Lost over the weekend amid President Donald Trump’s very serious and important allegation over Twitter that former President Barack Obama’s administration had engaged in surveillance of the Trump campaign in 2016 was another tweet from Trump that goes to the heart of claims that Russia had anything at all to do with the supposed hack of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and John Podesta emails.
The second tweet on March 4 stated, “Is it true the DNC would not allow the FBI access to check server or other equipment after learning it was hacked? Can that be possible?”
Here, Trump was referring apparently to a CNN report from January that the Democratic National Committee (DNC) refused to give the FBI access to its computer servers after it claimed in June it had been hacked by the Russian government.
Although the DNC tells the story a different way, with DNC deputy communications director Eric Lake offering to Buzzfeed News,
The DNC had several meetings with representatives of the FBI’s Cyber Division and its Washington Field Office, the Department of Justice’s National Security Division, and US Attorney’s Offices, and it responded to a variety of requests for cooperation, but the FBI never requested access to the DNC’s computer servers.”
But, either the FBI tried to get access to the servers, and was refused, or the FBI simply never requested access. Either way, per the CNN report, “The FBI instead relied on the assessment from a third-party security company called CrowdStrike,” which had performed its own audit of the DNC server.
This raises the obvious question of how the U.S. government ever proved on its own that Russia was behind the hack — if there even was a hack — if it never accessed the DNC computers. For, this goes to the heart of all claims central to Russia and the 2016 election.
Namely, if Russia was not behind any hacking of the DNC or John Podesta, then the Trump campaign could not have possibly colluded with Russia in such efforts.
Enter into the mix Wikileaks once again with its bombshell disclosure of CIA cyber warfare hacking tools and capabilities, which, besides Edward Snowden, appears to be the most impactful dump of classified information in U.S. history. Included in the disclosure is the ability of the agency — and presumably other hackers — to mask who is performing a hack.
According to Wikileaks’ press release,
The CIA’s Remote Devices Branch‘s UMBRAGE group collects and maintains a substantial library of attack techniques ‘stolen’ from malware produced in other states including the Russian Federation. With UMBRAGE and related projects the CIA cannot only increase its total number of attack types but also misdirect attribution by leaving behind the ‘fingerprints’ of the groups that the attack techniques were stolen from.”
On its face, the revelations on UMBRAGE appear to contradict a key finding from the CrowdStrike audit of the DNC server last year, which relied on an analysis of the techniques used by the supposed hackers.
[W]e identified advanced methods consistent with nation-state level capabilities including deliberate targeting and ‘access management’ tradecraft — both groups were constantly going back into the environment to change out their implants, modify persistent methods, move to new Command & Control channels and perform other tasks to try to stay ahead of being detected. Both adversaries engage in extensive political and economic espionage for the benefit of the government of the Russian Federation and are believed to be closely linked to the Russian government’s powerful and highly capable intelligence services.”
But if those techniques can be co-opted by other hackers or intelligence agencies — as the UMBRAGE program appears designed to do — it appears that the list of potential intruders on the DNC server should have been longer than just Russia. How does analyzing techniques tell you who perpetrated a hack?
Because, not only did the U.S. government apparently not physically investigate the DNC servers, it should have known full well that the hacking techniques identified by Crowdstrike as being used by state actors could be mimicked.
Add to that the fact that the DNC servers were already compromised in Dec. 2015, not because of a hack, but because of its internal voter and donor database software, NGP VAN, kept dropping its firewall. The problems were so bad that opposing campaigns could access each other’s files. Josh Uretsky was Bernie Sanders’ national data director but was fired after he accessed and stored files from the Clinton campaign he was able to access via NGP VAN before a software patch was issued. Has the FBI investigated these internal vulnerabilities? Might they explain how somebody internally might have gotten to the files that did wind up on Wikileaks?
That leads to multiple possibilities for the DNC servers to have been intruded. Then, what made everyone think it was Russia?
