SERPICO IS NOT THE VILLAIN:

Last September, the prosecutor indicted cybersecurity attorney Michael Sussmann for allegedly having lied to the FBI. Soon thereafter, evidence emerged that Durham's indictment itself was misleading, relying on selective quotes and omitting relevant details from their proper context. In December, Sussman's lawyers disclosed evidence that raised additional doubts about the reliability of Durham's charges.

Indeed, the whole case is terribly odd. Sussman met with the FBI nearly six years ago to discuss alleged connections between the Trump Organization's computers and the Kremlin-linked Alfa Bank. According to Durham, he claimed he wasn't acting on Clinton's behalf when he secretly was. Sussman's defense team said he never claimed not to have clients, and it didn't much matter who he worked for anyway.

It was against this backdrop that prosecutors had another court filing late last week, which Trump and the right seized on in ways that don't stand up well to scrutiny. From the Times' article:

The filing was ostensibly about potential conflicts of interest. But it also recounted a meeting at which Mr. Sussmann had presented other suspicions to the government. In February 2017, Mr. Sussmann told the C.I.A. about odd internet data suggesting that someone using a Russian-made smartphone may have been connecting to networks at Trump Tower and the White House, among other places. Mr. Sussmann had obtained that information from a client, a technology executive named Rodney Joffe. Another paragraph in the court filing said that Mr. Joffe's company, Neustar, had helped maintain internet-related servers for the White House, and that he and his associates "exploited this arrangement" by mining certain records to gather derogatory information about Mr. Trump.

The former president and conservative media went from zero to hyperventilating with surprising speed, overlooking all kinds of relevant details. Even putting aside the fact that Durham has an unfortunate habit of presenting provocative ideas that don't stand up well to scrutiny -- which helps explain why news organizations were cautious about pouncing on the so-called "controversy" -- in this matter, there's still no evidence of "infiltration," "hacking," or "spying," all words used by Trump and conservative media this week.

What we actually have is a superfluous story about cybersecurity researchers at Joffe's company examining malware in the White House -- from Obama's term, not Trump's -- and there doesn't appear to be any connection between Joffe's firm and Clinton.

Maybe Durham and his team didn't realize their court filing would be exploited as part of a public-deception campaign launched by Trump and his media cohorts. Perhaps Durham and his team knew what would happen and didn't care.

Either way, when your weird uncle who consumes conservative media all day sent you all-caps emails about Trump being "spied" on, he was pushing a story with no real basis in fact. The original "Spygate" story was a sad joke, and its third iteration is no better.

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