Ever feel like we are watching a remake of the Wizard of Oz?

I think its pretty obvious who the munchkin is, you know, short in statue, short where it counts  

A Loooooong read, but good!


We Still Have Zero Evidence That Trump Colluded With Russia
Russia always interferes in American elections, but the degree to which they did is important, and up for debate.

By Willis L. Krumholz

AUGUST 29, 2017

CNN counterterrorism analyst Phil Mudd, who worked for the FBI when now-special counsel Robert Mueller was the director, should have caused a bigger stir when he appeared to threaten President Trump: “Let me give you one bottom line as a former government official, the government is going to kill this guy.”

That’s because the president “defends Vladimir Putin,” Mudd said. After a few comments of agreement, CNN’s Jake Tapper made sure Mudd was speaking in a “metaphor.” “Obviously,” Mudd replied. “What I’m saying is government — people talk about the deep state — when you disrespect government officials who’ve done 30 years, they’re going to say, ‘Really’?”


The intelligence community seems to have it out for Donald Trump—but why? This CNN exchange was about Trump’s tongue-in-cheek response to Russia sending home U.S. embassy officials and spooks, Russia’s response to the latest bout of sanctions from Congress.

But the ire goes much deeper. Before the G20 summit, an NBC reporter asked Trump if he would definitively say that Russia interfered in the American election. Despite the U.S. intelligence community insisting otherwise, President Trump refused to place sole blame on Russia, adding that “nobody really knows for sure.”

In the beltway, this is unacceptable conspiracy-peddling that all but proves Trump-Russia collusion. After Trump’s G20 comments, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough took time away from his budding music career to chide Trump on Facebook for “attacking US intelligence patriots.” Chuck Todd took to Twitter to call this yet another capitulation to Putin. These are but a few examples.

The problem with all this? Trump is 100 percent correct when he says, more or less, that although Russia would love to meddle in American elections, and probably did meddle to some extent, there is a troubling lack of proof that Russia was behind the release of Democratic National Committee (DNC) emails and files to WikiLeaks, or the phishing of John Podesta’s email.


This isn’t just about the legitimacy of Trump’s election, or whether he will be impeached. The degree to which Russia interfered in the election affects the pace of Trump’s policy agenda, our foreign policy, our defense budget, and even the chances of open war between the world’s two predominant nuclear powers. Getting to the truth of what happened in the 2016 election could even affect the future of the republic. Because of this, the unanswered questions surrounding Russia’s election interference should trouble every American.

Russian DNC and RNC Hacking in Late 2015
Start in 2015, when the Russian hacking began, before Trump was the Republican nominee. According to reports, a sole FBI agent contacted the DNC in September 2015 to notify them of hacking, possibly tied to Russia. The DNC claims that because their employee didn’t believe the caller was an FBI agent, the employee didn’t return the agent’s subsequent calls. At this point, hackers were also attempting to enter the RNC’s systems.

Around this time the DNC hired cybersecurity consultants from Good Harbor Security Risk Management, which provided a list of recommendations for improving DNC cybersecurity. The DNC failed to take action on any of the consultants’ recommendations. Further, although Russian hackers were allegedly already in the DNC network at the time, Good Harbor did not discover any hackers in its review.

In December 2015, the failure of an internal firewall at the DNC allowed Sen. Bernie Sanders’ campaign staffers to access team Clinton voter data. This led to a brawl that reached its zenith when team Bernie lost its access to the data, then retaliated by suing the DNC.

The DNC Announces Russia Hacked It

As a result, the DNC hired the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike in early 2016, which released their findings on the Bernie staffers’ misdeeds in April 2016, with no mention of any Russian intrusion. Only days later, however, CrowdStrike allegedly found evidence of Russian hackers in the DNC’s computers, after the hackers had accessed opposition research on then-candidate Trump. CrowdStrike and the DNC did not make public their claims of Russian hacking until mid-June of 2016.

Specifically, on June 12, 2016, WikiLeaks head Julian Assange announced that he had Hillary Clinton-related documents. On June 14, the DNC released news of the DNC’s hacking, blaming Russia. On June 15, anonymous hacker “Guccifer 2.0” claimed responsibility for the DNC hack and claimed to be the WikiLeaks source. Guccifer 2.0 started posting documents outside of WikiLeaks on June 15, 2016, and continued posting documents over the next couple months. WikiLeaks began publishing on July 22.

An important distinction must be made here. WikiLeaks posted information showing DNC staff were targeting Sanders to benefit Clinton’s campaign. This created a lot of friction, especially since the release occurred right before the Democrat National Convention. When you heard about materials gained from “Russian hacking” in the news, the materials came from WikiLeaks.

Guccifer 2.0’s releases, on the other hand, were in all likelihood a non-factor. They were also largely obtained from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), not the DNC. You likely did not hear about Guccifer 2.0’s files in the news.


