OK, The Nation has published an article, based on a report by former CIA and NSA staffers, suggesting the DNC specifically was not a hack at all but was rather a leak. Has TPM looked into this?
And with a great disguise. Heâll be hiding out at the zoo or national park
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I was wondering the same thing. I read the article, but not being a geek am handicapped in understanding all of the inferences. That said, it strikes me as strange that they base their entire argument of an anonymous âinvestigatorâ (presumably FBI) who questions the meta tags and the download time. They all insist that they must have access to the physical server, but is that necessary? Just seems odd. Loads of questions.
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The arguments are way above my pay grade as well. I am troubled by two things. One is that when I originally read about the hacks in the NYTs, the article quoted experts as saying that it could be months, years, or never, in order to positively identify the hacker, but in the next day or two after the article the Russian gov was being fingered as the culprit. The second thing is that some of the people expressing a ¨high degree of certainty¨ about Russian involvement come from agencies with a piss poor track record of truthfulness - anybody remember the WMDs in Iraq?
This is not to say that I think there is nothing there. I imagine that Mueller is likely to find some shady business dealings between Trump and Russian interests, what with all the shady characters around him, around the development business, and with the mountain of money that needs laundering in Russia. But I´m skeptical about the DNC hacks, because the explanation seemed to be a very convenient distraction from what were damaging but authentic internal DNC emails.
Yes. They used someone elseâs code the way you might use a burner phone. Thatâs a feature.
Now, I thought the bear was the witness, really I did.
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GOP Congress-critters not interested in impeachment? That could change.
Think of the toxic uproar that will develop in this country if Mr. Muellerâs grand jury begins cranking out indictmentsâŚ
Like Michael Flynn⌠Like Paul Manafort⌠Like father, like son Jared KushnerâŚ
THEN youâll get some interest in impeachment. When the pending, slow-moving criminal charges suck up all the oxygen from the room 24/7!
There are plenty of rumors swirling about, to be sure, but multiple inside sources are fingering Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell, Reince Priebus, and other GOP Congresscritters as complicit in money laundering rubles into RNC coffers during the election. They may want to keep a lid on investigations of any sort, especially anything that would crack open the RNC Russian slush funds.
They may be trying to lay low and hope it all blows over before their involvement is revealed. Ryan and McConnell have been particularly circumspect in their criticism of the obvious crimes of the trump family, preferring to release mild statements about trumpâs current antisocial behavior rather than resurrect anything about how the campaign was run.
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The Nation? Spare me please. I need three corroborating sources before I believe anything Russia related that they put out.
That article looks like a serious pile of crap to me. Three distinct issues pop out.
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The independent research group makes much noise about how they canât prove things, because they havenât gotten access to original data from the DNC side. And how the Guccifer documents appear to be heavily modified. But the entire argument of âit had to be a local jobâ revolves around data from those untrustworthy sources.
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The argument relies on the notion that the download speed is unrealistically high. That 22 megabytes per second would have required inside access. That is nonsense. Just now, sitting in front of my eight year old computer, hooked up to a three year old residential apartment fiber optic loop, I am downloading a large file from the other side of the Pacific Ocean. My average speed? 14 megabytes per second. Switch to a local server, and my speed jumps to erm⌠77 megabytes per second. I find it absurd to state that such speeds were impossible all of last year, especially when you consider that trans-ocean speeds were not necessary. Itâs common enough to have another machine involved in the middle, thatâs how VPNs work. Or garden variety âgrandma keeps clicking on email attachmentsâ botnets. No reason why a direct link from DNC server to someplace in Europe would be necessary, and 22MB/s is quite doable to a machine somewhere on the East Coast. The numbers prove very little.
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Even if there were inside access⌠so what? âRussian government agency pays sketchy hacker group to download from Europeâ isnât significantly different an event from âRussian agency pays sketchy hacker group to bribe some low level IT guy to help them downloadâ. The article is trying to jump directly from âdownload speed too high to be a transcontinental direct linkâ to âdeliberate leak approved by DNC as a false flag opâ. This is silly.
Oh, and just for a bonus:
4. Even if the entire article is true, how does this meaningfully impact the ongoing investigation into Russian collusion? A DNC false flag op wouldnât result in Russia getting access to the Podhoretz emails. It wouldnât explain why a server setup for the Trump organization was communicating solely with a Russian server belonging to a bank directly connected to Russian intel agencies. Or why a Russian oligarch overpaid Trump by 50 million dollars for a property in Florida, or why the same oligarch used to co-own a bank (with ties to money laundering) alongside our Secretary of Commerce and an old KGB pal of Putinâs, or why Trump Toronto is funded by the Russian government. Or any of a hundred other dots in this pointillist painting of Russian collusion.
Like a cat with tinsel hanging out of its ass, Trumpâs organization has many streamers of Russian involvement hanging out of it. Taking away one strand of tinsel doesnât mean your cat wasnât eating off the Christmas tree.
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I like the expression âthe Hillary.â