Will the Real DNC Hacker Please Stand Up -- Because the Washington Elites Cannot Figure It Out

THE NEWS OF THE DAY IS THAT WHILE DEMOCRATS ARE COMING UNGLUED, TRUMP IS BEARING DOWN ON THE RUSSIAN ISSUE. • On Friday, President Trump raised three unanswered questions about the Democratic Party and the Obama administration’s role in claims that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election. Trump tweeted : "1 -- Why did the Democratic National Committee (DNC) turn down FBI requests to inspect its hacked servers?...Why did the DNC REFUSE to turn over its Server to the FBI, and still hasn't? It's all a big Dem scam and excuse for losing the election!" Then, his second tweet : "2 -- Why was the DNC uninterested in assistance from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to secure DNC servers?...Why did Democratic National Committee turn down the DHS offer to protect against hacks (long prior to election). It's all a big Dem HOAX!" And, his third tweet : "3 -- Why did the Obama administration wait until October before going public with claims that Russia was attempting to interfere in the 2016 presidential election?...By the way, if Russia was working so hard on the 2016 Election, it all took place during the Obama Admin. Why didn't they stop them?" • Breitbart News asked the DNC for some answers, but the DNC has not responded about why it refused FBI requests to inspect the Committee’s servers. In his January testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee, then-FBI Director James Comey confirmed that the FBI made “multiple requests at different levels,” to review the DNC’s hacked servers. Finally, the DNC and FBI agreed that a “highly respected private company” would carry out forensics on the servers and share any information that it discovered with the FBI, Comey testified. But, a senior law enforcement official stressed the importance of the FBI gaining direct access to the servers, a request that was denied by the DNC. Not only did the DNC turn down FBI help, it also, according to the testimony of Obama's Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, it also turned down DHS help. Johnson recently told the House intelligence Committee that the Democratic National Committee “did not feel it needed” DHS assistance into hacks of the Committee’s systems. • • • CROWDSTRIKE INSPECTED THE DNC SERVERS. Who? Breitbart says it was CrowdStrike, "financed to the tune of $100 million from a funding drive last year led by Google Capital. Google Capital, which now named CapitalG, is an arm of Alphabet Inc., Google’s parent company. Eric Schmidt, the chairman of Alphabet, has been an active supporter of Hillary Clinton and is a longtime donor to the Democratic Party." CrowdStrike is a California-based cybersecurity technology company co-founded by experts George Kurtz and Dmitri Alperovitch, born and raised as a child in Russia before his parents immigrated to the US. Alperovitch is a Nonresident Senior Fellow of the Cyber Statecraft Initiative at the Atlantic Council, a respected think tank, whose chairman now is Jon Huntsman. The Atlantic Council takes a hawkish approach toward Russia and has released reports and briefs about Russian aggression. It also opposes European populist groups, whom it has described as dangerously far-right. Alperovitch also allegedly has IT ties to Ukraine and to its nationalist anti-Russian factions that would like to start a war between the US and Russia because they want to bring down Russia and Putin -- interesting, because what better, although unlikely, way to destroy Putin and Russia than to get the US into a war with Russia over cyber-attacks on the US electoral system, a war that Russia cannot possibly win. The Atlantic Council is funded by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Inc, the US State Department, and NATO ACT. Another Council funder is the Ploughshares Fund, which in turn has received financing from billionaire George Soros’ Open Society Foundations. • Atlantic Council interviewed Alperovitch in July 2016 about his work on the DNC server hacking. Here is a portion of that interview : "Alperovitch: The two [Russian] actors were working completely independently. There was no indication that they even knew about each other, which is not surprising because Russian intelligence services almost never cooperate with each other and it’s a very adversarial relationship between them. FancyBear actually came in in April -- we believe they are GRU, the Russian military intelligence -- and they went straight for the opposition research. They knew exactly who to go after and find the easiest way to get the data. The CozyBear actor actually came in last summer and they were sitting on the communications servers so they were monitoring e-mail traffic and chat traffic. Q: What evidence is there that these actors are connected to the FSB or GRU -- the two primary Russian intelligence agencies? Alperovitch: We actually have a lot of evidence. As you can imagine we can’t share everything, but we have a very high-level of confidence that these are Russian intelligence services -- both of them. We have a medium-level of confidence that FancyBear is GRU. A lot of the evidence is based on their previous targets. FancyBear has targeted ministries of defense all over Europe. They have targeted Georgian military assets extensively during the 2008 war as well as afterwards. So a lot of their collection is in the military space, which is the remit of the GRU. We have a low-level of confidence that CozyBear is FSB, again based primarily on previous activity. We have a high-level of confidence that they are Russian intelligence but we are not sure