The Russiagate Hoax That Still Needs To Be Exposed.

The Steele Dossier Being A Hoax Is Not News, But The DNC Hack Hoax Still Needs To Be Fully Exposed.

Donald Trump has recently declassified some documents related to “Crossfire Hurricane”, the FBI investigation that launched the Russiagate hoax.

The documents, however, don’t really show anything newsworthy other than obvious things like the fact that the Steele Dossier was a hoax.

Everyone except drooling at the mouth MSNBC junkies already know that the Trump campaign did not collude with Russia and that Trump was not compromised by the Russian government (a claim debunked by Trump’s own hawkish Russia policies).

There was, however, a more wide-sweeping and consequential hoax that still needs to be fully uncovered: that is the claim that the Russian government stole emails from the DNC and gave them to WikiLeaks.

This claim was not only used to falsely tie Trump to Russia, but was also a vital narrative in the new Cold War with Russia and the demonization of Julian Assange.

In this article, I will review why this is the real Russiagate hoax that needs to be examined and exposed.

The Intelligence Agencies Relied On Shady Sources.

In October of 2016, the Department Of Homeland Security put out a press release claiming that “The U.S. Intelligence Community (USIC) is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations” and that “The recent disclosures of alleged hacked emails on sites like DCLeaks.com and WikiLeaks and by the Guccifer 2.0 online persona are consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts”.

This assertion, however, was made based on data from a thoroughly discredited source.

A detailed article written by award-winning journalist Matt Taibbi and a researcher who goes by the name “Undead FOIA” revealed that the intelligence agencies outsourced their research to a “Georgia Tech team”, “led by researchers David Dagon and Manos Antonakakis”.

The biggest problem with this, as Taibbi noted, is that Dagon and Antonikakis were “known to be sources for the infamous ‘Alfa Server’ story claiming the Trump team was engaged in a bizarre scheme to leak backchannel secrets to Russia’s Alfa Bank”.

For context, the Alfa server Hoax was a claim, cooked up by the Clinton Campaign, which claimed Trump had a secret backchannel to Russia through a server on the Russian Alfa Bank.

As The Wall Street Journal reported, Hillary Clinton’s lawyer, Michael Sussmann, “worked with cyber-researchers and opposition-research firm Fusion GPS to produce the claims (of an Alfa Bank backchannel) on behalf of the Clinton campaign, and to feed them to the FBI.”

The Wall Street Journal noted that “the Clinton campaign created the Trump-Alfa allegation, fed it to a credulous press that failed to confirm the allegations but ran with them anyway, then promoted the story as if it was legitimate news”.

As Taibbi reported, the FBI determined that “there were no such links” between Trump and Alfa Bank.

Taibbi reported that David Dagon’s lawyer-during the trial of Clinton's lawyer Micahel Sussman- “confirmed that he worked on ‘Alfa Bank’ and ‘the Democratic National Convention hack,’ and that the Georgia Tech researchers beginning in 2016 were performing tasks sent to them by the FBI/DOJ ‘through DARPA.’”

As Matt Taibbi reported, DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), the research arm of the United States Department of Defense, admitted that they outsourced the research into the DNC hack to Dagon and Antonikakis.

Taibbi reported that in response to a question from the Republican Senator Chuck Grassley, DARPA admitted that “Antonakakis and Dagon indeed provided attribution analysis” and that “this work was done, among other things, to ‘highlight the capabilities of their technical approach’”.

In other words, the intelligence agencies’ initial claim that Russia stole emails from the DNC came from “researchers” behind the Alfa Bank hoax, one of Russiagate’s most thoroughly debunked claims.

The FBI later “confirmed” that Russia stole emails from the DNC, but this, too, came from a discredited private firm.

The FBI again relied on a private firm hired by the Clinton campaign called “CrowdStrike” to make this assessment.

CrowdStrike itself had a shady history of making up false claims of Russian hacking.

As the Daily Mail reported, Crowdstrike claimed an alleged Russian hacker caused Ukraine to lose 80 percent of its howitzers when in reality “the actual percentage of howitzer losses was closer to 15 to 20 percent.”

Crowdstrike cited the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) for the 80 percent number but in reality, “It was soon discovered that CrowdStrike had not obtained this number from IISS directly, and instead relied on a post published by a pro-Russian website called The Saker.”

There were also signs that the entire report was made up, given that “reports from the Ukrainian military and the military app developer denied the hacking claim entirely.”

The cybersecurity expert Jeffrey Carr said this showed “CrowdStrike's intelligence reports were clearly a problem” and that “they just found what they wanted to find” using “elementary school-level analysis”.

