[Peace-discuss] Still Waiting for Evidence of a Russian Hack

[David Johnson]

Still Waiting for Evidence of a Russian Hack

June 7, 2018 .
<https://consortiumnews.com/2018/06/07/still-waiting-for-evidence-of-a-russi
an-hack/#comments> 111 Comments 

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More than two years after the allegation of Russian hacking of the 2016 U.S.
presidential election was first made, conclusive proof is still lacking and
may never be produced, says Ray McGovern.

By Ray McGovern Special to Consortium News

 
<https://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/raymcgovern_face0.jpg
>
https://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/raymcgovern_face0-150x
150.jpgIf you are wondering why so little is heard these days of accusations
that Russia hacked into the U.S. election in 2016, it could be because those
charges could not
<https://consortiumnews.com/2017/07/24/intel-vets-challenge-russia-hack-evid
ence/%C2%A0> withstand close
<https://consortiumnews.com/2017/09/20/more-holes-in-russia-gate-narrative/>
scrutiny. It could also be because special counsel Robert Mueller appears to
have never bothered to investigate what was once the central alleged crime
in Russia-gate as no one associated with WikiLeaks has ever been questioned
by his team.

Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity - including two "alumni" who
were former National Security Agency technical directors - have long since
concluded that Julian Assange did not acquire what he called the "emails
related to Hillary Clinton" via a "hack" by the Russians or anyone else.
They found, rather, that he got them from someone with physical access to
Democratic National Committee computers who copied the material onto an
external storage device - probably a thumb drive. In December 2016 VIPS
<https://consortiumnews.com/2016/12/12/us-intel-vets-dispute-russia-hacking-
claims/> explained this in some detail in an open Memorandum to President
Barack Obama.

On January 18, 2017 President Obama
<https://consortiumnews.com/2017/01/20/obama-admits-gap-in-russian-hack-case
/> admitted that the "conclusions" of U.S. intelligence regarding how the
alleged Russian hacking got to WikiLeaks were "inconclusive." Even the vapid
FBI/CIA/NSA "Intelligence Community Assessment of Russian Activities and
Intentions in Recent U.S. Elections" of January 6, 2017, which tried to
blame Russian President Vladimir Putin for election interference,
<https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/documents/ICA_2017_
01.pdf> contained no direct evidence of Russian involvement.  That did not
prevent the "handpicked" authors of that poor excuse for intelligence
analysis from expressing "high confidence" that Russian intelligence
"relayed material it acquired from the Democratic National Committee . to
WikiLeaks."  Handpicked analysts, of course, say what they are handpicked to
say.

Never mind. The FBI/CIA/NSA "assessment" became bible truth for partisans
like Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), ranking member of the House Intelligence
Committee, who was among the first off the blocks to blame Russia for
interfering to help Trump.  It simply could not have been that Hillary
Clinton was quite capable of snatching defeat out of victory all by herself.
No, it had to have been the Russians.

Five days into the Trump presidency, I had a chance to
<https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4652403/ray-mcgovern-creator-veteran-intelli
gence-professionals-sanity-asked-representative-adam> challenge Schiff
personally on the gaping disconnect between the Russians and WikiLeaks.
Schiff still "can't share the evidence" with me . or with anyone else,
because it does not exist.

WikiLeaks

 
<https://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Rep-Adam-Schiff-350px
.jpg>
https://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Rep-Adam-Schiff-350px.
jpg

Schiff: Can't share evidence.

It was on June 12, 2016, just six weeks before the Democratic National
Convention, that Assange announced the pending publication of "emails
related to Hillary Clinton," throwing the Clinton campaign into panic mode,
since the emails would document strong bias in favor of Clinton and
successful attempts to sabotage the campaign of Bernie Sanders.  When the
emails were published on July 22, just three days before the convention
began, the campaign decided to create what I call a Magnificent Diversion,
drawing attention away from the substance of the emails by blaming Russia
for their release.

Clinton's PR chief Jennifer Palmieri later
<http://raymcgovern.com/2017/04/07/2936/> admitted that she golf-carted
around to various media outlets at the convention with instructions "to get
the press to focus on something even we found difficult to process: the
prospect that Russia had not only hacked and stolen emails from the DNC, but
that it had done so to help Donald Trump and hurt Hillary Clinton."  The
diversion worked like a charm.  Mainstream media kept shouting "The Russians
did it," and gave little, if any, play to the DNC skullduggery revealed in
the emails themselves. And like Brer' Fox, Bernie didn't say nothin'.

