“Two FBI agents and a Neustar employee testified after opening statements on Tuesday, the second day in the trial of 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign attorney Michael Sussmann, with more witnesses for the prosecution expected to take the stand Wednesday.
David Martin (Credit: public domain)
(…) FBI Special Agents David Martin and Scott Hellman were the prosecution’s first two witnesses, followed by Neustar employee Steve DeJong.
Martin was the prosecution’s expert witness in cybersecurity and DNS data analysis and explained the basics of Domain Name System (DNS) data to the jury, saying that it is essentially maps of names of servers on the internet to numeric IP addresses — like a phonebook mapping someone’s name to a phone number.
The prosecution’s second witness, Hellman, examined the data on the thumb drives that Sussmann had given to Baker in their meeting weeks before the presidential election. One of the FBI agents whose signature was required for a chain of custody form for the drives was former FBI official Peter Strzok.
Scott Hellman (Credit: public domain)
(…) Hellman said the overall conclusion of a connection between Trump and Russia from the data didn’t make any sense because a presidential candidate would not likely put their own name in a domain name that was easily connected to their organization and Russia, if it’s supposedly for secret communication.
“Didn’t ring true at all,” Hellman said. He said the analysis of the data was done “inside of a day,” then given for further analysis to the FBI Chicago Division, which later agreed with his assessment.
Hellman added that he found it “conveniently coincidental” that someone was looking for suspicious activity between the Trump and Russian servers and found it just three weeks after it began.
(…) The third witness for the prosecution, DeJong, had pulled the data regarding the Trump email server and Alfa Bank for then-Neustar CTO Rodney Joffe at his request.
The request from Joffe came through Georgia Tech researcher Manos Antonakakis, which DeJong said was a little uncommon.
While DeJong said he eventually became curious as to why he was told by Joffe to search for DNS data regarding Trump and Alfa Bank, he never asked nor was he given a reason.” (Read more: JusttheNews, 5/17/2022) (Archive)