Most importantly, despite claiming publicly that Russia stole emails from the DNC, CrowdStrike’s CEO, Shawn Henry, admitted under Oath that the firm has no evidence to back this up.

In a secret 2017 testimony, Henry admitted that the firm had no evidence to back up the claim that hackers stole data from the DNC, saying “There's no evidence that they (DNC emails) were actually exfiltrated. There's circumstantial evidence - but no evidence that they were actually exfiltrated”.

He went on to say “There are times when we can see data exfiltrated, and we can say conclusively. But in this case, it appears it was set up to be exfiltrated, but we just don't have the evidence that says it actually left”.

So the FBI’s conclusion that Russia stole emails from the DNC server comes from a shady private firm that has admitted the assessment is based on “circumstantial evidence” and the fact that it “appears it was set up to be exfiltrated,” but with “no evidence that they were actually exfiltrated”.

Pictured above: Transcript from Shawn Henry’s Testimony where he admits the firm has “no evidence” that Russia stole emails from the DNC.

Time Travelling Russian Hackers

While the claim that Russia stole emails from the DNC comes from discredited sources with no evidence, the claim that the emails published on WikiLeaks in 2016 came from these hackers is even more shady.

This narrative was bolstered by the Muller report. The report alleged this because two shady Twitter accounts called Guccifer 2.0 and DC Leaks (more on it in a bit), which were alleged to be Russian intelligence cutouts, shared DNC emails to Twitter and sent some of them to the WikiLeaks Twitter account.

This was the entirety of the evidence the FBI and “intelligence communities” used to claim Assange’s source for the DNC emails was Russia.

A lengthy investigation based on multiple inside sources on the CIA's war against WikiLeaks in Yahoo News reported :

The NSA began surveilling the Twitter accounts of the suspected Russian intelligence operatives who were disseminating the leaked Democratic Party emails, according to a former CIA official. This collection revealed direct messages between the operatives, who went by the moniker Guccifer 2.0, and WikiLeaks’ Twitter account. Assange at the time steadfastly denied that the Russian government was the source for the emails, which were also published by mainstream news organizations.

Even so, Assange’s communication with the suspected operatives settled the matter for some U.S. officials. The events of 2016 ‘really crystallized’ U.S. intelligence officials’ belief that the WikiLeaks founder ‘was acting in collusion with people who were using him to hurt the interests of the United States’.

There is one major gaping hole in this story - the timeline does not match up.

As journalist Aaron Mate reported in Real Clear Investigations, the Mueller report alleges that the alleged Russian cutout Twitter account DC leaks first made contact with Wikileaks on June 14th of 2016, and “Guccifer 2.0” eventually contacted Wikileaks on June 22 of 2016 and sent Wikileaks the emails on June 6th.

The biggest issue with this problem is that all of this happened after Julian Assange and WikiLeaks had received the DNC emails they published, which he stated publicly on June 12th of 2016.

Assange told an interviewer on June 12th of 2016 that “We have upcoming leaks in relation to Hillary Clinton … We have emails pending publication, that is correct” in reference to the DNC emails.

The aforementioned Yahoo News investigation revealed that the intelligence agencies had “difficulty in proving that WikiLeaks was operating at the direct behest of the Kremlin”. One former official told the paper, “There was a lot of legal debate on: Are they operating as a Russian agent? It wasn’t clear they were, so the question was, can it be reframed on them being a hostile entity”.

They later settled on labeling Wikileaks a “non-state hostile intelligence service” because they could find no ties to Wikileaks and Russia.

This is likely because it is clear Assange never published any of the Guccifer 2.0 emails on WikiLeaks.

Aaron Mate reported that “In a 2017 interview, Assange said he ‘didn’t publish’ any material from that source (Guccifer 2.0) because much of it had been published elsewhere and because ‘we didn’t have the resources to independently verify.’

So to recap, Assange had announced he was in possession of the DNC emails he ended up publishing before the Guccifer 2.0 account sent him emails, and he did not publish any of those on WikiLeaks because they were already public and could not be verified.

While the Guccifer 2.0 emails all showed traceable Russian metadata, the emails published on WikiLeaks showed none.

In fact, the NSA’s former Technical Director for World Geopolitical & Military Analysis, William Binney, who blew the whistle on NSA spying, has argued that the metadata on the Wikileaks published DNC emails point to the idea that they were obtained through a leak over a hack.

Binney put out a report along with his fellow VIPS( Veteran Intelligence Professionals For Sanity) members, including the CIA whistleblowers Ray McGovern and John Kiriakou, which argued:

Recent forensic examination of the Wikileaks DNC files shows they were created on 23, 25 and 26 May 2016. We recently discovered that the files reveal a FAT (File Allocation Table) system property. This shows that the data had been transferred to an external storage device, such as a thumb drive, before WikiLeaks posted them.

