A loud guffaw at the pretentious slogan All the News That’s Fit to Print!
Today marks a milestone (millstone?) for the New York Times. This
morning it can smugly celebrate success in hiding for 30 months
horse’s-mouth evidence putting the lie to its "Russia-gate" yarn that
Russia hacked Democratic National Committee emails to help Donald Trump win
in 2016. (The evidence was released on May 7, 2020; before that, Adam Schiff
had been able to hide it for only 29 months.)
The emails showed how the DNC had tipped the playing field against candidate
Bernie Sanders for the nomination. Someone gave them to WikiLeaks , which posted
them just days before the Democratic National Convention. Court testimony has
now made it demonstrably clear that that "someone" was not Russia,
but this has been kept out of the corporate media. Russian DNC-hacking was all
a fake, and "important" people knew that five years ago, but have
been able to suppress it.
In an attempt to distract voters from details on how the Clinton campaign had
severely disadvantaged Sanders, the Democrats and their co-travelers in the
Deep State blamed the so-called "hack" on Russia. And court testimony
over recent months has proved what many of us suspected; namely, that President
Barack Obama, as well as candidate Hillary Clinton, were in it up to their ears.
(More on the involvement of Obama and his lieutenants below.)
Suffice it to remind that, in addition to distracting attention from the damning
information in the emails, the hacking accusation dovetailed nicely with efforts
already under way to (a) put Trump into "Putin’s pocket"; and (b)
raise the specter of an aggressive Russia, in order to facilitate profiteering
by the MICIMATT (Military-Industrial-Congressional-Media-Academia-Think-Tank)
complex – always in need of a menacing enemy.
What! No Russian Hack?
Check with your neighbors. I’ll wager that 80 percent still believe the Russians
hacked the DNC to help Trump win. Why is that? Well, the head of the House Intelligence
Committee, Adam Schiff, in cooperation with the New York Times, has suppressed
the truth for almost five, count them – 5 years.
I gave the play-by-play on May 7, 2022 in Only
If the News Fits, Do We Print writing on the 2nd anniversary of the NYT
suppression of that key evidence, so I need not go into gory detail here. I’ll
just draw from earlier work, and put it together with more recent revelations.
All in the (FBI) Family
Shawn Henry, head of CrowdStrike, the cyber firm to which then-FBI Director
James Comey, for some reason, deferred to perform the forensics on the DNC computers,
was also a longtime protégé of former FBI Director Robert Mueller.
On December 5, 2017 Mr. Henry gave sworn
testimony to the House Intelligence Committee that there was no technical
evidence that Russia, or any other entity, hacked the DNC emails that were published
by WikiLeaks just before the Democratic Convention in July 2016. (Incidentally,
the Justice Department has reported that CrowdStrike never produced an un-redacted
or final forensic report on the DNC email theft, because the FBI never required
it to.)
A newly appointed Director of National Intelligence forced Adam Schiff (D,
California), chair of the House Intelligence Committee, to release Shawn Henry’s
sworn testimony on May 7, 2020. Mr. Henry swore that there was zero technical
evidence that Russia – or anyone else – hacked the DNC emails published by WikiLeaks.
Here’s Henry:
"There’s no evidence that they were actually exfiltrated … it appears
it [the emails] were set up to be exfiltrated, but we just don’t have the evidence
that says it actually left."
This strongly suggests that someone with access to DNC computers "set
up" selected emails for transfer to an external storage device – a thumb
drive, for example. The Internet is not needed for such a transfer. Use of the
Internet would have been detected, enabling Crowdstrike to pinpoint any "exfiltration"
over that network.
Shawn Henry Revelations No Surprise to VIPS
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, relying on (1) the extensive
expertise and professional experience of two members who happened to have been
Technical Directors at NSA, (2) the revelations of Edward Snowden, and (3) the
immutable principles of physics, had concluded
– a year before Shawn Henry came clean – that the accusation of that Russian
hack on the DNC was phony.