which specific agency they are." • So, we have an IT expert with alleged ties to Ukraine telling the DNC that it has "medium-level" and "low-level" confidence that it was Russian intel groups that hacked into the DNC servers and stole emails -- later released by WikiLeaks -- with the intention of winning the election for Trump. If these assurances were about the mission-readiness of a spacecraft, I doubt any of us would want to go to the Moon in it. • • • WHY DID THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION WAIT SO LONG TO RAISE THE RUSSIA HACKING ISSUE? The Obama administration was reportedly confident that Russia was attempting to hack the election as early as August, but waited until October 7 to make an announcement, when the DHS released a statement claiming “the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations.” Newsweek raised questions three months ago when it cited “two sources with knowledge of the matter” reporting that Comey wanted to go public with the Russia story in the summer of 2016. Newsweek said : "Well before the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) accused the Russian government of tampering with the US election in an October 7 statement, Comey pitched the idea of writing an op-ed about the Russian campaign during a meeting in the White House Situation Room in June or July. He had a draft of it or an outline. He held up a piece of paper in a meeting and said, ‘I want to go forward. What do people think of this?’ says a source with knowledge of the meeting, which included Secretary of State John Kerry, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson and National Security Advisor Susan Rice....'The White House shut it down,' that source says. 'They did their usual -- nothing.' " Both sources spoke to Newsweek on the condition of anonymity. • Last December, NBC reported : "The Obama administration didn’t respond more forcefully to Russian hacking before the presidential election because they didn’t want to appear to be interfering in the election and they thought that Hillary Clinton was going to win and a potential cyber war with Russia wasn’t worth it, multiple high-level government officials told NBC News. 'They thought she was going to win, so they were willing to kick the can down the road,' said one US official familiar with the level of Russian hacking" -- that is the usual NBC fake news joke since the Obama administration was up to its neck in trying to gut the Trump candidacy • In his recent testimony before the Senate, former DHS chief Johnson attempted to explain the Obama administration’s decision to wait until October before announcing the Russia charges : "First, as you know well, we have to carefully consider whether declassifying the information compromises sources and methods. Second, there was an ongoing election, and many would criticize us for perhaps taking sides in the election. So that had to be carefully considered. One of the candidates, as you'll recall, was predicting that the election was going to be rigged in some way. And so we were concerned that, by making the statement, we might in and of itself be challenging the integrity of the -- of the election process itself. This was -- this was a very difficult decision. But in my personal view, it’s something we had to do. It got careful consideration, a lot of discussion. My view is that we needed to do it, and we needed to do it well before the election, to inform the American voters of what we knew and what we saw, and that it would be unforgivable if we did not, pre-election. And I’m glad we did it." • • • OBAMA'S DELAY ON RUSSIA FRUSTRATED DEMOCRAT LEADERS. Last Friday, TheHill published an article by Katie Bo Williams that gives new insight into the Obama administration response to Russian meddling in the election, after new details merged this week about how the White House weighed its actions against the 2016 political environment. Then-President Obama, say frustrated Democrat lawmakers and political strategists, was too cautious in the months leading up to the election. Representative Eric Swalwell, a California Democrat who is a member of the House Intelligence Committee and co-chairs the Democratic Steering and Policy Committee, says : "It was inadequate. I think they could have done a better job informing the American people of the extent of the attack.” Even after the election, some say, the penalties Obama levied on Russia -- expelling 35 Russian 'diplomats' and closing two Russian compounds -- were too mild to punish what by all accounts was an unprecedented attack on a US election. Another Democrat, Representative Jim Himes, also a House Intelligence Committee member, called the penalties “barely a slap on the wrist.” Some Republicans argue the Obama administration only started to take the Russia threat seriously after President Trump had won the election. • Trump has called the influence operation a “hoax” and dismisses inquiries into Russian interference in the election -- including looking for possible collusion between his campaign and Moscow -- as a “witch hunt.” • • • IS THE WASHINGTON POST TELLING THE TRUTH NOW? The current re-evaluation of Obama's inaction started last Friday when the Washington Post published a detailed analysis of the administration’s decision-making process that showed former President Obama agonizing over how to prevent politicization of the threat -- and arguably failing, critics say. While Democrats appreciated Obama’s sensitivity to the potential appearance of partisanship, they say the Russian influence campaign should have been treated like any other national security threat, without respect to politics. • In a gross