The White House on Monday refused to be drawn into the growing controversy over claims that Hillary Clinton 's allies tried to smea...
The White House on Monday refused to be drawn into the growing controversy over claims that Hillary Clinton's allies tried to smear Donald Trump, and whether internet data collection amounted to spying.
Three times Joe Biden's principal deputy press secretary was asked whether the president had any concerns about campaigns hacking into opponents' computer systems to gather dirt.
And three times during the White House daily briefing Karine Jean-Pierre referred all questions to the Department of Justice.
The tussle followed a new legal filing in Special Counsel John Durham's probe into the origins of the Russia investigation. It alleged that a tech executive, linked to Clinton's 2016 campaign, gained access to internet traffic at Trump Tower and the White House with the intention of collecting dirt on Trump.
Trump allies quickly cited it as proof of the former president's claim he was being illegally spied on and that the Russian collusion tale was a hoax.
The issue was raised at the White House briefing.
Jacqui Heinrich, of Fox News, asked: 'Does the president have any concerns about a candidate for president using computer experts to infiltrate computer systems of competing candidates - or even the president-elect - for the goal of creating a narrative ... Is that something ...'
Jean-Pierre cut her off, saying: 'That's something I can't speak to from this podium so I refer you to the Department of Justice.'
Heinrich tried again: 'Is what's been described in that report, monitoring internet traffic, is that spying?'
'Again I can't speak to that report. I refer you to the Department of Justice,' came the response.
Heinrich broadened her question, saying: 'Generally speaking though, would monitoring internet traffic...'
'Jacqui, my answer's not going to change,' said Jean-Pierre. 'I refer you to Department of Justice. I can't speak for that from here.'
The special counsel's office at the Department of Justice said it would not comment beyond its legal filings.
White House Principal Deputy Press Secretary referred questions about Special Counsel John Durham's allegations that Hillary Clinton on allies spied on Trump when he was president to the Department of Justice during the regular White House daily briefing on Monday
Special Counsel John Durham has been tasked with investigating the origins of the investigation into links between Donald Trump and Russian officials. In particular he has focused on claims that the Clinton campaign saw Trump's ties to Russia as a way of distracting from questions over Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server
The questions have polarized American media.
Rightwing news organizations have accused what they call the 'mainstream media' of ignoring an important development.
But some internet experts say the internet data at issue - DNS lookups - are often shared by internet service providers with third parties, and their collection may not be illegal or constitute hacking.
Earlier, Trump era Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe claimed Biden and Barack Obama knew the Clinton campaign was trying to hack into Trump's servers to try and find links to the Kremlin.
Ratcliffe said former CIA Director John Brennan told Obama and and Vice President Biden in 2016 about allegations Clinton was trying to fabricate Trump's links to Russia to distract from the scandal over her deleted emails.
The former DNI also told Fox News Digital on Monday there was 'enough evidence' to indict 'multiple people' in Special Counsel John Durham's probe into the origins of the Russia investigation into ex-President Donald Trump.
Clinton allegedly approved in the 2016 election 'a plan concerning U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump and Russian hackers hampering U.S. elections as a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server,' according to a CIA Counterintelligence Operational Lead (CIOL) first revealed when a heavily-redacted version became declassified in October 2020.
The September 2016 memo was forwarded from the CIA to the FBI to the attention of then-FBI Director James Comey and then-Deputy Assistant Director of Counterintelligence Peter Strzok.
Trump sent a short statement Monday morning claiming vindication after Durham's filing apparently revealed Clinton's plot to link him to Russia.
'I was proven right about the spying, and I will be proven right about 2020!' he wrote, insisting his claims of fraud and meddling in the 2020 presidential election will also be confirmed.
'What did John Brennan tell President Obama in the Oval Office in 2016?' Fox News' Bill Hemmer asked Ratcliffe during an interview Monday.
'Well, I can talk about this because this part has been declassified,' he prefaced. 'He briefed President Obama and Vice President Biden and other members of the national security team about this specific intelligence that John Durham now has about a Hillary Clinton plan to falsely accuse and vilify Donald Trump with a scandal, and the discussion around that and whether or not it was good intelligence.'
'And so everything that happened after that is one of the reasons that John Durham is investigating,' Ratcliffe added.
'Those are the issues that John Durham is looking at and I think there will be many more,' he said. 'I would expect there to be quite a few more indictments because of that. There wasn't a proper predicate to begin that investigation and John Durham has said that publicly already.'
DailyMail.com reached out to an Obama spokesperson regarding the alleged briefing but did not get a response.
Former DNI John Ratcliffe told Fox News in a Monday interview that former President Barack Obama and then-VP Joe Biden were briefed by then-CIA Director John Brennan in 2016 about allegations Hillary Clinton was trying to fabricate links between Trump to Russia
Ratcliffe told Special Counsel John Durham there is 'enough evidence' to indict 'multiple people' connected to the origins of the Trump-Russia probe. He pointed to a declassified memo from September 2016 that Clinton approved a plan looking into Trump colluding with Russian hackers to 'distract the public from her use of a private email server'
As developments in the case ensued Monday, Clinton posted an image of her young self with husband and former President Bill Clinton with the caption: 'Happy Valentine's Day!'
Brennan was questioned by Special Counsel John Durham's team for eight hours in August 2020 as part of the ongoing investigation, specifically focusing on whether the former CIA director pushed for a more blunt assessment of Russia's motivations
Ratcliffe told Durham, sources told Fox News, that the indictments could be connected to Clinton's lawyers hacking Trump's servers to try and fabricate ties to his campaign and the Kremlin in order to distract from her own email scandal.
A source familiar with the matter told Fox that Ratcliffe has privately raised concerns regarding the CIOL directing its memo specifically to Comey and Strzok.
Ratcliffe met with Durham more than once and shared his assessment that multiple people can be charged with a crime in the events that ultimately led to Trump's first impeachment, in which he was acquitted by the Senate.
Before becoming Trump's director of National Intelligence, Ratcliffe served as U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Texas and after that was a congressman for Texas' 4th congressional district.
A growing chorus of Democrats believe Clinton should be questioned by Durham for her alleged role in the Russian secret server scandal in a poll conducted before the bombshell revelations that her team spied on Trump's campaign.
In a poll last month, 66 percent of Democrats wanted Clinton questioned, a whopping 22 percentage points higher than how many in her party demanded a probe last October, according to TechnoMetrica Institute of Policy and Politics (TIPP) research.
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