[Peace-discuss] The latest article from award winning journalist Aaron Mate - Pelosis Take a Big Stake in CrowdStrike, Democrat-Connected Linchpin of Russia Probe

Mon Oct 12 15:49:54 UTC 2020

The latest from award winning independent journalist Aaron Mate. Former
Democracy Now co-host and contributor to The Nation magazine.

Pelosis Take a Big Stake in CrowdStrike, Democrat-Connected Linchpin of
Russia Probe

By
<https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/authors/aaron_mat_realclearinvestig
ations/> Aaron Maté, RealClearInvestigations
October 09, 2020

The cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike rose to global prominence in mid-June
2016 when it publicly accused Russia of hacking the Democratic National
Committee and stealing its data. The previously unknown company's explosive
allegation set off a seismic chain of events that engulfs U.S. national
politics to this day. The Hillary Clinton campaign seized on CrowdStrike's
claim by accusing Russia of meddling in the election to help Donald Trump.
U.S. intelligence officials would soon also endorse CrowdStrike's allegation
and pursue what amounted to a multi-year, all-consuming investigation of
Russian interference and Trump's potential complicity.  

With the next presidential election now in its final weeks, the Democrats'
national leader, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and her husband, Paul Pelosi,
are endorsing the publicly traded firm in a different way. Recent financial
disclosure filings
<https://disclosures-clerk.house.gov/public_disc/ptr-pdfs/2020/20017460.pdf>
show  the couple have invested up to $1 million in CrowdStrike Holdings. The
Pelosis purchased the stock at a share price of $129.25 on Sept. 3. The
price has since risen
<https://markets.businessinsider.com/stocks/crwd-stock> above $140. 

Drew Hammill, spokesman for Pelosi, said: “Speaker Pelosi is not involved in
her husband’s investments and was not aware of the investment until the
required filing was made.  Mr. Pelosi is a private investor and has
investments in a number of publicly traded companies.  The Speaker fully
complies with House Rules and the relevant statutory requirements.”

The Pelosis' sizeable investment in CrowdStrike in the
<https://disclosures-clerk.house.gov/public_disc/ptr-pdfs/2020/20017460.pdf>
$500,000-to-$1-million range could revive scrutiny of the company's
involvement in the Trump-Russia saga since the Democrats' 2016 election
loss.  

http://assets.realclear.com/images/48/483013_5_.png

Dmitri Alperovitch: The CrowdStrike co-founder reportedly was thanked by a
senior U.S. official "for pushing the government along" in its DNC hacking
probe.

CrowdStrike.com

After generating the hacking allegation against Russia in 2016, CrowdStrike
played a critical role in the FBI's ensuing investigation of the DNC data
theft. CrowdStrike executives shared intelligence with the FBI on a
consistent basis, making dozens of contacts in the investigation's early
months. According to Esquire, when U.S. intelligence officials first accused
Russia of conducting malicious cyber activity in October 2016, a senior U.S.
government official personally alerted CrowdStrike co-founder Dmitri
Alperovitch and thanked him "for pushing the government along." The final
reports of both Special Counsel Robert Mueller and the Senate Intelligence
Committee cite CrowdStrike's forensics. The firm's centrality to Russiagate
has drawn the ire of President Trump. During the fateful July 2019 phone
call that would later trigger impeachment proceedings, Trump asked Ukraine's
Volodymyr Zelensky to scrutinize CrowdStrike's role in the DNC server
breach, suggesting that the company may have been involved in hiding the
real perpetrators. 

Pelosi's recent investment in CrowdStrike also adds a new partisan
entanglement for a company with significant connections to Democratic Party
and intelligence officials that drove Russiagate.

DNC law firm Perkins Coie hired CrowdStrike to investigate the  breach in
late April 2016. At the outset, Perkins Coie attorney Michael Sussmann
personally informed CrowdStrike officials that Russia was suspected of
breaching the server. By the time CrowdStrike went public with the Russian
hacking allegation less than two months later, Perkins Coie had recently
hired Fusion GPS, the opposition research firm that produced discredited
Steele dossier alleging a longstanding conspiracy between Trump and Russia.

http://assets.realclear.com/images/50/509874_5_.png

Shawn Henry: Behind closed doors, the CrowdStrike president admitted under
oath in December 2017 that his firm "did not have concrete evidence" that
Russian hackers actually stole any emails or other data from the DNC
servers. "There's circumstantial evidence, but no evidence that they were
actually exfiltrated." 

CrowdStrike.com

CrowdStrike President Shawn Henry, who led the team that remediated the DNC
breach and blamed Russia for the hacking, previously served as assistant
director at the FBI under Robert Mueller. Since June 2015, Henry has also
worked as an analyst at MSNBC, the cable network that has promoted debunked
Trump-Russia innuendo perhaps more than any other outlet. Alperovitch, the
co-founder and former chief technology officer, is a former nonresident
senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, the Washington organization that
actively lobbies for a hawkish posture toward Russia.

Campaign disclosures also show that CrowdStrike contributed $100,000 to the
Democratic Governors Association in 2016 and 2017. 

The firm's multiple conflicts of interest in the Russia investigation
coincide with a series of embarrassing disclosures that call into question
its technical reliability. 

In early 2017, CrowdStrike was forced to retract its allegation that Russia
had hacked Ukrainian military equipment with the same malware the firm
claimed to have discovered inside the DNC server.