exaggeration, Representative Swalwell said : “I understand the analysis, but look where we are right now. This was the worst mess our democracy has been in since the Civil War.” -- Really?? • Others point to the then-ongoing and extremely delicate negotiations with Russia over a ceasefire in Syria. The Obama administration publicly blamed Russia for the DNC hack and the wider interference in the campaign just a few days after Obama's Secretary of State John Kerry officially suspended those talks. Democratic strategist Brad Bannon says : “I think the Obama administration figured, we have to deal with the Russians in the Middle East and they didn’t want the stuff with the hacking to interfere with that. But I think that was a mistake because if voters don’t trust the integrity of the electoral system, we’ve got nothing left.” Obama DHS Secretary Johnson defended the White House response, arguing the administration repeatedly beat the drum on election cybersecurity throughout the summer and fall but was appropriately leery of undermining trust in the integrity of the election. The October 7 statement, Johnson said, was one in a series of public statements -- but it was overshadowed in the media by the leak of the “Access Hollywood” tape. One unnamed official told the WP : “It is the hardest thing about my entire time in government to defend. I feel like we sort of choked.” • • • TRUMP SAYS OBAMA DID NOTHING. After the Washington Post published its article on Obama's timidity toward Russia, President Trump faulted Obama's handling of Russia's meddling in the 2016 election. Trump told Fox News contributor Pete Hegseth in an interview that aired on Sunday he "just heard today for the first time" former President Barack Obama "knew about Russia a long time before the election, and he did nothing about it." He says Obama "should have done something about it. The CIA gave him information on Russia a long time before they even -- before the election. And I hardly see it. It's an amazing thing. In other words, the question is, if he had the information, why didn't he do something about it? He should have done something about it. But you don't read that. It's quite sad." • Trump echoed his comments later in a Friday night tweet : "Just out : The Obama Administration knew far in advance of November 8th about election meddling by Russia. Did nothing about it. WHY?" And, last Saturday, Trump tweeted : "Since the Obama Administration was told way before the 2016 Election that the Russians were meddling, why no action? Focus on them, not T!" and also : "Obama Administration official said they "choked" when it came to acting on Russian meddling of election. They didn't want to hurt Hillary?" • • • THERE IS NO RUSSIA-TRUMP COLLUSION. American Thinker on Friday published an article by Christopher Ruddy, CEO of Newsmax Media, Inc., and a good friend of President Trump. Ruddy says : "When it comes to the Russian-Trump collusion "smoke" we keep hearing about, one thing has become crystal clear : there isn't any smoke, there isn't any fire, and this nothingburger isn't even worth lighting a match for. This 'scandal' has been the major topic of press attention since Election Day last year. Yet, no one has provided one scintilla of evidence that the Trump campaign colluded with the Russians in hacking or otherwise interfering in the US election. No evidence. Nothing. Nada. Zilch." Ruddy cites Obama's DNI James Clapper, two congressional inquiries and an FBI probe in the last 6 months, "not to mention dozens of voracious media organizations like The New York Times and Washington Post frequently reporting leaks of convenience -- nobody has unearthed any evidence that Russians at any level worked with the Trump campaign....The Obama administration took the unusual step of "unmasking" the identities of Americans, including people close to Trump, discovered in classified NSA and intelligence intercepts. Still, this highly questionable action found no evidence of collusion." Ruddy's conclusion? : "The President is right to be worried about an investigation that was created with no evidence of a crime. Apparently finding no evidence, it is careening into other areas as it seeks to justify its own existence." • • • SENATOR GRASSLEY COMES OUT SWINGING. The Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Charles Grassley, has just called Minority Leader Chuck Schumer a liar for stating publicly that President Trump was under investigation by the FBI when he knew the opposite was true. Grassley described a meeting he had with former FBI Director James Comey in March where he told Grassley and Senator Diane Feinstein, ranking minority member of the Judiciary Committee, that President Trump was not under investigation. Grassley urged Comey to go public with that information because at the time, there was wild media speculation -- fed by Democrats and leaks -- that the President was the target of an investigation. Grassley says that Comey also briefed the "Gang of Eight" -- the top ranking Republicans and Democrats in Congress, including the Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. But the knowledge that the President was not under investigation didn't stop Schumer and other Democrats from claiming otherwise. The Daily Caller reported Grassley's comments : “So the media was wrong. So the Democrats were wrong. So the wild speculation and conspiracy theories ended up harming our country. They played right into Russia’s hands. And how did we all learn about this truth? In President Trump’s letter removing Mr. Comey from office. At first, most didn’t believe it. The media scoffed when they wrote what the President said in that