Bear in mind that right before the supposed hack was reported, on June 12, 2016, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange told ITV in an interview that “We have upcoming leaks in relation to Hillary Clinton, which is great, Wikileaks has a very big year ahead… We have emails related to Hillary Clinton which are pending publication, that is correct.”
Just two days later, on the Washington Post on June 14, 2016, it was preannounced that the hackers had accessed opposition research on then-GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump, which stated:
Russian government hackers penetrated the computer network of the Democratic National Committee and gained access to the entire database of opposition research on GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump, according to committee officials and security experts who responded to the breach.”
Sure enough, a day later, on June 15, 2016, the WordPress blog by Guccifer 2.0 appeared, taking credit for the DNC hack described in the Washington Post story. The blog posted some of the documents including the opposition research as proof of the hack. Critically, Guccifer 2.0 claimed, “The main part of the papers, thousands of files and mails, I gave to Wikileaks. They will publish them soon.”
Here Guccifer 2.0 was going out of its way to associate itself with Wikileaks, not the other way around. Wikileaks never confirmed that Guccifer 2.0 was the source of either the DNC or Podesta emails.
It was always peculiar that Wikileaks’ supposed source for the organization’s biggest story ever had preempted Wikileaks’ disclosure by more than a month claiming responsibility. Guccifer 2.0 also left behind a trail of bread crumbs that make the hack look Russian. For example, it was revealed that metadata in one of the files posted by Guccifer 2.0 was modified by a user whose name in Cyrillic was “Felix Edmundovich,” an apparent reference to a founder of the Soviet-era secret police.
So, what if the DNC supposed hack and Guccifer 2.0 was actually staged to make it look like Russia was responsible in order to get out front of Assange’s pending leaks against Clinton?
Former United Kingdom Ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray has maintained that there was no hack for months. “Neither of [the leaks] came from the Russians. The source had legal access to the information. The documents came from inside leaks, not hacks,” Murray is quoted as saying in an interview with the Daily Mail published Dec. 14, 2016.
Later, at a tech conference in London in Sept. 2016, Guccifer 2.0 claimed he or she had accessed the DNC servers via the same NGP VAN breach that Uretsky had been fired from the Sanders campaign over.
Add to that, then, the Christopher Steele dossier commissioned by the Clinton campaign — eventually published and discredited by Buzzfeed — that only started linking the Trump campaign to the Wikileaks disclosures after the DNC emails had appeared on Wikileaks in July. Somehow, Steele’s sources had no idea what bombshells were coming from Assange in the initial memos, but suddenly, in late July after Wikileaks published the emails, he had already gotten to the bottom of it. Not only was Russia behind Wikileaks, but the Trump campaign was colluding with them. It was too good to be true.
At some point, the FBI apparently offered to commission Steele to continue his Russia, Trump reporting, according to a Feb. 28 report from the Washington Post. In a March 6 letter by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) to FBI director James Comey, Grassley blasted the agency for getting involved in politics — and using unsubstantiated opposition research by the Clinton campaign to apparently initiate a national security investigation into the Trump campaign, then the opposition party. Wrote Grassley:
The idea that the FBI and associates of the Clinton campaign would pay Mr. Steele to investigate the Republican nominee for President in the run-up to the election raises further questions about the FBI’s independence from politics, as well as the Obama administration’s use of law enforcement and intelligence agencies for political ends.”
Indeed, it offers the appearance that the Trump campaign was framed — by the Clinton campaign using vendors like Steele and CrowdStrike — for crimes that were never committed. What’s worse, the FBI appears to have relied on these Democrat sources for material related to Russia — without apparently verifying it for itself.
Next, information was used to engage in surveillance against the Trump campaign — or at least spy on Russian contacts with the Trump campaign — which were then leaked to the media to create the appearance of collusion. FBI probes were launched into one-time campaign advisor Carter Page, former campaign manager Paul Manafort and former National Security Advisor Mike Flynn. These men’s reputations were destroyed at the altar of this madness.
