Joffe and Michael Sussmann, the cybersecurity lawyer accused of falsely saying he had no client when he brought the findings of the researchers to the F.B.I. Durham’s indictment provided evidence that two participants in the matter - Mr. and that the indictment “gratuitously presents an incomplete and misleading picture” of his role. Tyrrell, a lawyer for Rodney Joffe, an internet entrepreneur and another of the four data experts, said his client had a duty to share the information with the F.B.I. The findings of the researchers were true then and remain true today reports that these findings were innocuous or a hoax are simply wrong,” said Jody Westby and Mark Rasch, lawyers for David Dagon, a Georgia Institute of Technology data scientist and one of the researchers whom the indictment discussed but did not name. The Alfa Bank results “have been validated and are reproducible. Their clients, they say, believed their hypothesis was a plausible explanation for the odd data they had uncovered - and still do. Trump’s company were a deliberate hoax by supporters of Hillary Clinton and portraying it as evidence that the entire Russia investigation was unwarranted.Įmails obtained by The New York Times and interviews with people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss issues being investigated by federal authorities, provide a fuller and more complex account of how a group of cyberexperts discovered the odd internet data and developed their hypothesis about what could explain it.Īt the same time, defense lawyers for the scientists say it is Mr. Trump supporters seized on the indictment, saying it shows that suspicions about possible covert communications between Russia’s Alfa Bank and Mr. Durham’s version of events set off reverberations beyond the courtroom. Trump’s company and a Kremlin-linked bank - a theory, he insinuated, they did not really believe. Durham used a 27-page indictment to lay out a far more expansive tale, one in which four computer scientists who were not charged in the case “exploited” their access to internet data to develop an explosive theory about cyberconnections in 2016 between Donald J. Durham, the special counsel appointed by the Trump administration to scour the Russia investigation, indicted a cybersecurity lawyer this month on a single count of lying to the F.B.I.īut Mr. WASHINGTON - The charge was narrow: John H.