letter. They insisted that Mr. Comey would never tell the President that he was not under investigation. Well we learned earlier this month from Mr. Comey himself that he had done exactly that. It wasn’t a surprise to me because Mr. Comey had told me the same thing. I have to note something else here. Mr. Comey didn’t just tell the President, Senator Feinstein and me that the President was not under investigation. He had also told the Gang of Eight. Of course, the Gang of Eight includes Senate Minority Leader Senator Schumer. But even after Mr. Comey told the Gang of Eight that the President was not under investigation, the minority leader told the media that the President was under investigation and of course that further help feed media storm -- Hysteria.” Senator Grassley also recalled that when Schumer stated that the Senate should not confirm then Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch because Trump was under investigation, Schumer already knew Trump was not under investigation at the time. • Risk Moran of American Thinker sums it up : "The stunning truth is that the American political and media establishment allowed a phony story -- that they knew was phony -- to dominate our political discourse for months. When James Comey testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee last week, he revealed that he had informed many important congressional leaders that there was no investigation of President Trump and the Russians underway, even as MSNBC, CNN, the New York Times, and the Washington Post daily carried stories alluding to an imaginary investigation. Desperate for power, unable to understand why they continue to lose at the ballot box, incapable of realizing the damage they are doing to American democracy, the Democratic-Media monolith has spun a narrative that even after the truth came out about the President's status, they refuse to amend or abandon it. Their continuing effort to destroy the Trump presidency will have currency as long as a compliant media sees truth and facts as something frangible and gives credence to the lies and hysterical exaggerations coming from the left." • • • In another American Thinker article by Clarice Feldman, published on June 25 -- "The DNC Scams the Suckers and Contradicts the Feds on 'Hacking' " -- which you can google and read because it is excellent but covers topics not in this blog -- Feldman writes : "...this week former DHS head Jeh Johnson testified that he was denied access to the reportedly hacked DNC servers. Former FBI head James Comey testified to the same effect earlier. Yet Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, head of the DNC during the supposed hacking, said that neither the DHS nor any federal agency had informed her of any hacking or sought access to the DNC servers. Either the DNC is lying or the Obama-era FBI head (Comey) and DHS head Johnson are. And if she’s not the liar, were the DNC servers actually hacked by the Russians or anyone at all?" Feldman then raises the question that is off-limits to the maintream media : "Some believe that the murdered DNC staffer Seth Rich was the source for Wikileaks head Julian Assange, giving him access to the emails which, inter alia, revealed the DNC plot to deny Bernie Sanders the party’s nomination. There was an interesting report on that murder this week. The crime-profiling project at George Washington University, aided by forensic experts issued a little-publicized report on the Rich murder. After a three-month review and investigation into the death of Seth Rich, The Profiling Project notes the following : 1. Seth’s death does not appear to be a random homicide; 2. Seth’s death does not appear to be a robbery gone bad; 3. Seth death was more likely committed by a hired killer or serial murderer; 4. There may be additional video surveillance of the crime and crime scene; 5. The resolution of prosecuting the individual(s) responsible appears to be hindered both actively and passively; 6. Seth’s killer(s) most likely remains free within the community." In sum, the “Russian collusion” story was fabricated upon a foundation that the Russians “hacked” the DNC servers, the federal agencies involved in investigating such matters say the DNC denied them access to their servers to examine them, but the head of the DNC vehemently denies they ever contacted her about the suspected “hacking” or sought access to the servers. Someone, whom independent investigation indicates was a professional killer, murdered the chief insider suspect for the leaked emails on those servers and the search for the killer is being hindered “actively and passively.” • • • A COOKED UP DEMOCRAT STORY TO DAMAGE TRUMP. That brings us to the answer to the question about whether the Washington Post was telling the truth when it stated Friday that portrayed President Obama as "agonizing over how to prevent politicization of the threat" posed by Russian hacking into the DNC servers. • A recent TV series -- Twin Peaks - The Return -- is a strange mix of parallel worlds by David Lynch, and the message for me was that people will not believe what is spread before them IF what they see doesn't match their pre-conceived notions of reality. • The Washington Post article on Obama's "agonizing" reminds me of Twin Peaks -- the parallel world of the mainstream madia and their clients, the Progressive Democrat elites, is disconnected from reality. They wouldn't recognize real facts about anything political if those facts were pouring over them like a waterfall. • Consider that author Paul Sperry, formerly of the Hoover Institution, repored in the New York Post that the Senate is probing the partisan nature of a DC