposed links between the Trump Organization and a Russian bank.

• “Tech Executive-1’s employer, Internet Company-1, 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,” Durham’s office wrote, using an acronym for the White House’s Executive Office of the President.

• “Tech Executive-1 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.”

• An attorney representing Joffe did not immediately respond when asked for comment.

• The filing came in Durham’s prosecution against Michael Sussmann, an attorney who represented Joffe and worked on behalf of the Democrats and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, for a single count of making false statements to the FBI’s general counsel.

• Sussmann is accused of falsely telling the FBI’s top attorney in a 2016 meeting that he was not representing any client when he presented data that researchers believed could have established a connection between Trump’s business and the Moscow-based Alfa Bank.