Meanwhile, highly sophisticated technical experts, were hard at work
fabricating "forensic facts" to "prove" the Russians did it.  Here's how it
played out:

June 12, 2016: Assange announces that WikiLeaks is about to publish "emails
related to Hillary Clinton."

June 14, 2016: DNC contractor CrowdStrike, (with a dubious professional
record and multiple conflicts of interest) announces that malware has been
found on the DNC server and claims there is evidence it was injected by
Russians.

June 15, 2016: "Guccifer 2.0" affirms the DNC statement; claims
responsibility for the "hack;" claims to be a WikiLeaks source; and posts a
document that the forensics show was synthetically tainted with "Russian
fingerprints."

The June 12, 14, & 15 timing was hardly coincidence. Rather, it was the
start of a pre-emptive move to associate Russia with anything WikiLeaks
might have been about to publish and to "show" that it came from a Russian
hack.

Enter Independent Investigators

A year ago independent cyber-investigators completed the kind of forensic
work that, for reasons best known to then-FBI Director James Comey, neither
he nor the "handpicked analysts" who wrote the Jan. 6, 2017 assessment
bothered to do.  The independent investigators found verifiable evidence
from metadata found in the record of an alleged Russian hack of July 5, 2016
showing that the "hack" that day of the DNC by Guccifer 2.0 was not a hack,
by Russia or anyone else.

Rather it originated with a copy (onto an external storage device - a thumb
drive, for example) by an insider - the same process used by the DNC
insider/leaker before June 12, 2016 for an altogether different purpose.
(Once the metadata was found and the "fluid dynamics" principle of physics
applied, this was not difficult to
<https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-08-10/why-some-u-s-ex-spies-do
n-t-buy-the-russia-story> disprove the validity of the claim that Russia was
responsible.)

One of these independent investigators publishing under the name of The
Forensicator on May 31
<https://disobedientmedia.com/2018/05/guccifer-2-0s-american-fingerprints-re
veal-an-operation-made-in-the-usa/> published new
<https://theforensicator.wordpress.com/guccifer-2s-west-coast-fingerprint/>
evidence that the Guccifer 2.0 persona uploaded a document from the West
Coast of the United States, and not from Russia. 

In our July 24, 2017 Memorandum to President Donald Trump we
<https://consortiumnews.com/2017/07/24/intel-vets-challenge-russia-hack-evid
ence/> stated, "We do not know who or what the murky Guccifer 2.0 is. You
may wish to ask the FBI."

Our July 24 Memorandum continued: "Mr. President, the disclosure described
below may be related. Even if it is not, it is something we think you should
be made aware of in this general connection. On March 7, 2017, WikiLeaks
began to publish a trove of original CIA documents that WikiLeaks labeled
'Vault 7.' WikiLeaks said it got the trove from a current or former CIA
contractor and described it as comparable in scale and significance to the
information Edward Snowden gave to reporters in 2013.

"No one has challenged the authenticity of the original documents of Vault
7, which disclosed a vast array of cyber warfare tools developed, probably
with help from NSA, by CIA's Engineering Development Group. That Group was
part of the sprawling CIA Directorate of Digital Innovation - a growth
industry established by John Brennan in 2015. [ (VIPS
<https://consortiumnews.com/2015/03/09/us-intel-vets-oppose-brennans-cia-pla
n/%C2%A0> warned President Obama of some of the dangers of that basic CIA
reorganization at the time.]

Marbled

 
<https://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/CIA-Vault-7-Part-3-Ma
rble-Allows-CIA-To-Cover-Their-Tracks.jpg>
https://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/CIA-Vault-7-Part-3-Mar
ble-Allows-CIA-To-Cover-Their-Tracks.jpg"Scarcely imaginable digital tools -
that can take control of your car and make it race over 100 mph, for
example, or can enable remote spying through a TV - were described and duly
reported in the New York Times and other media throughout March. But the
Vault 7, part 3 release on March 31 that exposed the "Marble Framework"
program apparently was judged too delicate to qualify as 'news fit to print'
and was kept out of the Times at the time, and has never been mentioned
<https://www.nytimes.com/search?query=%22Vault%207%22> since.