research firm which produced a “dossier” on then-presidential candidate Donald Trump in 2016 alleging that he is a secret agent of Russian President Vladimir Putin -- recruited via blackmail with a videotape of Trump and urinating Russian prostitutes. Former FBI Director James Comey reportedly cited the discredited dossier as the basis for the current investigation of “Russian interference” in the 2016 election, which has been taken up by Robert Mueller, a friend of Comey’s who served as FBI Director under presidents Bush and Obama. Sperry says the Washington firm that commissioned the dubious intelligence dossier on Donald Trump is stonewalling congressional investigators trying to learn more about its connections to the Democratic Party. The Senate Judiciary Committee earlier this month threatened to subpoena the firm, Fusion GPS, after it refused to answer questions and provide records to the committee trying to identify who financed the error-ridden dossier, which was circulated during the election and has sparked much of the Russia scandal now engulfing the White House. Fusion GPS, according to Sperry, describes itself as a “research and strategic intelligence firm” founded by “three former Wall Street Journal investigative reporters.” But, congressional sources told Sperry it’s actually an opposition-research group for Democrats, and the founders, who are more political activists than journalists, have a pro-Hillary, anti-Trump agenda -- in September 2016, while Fusion GPS was quietly shopping the dirty dossier on Trump around Washington, its co-founder and partner Peter R. Fritsch contributed at least $1,000 to the Hillary Victory Fund and the Hillary For America campaign, Federal Election Commission data show. His wife also donated to Hillary’s campaign. Property records show that in June 2016, as Clinton allies bankrolled Fusion GPS, Fritsch bought a six-bedroom, five-bathroom home in Bethesda, Md., for $2.3 million -- as we know, 'follow the money' is a good rule. A congressional source close to the investigation told the media : “These weren’t mercenaries or hired guns. These guys had a vested personal and ideological interest in smearing Trump and boosting Hillary’s chances of winning the White House.” Fusion GPS, according to Sperry, was on the payroll of an unidentified Democratic ally of Clinton when it hired a long-retired British spy Christopher Steele to dig up dirt on Trump -- in 2012, Democrats had hired Fusion GPS to do the same on GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney. Steele contracted with Fusion GPS to investigate Trump’s ties to Russia starting in June 2016, whereupon he outlandishly claimed that Hillary campaign hackers were “paid by both Trump’s team and the Kremlin” and that the operation was run out of Putin’s office. • • • THE SENATE JUDICIARY COMMITTEE IS INVESTIGATING. The Senate Judiciary Committee is investigating whether the FBI has wrongly relied on the anti-Trump dossier and its author, Christopher Steele -- the old spy who was hired by Fusion GPS to build a Russia file on Trump -- to aid its ongoing espionage investigation into the Trump campaign and its possible ties to Moscow. The FBI received a copy of the Democrat-funded dossier in August, during the heat of the campaign, and is said to have contracted in October to pay Steele $50,000 to help corroborate the dirt on Trump -- a relationship that “raises substantial questions about the independence” of the bureau in investigating Trump, warned Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley. Senate investigators are demanding to see records of communications between Fusion GPS and the FBI and the Justice Department, including any contacts with former Attorney General Loretta Lynch, now under congressional investigation for possibly obstructing the Hillary Clinton email probe, and deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe, who is under investigation by the Senate and the Justice Department inspector general for failing to recuse himself despite financial and political connections to the Clinton campaign through his Democratic activist and candidate wife. Senate investigators have singled out McCabe as the FBI official who negotiated with Steele. • Like Fusion GPS, the FBI has failed to cooperate with congressional investigators seeking documents. • • • DEAR READERS, The DNC was hacked -- unless Debbie Wasserman Schultz is right, and that would be a first -- but all evidence points to the disgruntled, or disillusioned, DNC staffer Seth Rich as the hacker who gave the Hillary et. al. emails to WikiLeaks before he was murdered. Another possibility is that CrowdStrike, the company that inspected the DNC servers, was somehow connected to Ukraine, and perhaps indirectly to Russia, and created a report to blame Russia because of its interest in starting a war between Russia and the US. And, there is the additional story line that points to the Democrat supporters of Hillary Clinton creating a sordid fake dossier on Trump in order to ruin his candidacy. • But, there is No Evidence that President Trump or anyone on his team, either before or after the election, colluded with Russia or Russians or did anything else to interfere with a free and honest election. For questions about election interference, we need to hear sworn testimony from Comey, Lynch, the DNC, Hillary, Bill and the Democrat Party leadership. • As for the "agonizing" of President Obama -- he can forget trying to blame Mitch McConnell and GOP state officials -- he was undoubtedly "agonizing" about how to use the Russia fake news to collude with Comey, Lynch and his national security staff to ruin Trump and elect Hillary.