So far, the Russia supposed hacks of the DNC and John Podesta emails have been compared to Pearl Harbor and 9/11. But who were these hackers? What were their names? Which branch of the Russian government did they represent? What city were they operating out of? Were there any operatives in the U.S.?
Or don’t we know? Consider that. The Clinton campaign and the Obama administration have virtually destroyed U.S-Russian relations — with both governments sitting atop thousands of nuclear weapons — bringing us to the brink of war, with claims that were never proven. It has become an article of faith. Something politicians say to sound tough but who have not at all made the case publicly to justify escalating tensions in theaters like Syria or Ukraine.
This is all making war more likely. And one way or another it’s time to come clean.
If the government can’t prove the case against Russia — if the supposed hack was not even physically investigated by the FBI — then for the sake of diplomacy alone, the claim ought to be disavowed. Those intelligence assessments by the Obama administration should have never been made public. They, lacking proof, added nothing but poison to the discussion, and their continued exhibition to date in news reports purporting to show fantastical connections between Trump and Russia contribute nothing but further deteriorating the possibility of relations.
To be fair, we don’t know what we don’t know. But given these glaring inconsistencies in the record — plus the specter that the Obama administration used the national security apparatus against the opposition party to win an election and afterward to overturn it and now to simply save face — the House and Senate Intelligence Committees must consider and investigate the possibility we’ve all been had.
18 comments
[…] Was the DNC ‘hack’ staged? (thebullelephant.com) […]
One word, Snowden. Latest CIA/Wiki leaks, is it Snowden?
Assange/Wiki? Get Assange a small apartment right next door to Snowden. Did Putin promise to get Assange out of that embassy and into Russia?
Probably.
and Trump is a genius – you guys will believe anything
Trump throw out a couple of tweets, and the entire obama/Clinton charade falls apart. I would say that is pretty damn smart.
assuming he has a strategy – the more simple explanation is that he is reacting like a 5-year old.
but go ahead and keep cheering your decision while the rest of us laugh at how stupid you are
I know! It was Professor Plum in the library with the candlestick!
This whole “Deep State” conspiracy crap falls apart as soon as you try to string the allegations together to form a complete story.
What we are now meant to believe is that it wasn’t the Russians who hacked the DNC and John Podesta, it was instead our own CIA who did it!! Why did they do it you ask? Well, they didn’t want Donald Trump to win, so they thought the best thing to do would be to hack the emails of the candidate they wanted to win, then give them to wikileaks which has known ties to the Kremlin, which then is used to damage the CIA’s chosen candidate, helping the election of the Trump, so they can then blame Trump for colluding with the Russians… do you see how ridiculous this all is?
A far more likely story is that the Russians hacked the DNC and Podesta for their own reasons, choosing to create chaos in our elections. They didn’t really care who won as long as they can keep sowing chaos and distrust.
A far more likely story behind the “Obama tapped my phones” farce is that counterintelligence officials were looking to find out why a Russian server kept periodically pinging a server in Trump tower, almost as if it had been…dare I say…HACKED!!!
Maybe the Russians have a mole in the CIA who leaked this most recent information to wikileaks, and it was released when it was to have maximum effect after Trump accused Obama of tapping his phones. Instead of looking at any possible Russian involvement, now people are accusing our own intelligence community of running some kind of false flag operation that harmed their supposedly chosen candidate.
Any way you slice it, the Russians are clearly winning the spy war right now.
There is no evidence which has been made publicly available which links the Russians to an attempt to support Trump.
First Mr. Romano says that we can’t trust the report of our intelligence community because he says the FBI never examined the servers, so how could the govt. know there were indicators of Russian involvement? Then he says that our CIA has the ability to perform a hack and make it look like the Russians so we can’t trust the Crowdstrike report.
The problem is that his second assertion actually lends credence to the Crowdstrike report by accepting the premise that the DNC servers did indeed have markers and evidence pointing the finger at the Russians, but he asserts the CIA did it instead. The problem is…why? Why would the CIA hack the DNC if they hated Trump so much and wanted him to lose? Why not just hack Trump and turn the records over to the Democrats?