FAT is a simple file system named for its method of organization, the File Allocation Table. It is used for storage only and is not related to internet transfers like hacking. Were WikiLeaks to have received the DNC files via a hack, the last modified times on the files would be a random mixture of odd and even-ending numbers.

Why is that important? The evidence lies in the “last modified” timestamps on the Wikileaks files. When a file is stored under the FAT file system the software rounds the time to the nearest even-numbered second. Every single one of the time stamps in the DNC files on WikiLeaks’ site ends in an even number.

We have examined 500 DNC email files stored on the Wikileaks site. All 500 files end in an even number—2, 4, 6, 8 or 0. If those files had been hacked over the Internet, there would be an equal probability of the timestamp ending in an odd number. The random probability that FAT was not used is 1 chance in 2 to the 500th power. Thus, these data show that the DNC emails posted by WikiLeaks went through a storage device, like a thumb drive, and were physically moved before Wikileaks posted the emails on the World Wide Web.

This finding alone is enough to raise reasonable doubts, for example, about Mueller’s indictment of 12 Russian intelligence officers for hacking the DNC emails given to WikiLeaks. A defense attorney could easily use the forensics to argue that someone copied the DNC files to a storage device like a USB thumb drive and got them physically to WikiLeaks — not electronically via a hack.

Was “Guccifer 2.0” A Set Up?

So if there is no real evidence that Russia stole emails from the DNC, and Assange’s published DNC emails are more likely to be the result of a leak rather than a hack, and if Guccifer 2.0 was not his source, this raises the question: who was behind the alleged Russian accounts Guccifer 2.0 and DC leaks?

A closer look at the accounts shows that they seem to be more in line with someone attempting to give the appearance of a Russian spy account rather than an actual spy.

As journalist Aaron Mate noted, “Guccifer 2.0 – who was unknown until June 2016 – burst onto the scene to demand credit as WikiLeaks’ source. This publicity-seeking is not standard spycraft”

Furthermore, Mate noted that “the documents Guccifer 2.0 released directly were nowhere near the quality of the material published by WikiLeaks” and that “Guccifer 2.0 released documents that it claimed were from the DNC, but which were almost surely not,” while everything released on Wikileaks was authentic.

If there really was a Russian spy behind the Guccifer 2.0 account, he would have had to have been one of the dumbest spies in history.

Mate noted that “The material Guccifer 2.0 initially promoted in June also contained easily discoverable Russian metadata” and “The computer that created it was configured for the Russian language, and the username was ‘Felix Dzerzhinsky,’ the Bolshevik-era founder of the first Soviet secret police”.

These facts certainly point to the idea that Guccifer 2.0 was an account set up to frame WikiLeaks and try to paint the DNC emails as coming from Russia.

The aforementioned VIPS report noted that “There was a flurry of activity after Julian Assange announced on June 12, 2016: ‘We have emails relating to Hillary Clinton which are pending publication.’”

The report noted that only after this “On June 14, DNC contractor CrowdStrike announced that malware was found on the DNC server and claimed there was evidence it was injected by Russians.”

Following this, the report notes that “On June 15, the Guccifer 2.0 persona emerged on the public stage, affirmed the DNC statement, claimed to be responsible for hacking the DNC, claimed to be a WikiLeaks source, and posted a document that forensics show was synthetically tainted with “Russian fingerprints.”

The VIPS report notes that there is a lot of “suspicion” around the Guccifer account because it “claimed responsibility for a “hack' of the DNC on July 5, 2016” and then “released DNC data that was rather bland compared to what WikiLeaks published 17 days later”.

The report notes that this points to the idea that the Guccifer 2.0 and DC Leaks accounts were “contrivance to preemptively taint anything WikiLeaks might later publish from the DNC, by ‘showing’ it came from a ‘Russian hack.’”

This Scam Must Be Exposed

While the Steele dossier being fake is old and boring news, the DNC hack deception needs to be fully exposed.

Not only does it show that the intelligence agencies relied on faulty assessments from Clinton campaign hired private firms, but it points to the idea that somebody (presumably the intel agencies) created a fake Twitter persona to try to frame Wikileaks as being in bed with Russia, and taint the DNC emails as coming from Russia.

This smear against Assange was used to manufacture consent for the eventual Espionage Act case brought against him for exposing war crimes.

Unfortunately, because the Trump administration was behind that case, they seem less eager to expose this deception as they are other Russiagate frauds.

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