During the FBI's investigation of the DNC breach, CrowdStrike never provided
direct access to the pilfered servers, rebuffing multiple requests that came
from officials all the way up to then-Director James Comey. The FBI had to
rely on CrowdStrike's own images of the servers, as well as reports that
Justice Department officials later acknowledged were delivered in
incomplete, redacted form. James Trainor, who served as assistant director
of the FBI's Cyber Division, complained to the Senate Intelligence Committee
that the DNC's cooperation with the FBI's 2016 hack investigation was "slow
and laborious in many respects" and that CrowdStrike's information was
"scrubbed" before it was handed over. Alperovitch, the former CTO, has
claimed that CrowdStrike installed its Falcon software to protect the DNC
server on May 5, 2016. Yet the Democratic Party emails were stolen from the
server three weeks later, from May 25 to June 1.

Yet the most damaging revelation calling into question CrowdStrike's Russian
hacking allegations came with an admission early in the Russia probe that
was only made public this year. Unsealed testimony from the House
Intelligence Committee shows that Henry admitted under oath behind closed
doors in December 2017 that the firm "did not have concrete evidence" that
Russian hackers actually stole any emails or other data from the DNC
servers. "There's circumstantial evidence, but no evidence that they were
actually exfiltrated," Henry said. "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."

The Henry testimony was among a trove of damning transcripts released by
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff only after pressure from
the then-acting Director of the Office of the Director of National
Intelligence, Richard Grenell.

As RealClearInvestigations reported last month, Henry's House testimony also
conflicts with his testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee two
months prior, in October 2017. According to the Senate report, Henry claimed
that CrowdStrike was "able to see some exfiltration and the types of files
that had been touched," but not the files' content. Yet two months later,
Henry told the House that "we didn't see the data leave, but we believe it
left, based on what we saw." 

Notably, Henry's acknowledgment to the House that CrowdStrike did not have
evidence of exfiltration came only after he was interrupted and prodded by
his attorneys to correct an initial answer. Right before that intervention
from CrowdStrike counsel, Henry had falsely asserted that he knew when
Russian hackers had exfiltrated the stolen information:  

http://assets.realclear.com/images/49/494368_5_.jpg

Adam Schiff: CrowdStrike testimony was released by the House Intelligence
Committee chairman only after pressure from the then-acting  Director of
National Intelligence, Richard Grenell.

AP Photo/Alex Brandon

Adam Schiff: Do you know the date in which the Russians exfiltrated the data
from the DNC?  

Shawn Henry:  I do. I have to just think about it. I don’t know. I mean,
it’s in our report that I think the Committee has. 

Schiff:  And, to the best of your recollection, when would that have been? 

Henry: Counsel just reminded me that, as it relates to the DNC, we have
indicators that data was exfiltrated. We do not have concrete evidence that
data was exfiltrated from the DNC, but we have indicators that it was
exfiltrated. 

Henry then improbably argued that, in the absence of evidence showing the
emails leaving the DNC server, Russian hackers could have taken individual
screenshots of each of the 44,053 emails and 17,761 attachments that were
ultimately put out by WikiLeaks.

Keeping Henry's admission under wraps for nearly four years was highly
consequential. The allegation of Russian hacking was elevated to a dire
national security issue, and anyone who dared to question it – including
President Trump – was accused of doing the Kremlin's bidding. The hacking
allegation also helped plunge U.S.-Russia relations to new lows. Under
persistent bipartisan pressure over allegations of Russian meddling, Trump
has approved a series of punitive measures and aggressive policies toward
Moscow, shunning his own campaign vow to seek cooperation.

http://assets.realclear.com/images/51/510011_5_.png

Wikipedia/CrowdStrike.com

Meanwhile, during the several years that CrowdStrike's own uncertainty about
its hacking allegation was kept from the public, the firm has enjoyed a
stratospheric rise on Wall Street. In 2017, one year after lodging its
Russia hacking allegations, CrowdStrike had a valuation of $1 billion. Three
years later, after going public in 2019, the firm's valuation was set at
$6.7 billion, and soon hit $11.4 billion. Just over a year later, its market
cap was  $31.37 billion. CrowdStrike has more than doubled its revenue on
average every year, going from $52.75 million in 2017 to $481.41 million in
2020.

CrowdStrike and Fusion GPS, which spread Trump-Russia collusion allegations
via the Steele dossier, are not the only private companies to play a
critical and lucrative role in the Trump-Russia saga.

The firm New Knowledge, staffed by several former Democratic Party
operatives and intelligence officials, authored a disputed report for the
Senate Intelligence Committee that accused a Russian troll farm of a
sophisticated social media interference campaign that duped millions of
vulnerable Americans. Ironically, the company itself took part in a social
media disinformation operation in the 2017 Alabama Senate race to help elect
the ultimate victor, Democratic candidate Doug Jones. Just as the Democratic
Party's impeachment proceedings were in full swing a year ago, another
cybersecurity firm with Democratic Party ties, Area One, accused the Russian
spy agency GRU of hacking into the Ukrainian company Burisma with the aim of
uncovering dirt on Joe Biden. Graphika, a firm with extensive ties to the
Atlantic Council and the Pentagon, has recently put out reports accusing
Russians of impersonating left-wing and right-wing websites to fool
hyper-partisan American audiences.  

Having generated the seminal Russian hacking allegation, CrowdStrike sits at
the top of what has become a booming cottage industry of firms and
organizations shaping a multi-year barrage of accusations of Russian
interference in American politics. And with her new investment in
CrowdStrike, Nancy Pelosi -- the highest-ranking elected official of a party
that has promoted Russiagate above all else -- is already profiting from its
success. 

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