There is ample evidence out there to support the contention that the Russians hacked the DNC and hacked Podesta’s email account. To say there is no evidence is to presuppose that both the report by Crowdstrike and the assessment of our own Intelligence community are fabricated.
Just because the Russians are behind the hacks, it does not mean it was done in collusion with the Trump campaign. As I said before, it is much more likely that the Russians did it for their own purposes.
Generally agree, Mick. The simplest explanation is usually the right one. Further, popular culture ALWAYS over imagines the sinister motives and ability to keep dirty deeds a secret among our intelligence professionals. It’s just not like that.
Mick there is no “ample evidence” of any Russian interference. A series of “we assess” statements by our intelligence community is not “evidence.”
Do you think that maybe a report from the Intelligence Community is not going to tell you everything that they know? Do you think that maybe they have other sources of information than just an examination of the server?
You are rejecting the analysis of an experienced cyber security company who directly examined the server, AND rejecting the assessment of the intelligence community, all because some little company that created a WordPress plugin says they are wrong?
Again. I have to go back to the WHY? Why make it up?
The analysis by Crowdstrike was paid for by the DNC. It’s quite possible that the DNC wanted to see a conclusion of Russian interference. Crowdstrike’s report has also been criticized. https://theintercept.com/2016/12/14/heres-the-public-evidence-russia-hacked-the-dnc-its-not-enough/. I don’t expect the intelligence community to tell me everything but I also don’t expect them to provide zero evidence. The preliminary report has been criticized by numerous sources, not just Wordfence.
If the DNC was simply looking to blame someone for maximum PR potential, why wouldn’t they point the finger at the RNC, or the Trump campaign? If you are making up stories, it is much easier to sell that than to try and invent some crazy “collusion with the Russians” theory.
Crowdstrike has no reason to make up their findings. The Intelligence Community really has no reason to make up their findings, especially since their findings were never released until after Trump had already won. Trump is the President. He can simply demand their full intelligence analysis and if they are making things up he can blow them out of the water.
That’s what is so mind-blowingly maddening about his “Obama tapped my phones” tweet. If he really believed that he could simply tell AG Sessions and FBI Directory Comey (who both work for him now) to give him the proof and then release it. Instead he tweets out a wild accusation with no evidence and no warning to even his own people, just to create chaos and confusion.
I am not accusing Crowdstrike, or the intelligence community, of making anything up but rather engaging in confirmation bias which is to say coming to definitive conclusions based upon inconclusive evidence. (Read the Interceptor article.) I posit it is possible Russian government operatives were behind the DNC email hack but it is impossible to conclude that based upon what information is publicly available. I for one refuse to accept at face values series of “we assess” statements not backed up by any evidence.
The intercept is not exactly a non-biased source considering their role in publishing Snowden’s stolen information. I might as well believe Julian Assange (who used to work for Kremlin controlled RT) when he says it wasn’t the Russians who hacked Podesta and the DNC.
If Republicans settle upon any one view of the world or what should be done about it, do let us know. In the meantime, united you stand, divided you fall. The only questioning remaining is how far and how fast.
The puppet master was obama. The puppet mistress was Clinton. The strings belong to Loretta Lynch.
The preliminary report issued by he FBI/DHS alleging proof of Russian hacking was completely destroyed. I noticed the final declassified report contained no evidence to analyze. It is just a series of “we assess” statements. Here is an analysis of the preliminary report. “On Friday we published an analysis of the FBI and DHS Grizzly Steppe report. The report was widely seen as proof that Russian intelligence operatives hacked the US 2016 election. We showed that the PHP malware in the report is old, freely available from a Ukrainian hacker group and is an administrative tool for hackers.
We also performed an analysis on the IP addresses included in the report and showed that they originate from different organizations with no clear attribution to Russia.
https://www.wordfence.com/blog/2017/01/election-hack-faq/