"The Washington Post's Ellen Nakashima, it seems, 'did not get the memo' in
time. Her March 31
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/wikileaks-latest-rel
ease-of-cia-cyber-tools-could-blow-the-cover-on-agency-hacking-operations/20
17/03/31/63fc3616-1636-11e7-833c-503e1f6394c9_story.html?utm_term=.229220a5c
bda> article bore the catching (and accurate) headline: 'WikiLeaks' latest
release of CIA cyber-tools could blow the cover on agency hacking
operations.'

"The WikiLeaks release indicated that Marble was designed for flexible and
easy-to-use 'obfuscation,' and that Marble source code includes a
"de-obfuscator" to reverse CIA text obfuscation.

"More important, the CIA reportedly used Marble during 2016. In her
Washington Post
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/wikileaks-latest-rel
ease-of-cia-cyber-tools-could-blow-the-cover-on-agency-hacking-operations/20
17/03/31/63fc3616-1636-11e7-833c-503e1f6394c9_story.html?utm_term=.229220a5c
bda> report, Nakashima left that out, but did include another significant
point made by WikiLeaks; namely, that the obfuscation tool could be used to
conduct a 'forensic attribution double game' or false-flag operation because
it included test samples in Chinese, Russian, Korean, Arabic and Farsi." 

A few weeks later William Binney, a former NSA technical director, and I
<https://consortiumnews.com/2017/05/20/the-gaping-holes-of-russia-gate/%C2%A
0> commented on Vault 7 Marble, and were able to get a shortened op-ed
version
<http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bs-ed-trump-russia-phony-2017
0517-story.html%C2%A0> published in The Baltimore Sun.

The CIA's reaction to the WikiLeaks disclosure of the Marble Framework tool
was neuralgic. Then Director Mike Pompeo lashed out two weeks later, calling
Assange and his associates "demons," and insisting; "It's time to call out
WikiLeaks for what it really is, a non-state hostile intelligence service,
often abetted by state actors like Russia."

Our July 24 Memorandum continued:  "Mr. President, we do not know if CIA's
Marble Framework, or tools like it, played some kind of role in the campaign
to blame Russia for hacking the DNC. Nor do we know how candid the denizens
of CIA's Digital Innovation Directorate have been with you and with Director
Pompeo. These are areas that might profit from early White House review.  [
President Trump then directed Pompeo to invite Binney, one of the authors of
the July 24, 2017 VIPS Memorandum to the President, to discuss all this.
Binney and Pompeo spent an hour together at CIA Headquarters on October 24,
2017, during which Binney briefed Pompeo with his customary
straightforwardness. ]

"We also do not know if you have discussed cyber issues in any detail with
President Putin. In his interview with NBC's Megyn Kelly he seemed quite
willing - perhaps even eager - to address issues related to the kind of
cyber tools revealed in the Vault 7 disclosures, if only to indicate he has
been briefed on them. Putin pointed out that today's technology enables
hacking to be 'masked and camouflaged to an extent that no one can
understand the origin' [of the hack] . And, vice versa, it is possible to
set up any entity or any individual that everyone will think that they are
the exact source of that attack.

"'Hackers may be anywhere,' he said. 'There may be hackers, by the way, in
the United States who very craftily and professionally passed the buck to
Russia. Can't you imagine such a scenario? . I can.'

New attention has been drawn to these issues after I discussed them in a
widely published 16-minute
<http://raymcgovern.com/2018/06/05/did-did-cias-digital-innovation-directora
te-do-the-russian-hacking-circumstantial-evidence-points-in-that-direction-a
s-ray-explains-in-this-16-minute-video/%C2%A0> interview last Friday.

In view of the highly politicized environment surrounding these issues, I
believe I must append here the same notice that VIPS felt compelled to add
to our key Memorandum of July 24, 2017:

"Full Disclosure: Over recent decades the ethos of our intelligence
profession has eroded in the public mind to the point that agenda-free
analysis is deemed well nigh impossible. Thus, we add this disclaimer, which
applies to everything we in VIPS say and do: We have no political agenda;
our sole purpose is to spread truth around and, when necessary, hold to
account our former intelligence colleagues.

"We speak and write without fear or favor. Consequently, any resemblance
between what we say and what presidents, politicians and pundits say is
purely coincidental." The fact we find it is necessary to include that
reminder speaks volumes about these highly politicized times.

Ray McGovern works for Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical
Church of the Savior in inner-city Washington.  He was an Army
infantry/intelligence officer before serving as a CIA analyst for 27 years.
His duties included preparing, and briefing one-on-one, the President's
Daily Brief.

 

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