By William Binney, former Technical Director NSA and Larry Johnson, former State CT and CIA
February 15, 2019 "Information Clearing House" - The FBI, CIA and NSA claim that the DNC emails published by WIKILEAKS on July 26, 2016 were obtained via a Russian hack, but more than three years after the alleged “hack” no forensic evidence has been produced to support that claim. In fact, the available forensic evidence contradicts the official account that blames the leak of the DNC emails on a Russian internet “intrusion”. The existing evidence supports an alternative explanation--the files taken from the DNC between 23 and 25May 2016 and were copied onto a file storage device, such as a thumb drive.
If the Russians actually had conducted an internet based hack of the DNC computer network then the evidence of such an attack would have been collected and stored by the National Security Agency. The technical systems to accomplish this task have been in place since 2002. The NSA had an opportunity to make it clear that there was irrefutable proof of Russian meddling, particularly with regard to the DNC hack, when it signed on to the January 2017 “Intelligence Community Assessment,” regarding Russian interference in the 2016 Presidential election:
- We also assess Putin and the Russian Government aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to him. All three agencies agree with this judgment. CIA and FBI have high confidence in this judgment; NSA has moderate confidence.
The phrase, “moderate confidence” is
intelligence speak for “we have no hard
evidence.” Thanks to the leaks by Edward
Snowden, we know with certainty that the
NSA had the capability to examine and
analyze the DNC emails. NSA routinely
“vacuumed up” email traffic transiting
the U.S. using robust
collection systems (whether or not
anyone in the NSA chose to look for this
data is another question). If those
emails had been hijacked over the
internet then NSA also would have been
able to track the electronic path they
traveled over the internet. This kind of
data would allow the NSA to declare
without reservation or caveat that the
Russians were guilty. The NSA could
admit to such a fact in an unclassified
assessment without compromising sources
and methods. Instead, the NSA only
claimed to have moderate confidence in
the judgement regarding Russian
meddling. If the NSA had hard
intelligence to support the judgement
the conclusion would have been stated as
“full confidence.”
We believe that Special Counsel Robert Mueller faces major embarrassment if he decides to pursue the indictment he filed--which accuses 12 Russian GRU military personnel and an entity identified as, Guccifer 2.0, for the DNC hack—because the available forensic evidence indicates the emails were copied onto a storage device.
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