In our Memorandum of Dec. 12, 2016, Allegations of Hacking are Baseless,
we wrote:
A New York Times report on Monday alluding to "overwhelming circumstantial
evidence" leading the CIA to believe that Russian President Vladimir Putin
"deployed computer hackers with the goal of tipping the election to Donald
J. Trump" is, sadly, evidence-free. This is no surprise, because harder
evidence of a technical nature points to an inside leak, not hacking – by Russians
or anyone else.
We even included a brief tutorial on the difference between a "hack"
and a leak, but we were already, in Dec. 2016 going up against deeply encrusted
popular "belief" based on intelligence-corporate media connivance.
Back to Obama
Even President Obama, who we now know was knee-deep into this operation, felt
it wise to admit,
two days before leaving office:
"The conclusions of the intelligence community with respect to
the Russian hacking were not conclusive as to whether WikiLeaks was witting
or not in being the conduit through which we heard about the DNC e-mails that
were leaked." [Emphasis added]
One needs to carefully parse lawyer Obama’s words. He offered a similarly hedged
comment at a Dec. 16, 2016 press conference when he said: "based on uniform
intelligence assessments, the Russians were responsible for hacking the DNC.
… the information was in the hands of WikiLeaks." I pointed at the time
to:
The disconnect between the professed confidence about Russian hacking and
the stark declarative sentence about the information ending up at WikiLeaks.
Obama does not bridge the gap because – as we now know – he already knew that
would be a bald-faced lie, which some honest intelligence officer might call
him on. So, he simply presented the two sides of the chasm – implies a connection
– but leaves it to the listener to make the leap.
I used Obama’s lawyerly language to confront Adam Schiff as he began to promote
Russian hacking big time; see this two-minute
clip.
More Recent Revelations
We now know from more recent court testimony that Obama was actually promoting
the "Russian-hack" ruse from the start. In early fall 2016, he ordered
National Intelligence Director James Clapper and Department of Homeland Security
Secretary Jeh Johnson to prepare a paper accusing Russia of the DNC hack even
before input from CrowdStrike.
On Oct. 7, six days before CrowdStrike agreed to mail the DNC server images
to the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director
of National Intelligence released a statement
accusing Russia of hacking U.S. political organizations and disseminating emails
allegedly stolen through the hack. The statement was approved and encouraged
by Obama, according to then-DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson, who, somewhat defensively
added:
"The president approved the statement. I know he wanted us to make the
statement. So that was very definitely a statement by the United States government,
not just Jim Clapper and me," Johnson told
the House Intelligence Committee in June 2017, referring to then-Director of
National Intelligence James Clapper. Yes, the same Clapper who admits in his
memoir that, while head of imagery analysis before the attack on Iraq in 2003,
he was so eager to help [fortify the administration narrative of WMD] that "we
found what wasn’t really there."
As one wag wryly commented,
the lack of server images at the time the statement was released highlights
the question of what the intelligence community used to establish Russia’s involvement.
Duh.
Mrs. Clinton and Alfa Bank
Again, thanks to court-related documents, we now know that in the months before
the election candidate Clinton personally approved
the ruse involving alleged Trump campaign ties with Russia’s Alfa Bank. This
one left even the technical people trying to manufacture a convincing case,
holding their collective noses.
Mueller the Cardboard Cutout
Finally, I confess. After super-sleuth Peter Strzok confessed that "there
is no there there" on Russia-gate, it was hard for me to understand
why, nevertheless, Robert Mueller persisted.
Duh!. The game was to keep the Russia-gate cloud over Trump until after the
midterms four years ago. For the Dems, it worked beautifully. You know the rest
of the story.
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical
Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. His 27-year career as a CIA
analyst includes serving as Chief of the Soviet Foreign Policy Branch and preparer/briefer
of the President’s Daily Brief. He is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals
for Sanity (VIPS).