A list of Guccifer’s materials include congressional passwords to news services, Lexis, and a federal courts public access system called PACER; a list of Democratic donors from 2005, files on a Democrat donor jailed in 2009, and files on a disgraced lobbyist’s donations to Republicans; opposition research on Sarah Palin and information that somewhat placed Barack Obama in a bad light; along with information on House races and candidates, almost all of it inconsequential. Guccifer also had a habit of lying, including that he or she had gained access to the Clinton Foundation donor list, when really the donors released were to the DCCC.

In other words, don’t conflate Guccifer 2.0 with WikiLeaks. Although it is possible that the two were affiliated entities in Russia’s election-interference campaign, the two groups released very different materials in consequence and scope. More on this later.

CrowdStrike and the DNC

Back at the DNC, between April, when the Russian hacking was allegedly discovered, and June, when news of the hacking went public, CrowdStrike proceeded to clean or replace all of the DNC servers. Because of this, direct confirmation of the DNC hack did not come from the FBI, but only from CrowdStrike.

According to former FBI Director James Comey, the FBI made “multiple requests at different levels” to examine the DNC servers, but the DNC refused. Ultimately, the FBI reached an agreement with the DNC that, in Comey’s words, a “highly respected private company” would report to the FBI what it found in the DNC servers.

CrowdStrike has also been wrong about Russian hacking in the past.
This is odd. Checking out the DNC servers, especially with an election and U.S. national security on the line, should be the FBI’s job. Next, CrowdStrike had incentives that might conflict with an honest assessment. Because CrowdStrike was being paid by the DNC, not taxpayers, it had a clear incentive to report whatever the DNC wanted it to report. The DNC had a political incentive to blame the hacking on Russia, which allowed the Clinton team to first falsely claim that the documents were heavily doctored or even wholly manufactured, then pivot to attacking Trump as a Putin stooge whenever WikiLeaks material came up.

Most important, CrowdStrike has a monetary incentive to find something big when skunking out hackers—the better to get its name in the public domain and go on to bigger and better contracts. In the words of Jeffrey Carr, a cybersecurity consultant who has lectured at the U.S. Army War College: “The only things that pay in the cybersecurity world are claims of attribution. Which foreign government attacked you? If you are critical of the attack, you make zero money. CrowdStrike is the poster child for companies that operate like this.”

Remember the Sony hack, supposedly perpetrated by North Korea? CrowdStrike was sure that North Korea was behind the hack, even though cybersecurity experts pointed out the evidence was thin and it was equally likely that the “hack” was the work of an insider.

CrowdStrike has also been wrong about Russian hacking in the past. Crowdstrike reported in December 2016 that the same malware used in the DNC attack had infected Ukrainian military Android devices and tracked and targeted Ukrainian artillery units. This allowed CrowdStrike to upgrade their assessment of the DNC hack to a “high degree of certainty.”

The only problem? No such “hacking” took place, and it could even be argued that by making the Ukrainian military doubt its equipment, the CrowdStrike report temporarily aided the Russian-backed rebels. CrowdStrike was roundly criticized by the Ukrainian government and cybersecurity experts as a result.

The Podesta Email Theft and Obama’s Response

After news of the DNC hacking, U.S. officials publicly expressed reticence to positively blame Russia for the DNC hacking, rightly not wanting to base U.S. national security assessments on the work of a private cybersecurity firm with ties to the Clinton campaign.

This changed in early August, when, according to the Washington Post, President Obama received a double-secret report from the CIA that Russia was indeed attempting to influence the election in favor of Trump. The NSA did not attach a high degree of confidence to the intelligence due to the nature of the source (likely an Eastern European intelligence agency), and the White House sat on the information. That changed on October 7, the very day WikiLeaks released the Podesta emails, when the Obama administration officially blamed Russia for both the DNC hack and the Podesta email theft.

There are several discrepancies to this tale.

First, the Podesta email theft resulted from a ploy that tricked Podesta into giving the “hacker” his Gmail password. Phishing, the method used, isn’t hacking per se. It works by getting the victim to type his or her password into a “fake” website. Although Russian hacking groups have used the fake link trick before, saying that it can only be used by Russians is a stretch. In the words of Sam Biddle, “this isn’t a Russian technique any more than using a computer is a Russian technique.”

Although Russian hacking groups have used the fake link trick before, saying that it can only be used by Russians is a stretch.
It should also be questioned whether the Obama administration used the Podesta phishing to assess that Russia was behind the separate DNC hack, and why the Obama administration picked the very day of the Podesta email release to officially make its assessment.

Second, WikiLeaks’ Podesta email release occurred just hours after NBC released the infamous Trump-Billy Bush tape. Thus some say the Podesta emails were only released at this time to distract the hayseeds in flyover country from Trump’s vulgarity. Actually, everyone knew that WikiLeaks was set to release that day, and the NBC tape could have been shot to distract from the Podesta email trove.

The rest of the story, it reached it posting size limit:

http://thefederalist.com/2017/08/29/still-zero-evidence-trump-colluded-russia/