The Russiagate Hoax — Cutting to the Chase

Originally published Aug 11, 2017

I have written a rather comprehensive debunking of the “Russia interfered in our election” narrative that has obsessed the MSM for most of a year. Since its first posting, I have been updating it; its expanded form is available here:

https://caucus99percent.com/content/what%E2%80%99s-left-russiagate%E2%80...

I don’t pretend to be an investigative journalist — rather, what I have done is to assemble the findings of respected journalists, intelligence experts, and cyberanalysts who have examined the interference narrative with a critical eye. The links are the best part of my essay, and I refer you to them if you want verification for the views I express below.

What I would like to do here is present, in summary form, my own best guess as to what actually happened, in light of the evidence and analyses I cite. Other interpretations are possible, but most of these have a Rube Goldberg-type complexity and illogic that render them quite dubious. Whereas this interpretation fits the known evidence rather straightforwardly:

Seth Rich was the source for the DNC emails which Wikileaks published; Assange has been silently screaming this for months, both through statements and tweets, while strenuously denying that the Russian government played any role in this regard. How Seth obtained these emails, and how he conveyed them to Wikileaks, remain to be determined. If the FBI inside source which Sy Hersh discussed in his taped conversation with Ed Butowski is accurate, Seth provided them by drop box, giving Wikileaks the password. There is a recent claim that Seth had had a raucous argument with Donna Brazile regarding DNC unfairness to Bernie; this concern may have motivated Seth’s leaking, though he may also have sought payment for his risky efforts.

On June 12th of last year, Wikileaks announced that it would soon be releasing material pertinent to Hillary’s campaign. Whether the DNC knew at this time that Seth was the source is unclear. What is clear is that DNC officials, who had previously been informed that their server had been hacked, quickly decided to convince our intelligence agencies, the press, and the public that Russian hackers, acting at the behest of the Russian government, were the source of the damaging material to be released — in that way, focusing attention on the evil machinations of the Russians, slamming Wikileaks, and detracting attention from the content of the released material.

On June 14th, the DNC, in conjunction with the Crowdstrike cybersecurity firm that they had hired, announced that its servers had been hacked, and that a file on Trump opposition research had been taken. An entity dubbed “Guccifer 2.0” popped up online a day later, claiming to be the source for the soon-to-be-released Wikileaks DNC material, and obligingly posting a file on Trump opposition research, as well as several other files. Forensic analyses have indicated that the posted documents had had their metadata intentionally altered to leave “Russian fingerprints”.

On July 5th, Guccifer 2.0 downloaded from the DNC server a number of additional documents, some of which — all of them relatively innocuous — he subsequently posted on his own website. Forensic analysis of this download indicated that it occurred locally, most likely via USB port, and that it took place on the East Coast.

An overview suggests that the Guccifer 2.0 persona was created by people with inside connections to the DNC. The evident intent of this charade was to trick our intelligence agencies into concluding that Guccifer 2.0 was the Wikileaks source and was acting at the behest of the Russian government. The fact that he released Trump opposition material a day after the DNC proclaimed that it had been taken by hackers strongly suggests collusion between top people in the DNC and the people concocting Guccifer 2.0. As Adam Carter notes, it is not at all clear how the DNC/Crowdstrike could have known that this particular file had been taken. Carter suspects that principals at Crowdstrike played a key role in creating Guccifer 2.0, as they would have had the expertise required to pull off such a scam. (Whether Imran Awan possesses such skill is not clear.)

Five days later (July 10th), Seth Rich was murdered, most likely by hitmen. The DNC might have known by this point that Seth was the leaker to Wikileaks — and that he therefore would have been in a position to completely destroy the Russian interference hoax if he had chosen to do so.

Crowdstrike, whose founders are known to despise the Russian government, rapidly concluded that the DNC server had been hacked by Russians affiliated with Russian intelligence. According to experts who have examined this claim, the logic behind this conclusion is unconvincing and puerile. Moreover, Crowdstrike’s previous effort to implicate Russian intelligence in a hack had been shown to be bogus. Nonetheless, the FBI chose to accept the Crowdstrike conclusions, even though they had never been able to examine the DNC servers themselves because the DNC had refused to turn them over, and the FBI had failed to subpoena them.

If Hersh’s source inside the FBI is to be believed, the FBI has known for over a year that Seth Rich was a Wikileaks source, and has kept this knowledge secret. The FBI states that they have not participated in the investigation of Seth’s murder — thereby tacitly implying, without saying so directly, that they have not examined his computer. Given that Assange, who presumably has direct knowledge on the issue, has hinted as strongly as possible that Seth was one of his sources, the FBI would be severely derelict if indeed it has not examined Seth computer(s).

The Obama administration was soon fully on board with the “Russia interfered” narrative, which initially shielded Hillary from the full import of the Wikileaks revelations, and, after the election, provided Hillary’s campaign with an excuse for its failure while enabling an ancillary “Trump colluded in the interference” narrative that could be employed to disable the Trump presidency. Despite Hillary’s concocted claim about “17 intelligence agencies” verifying the Russian interference story, the Obama administration made sure that the standard appropriate process for our intelligence agencies to provide a balanced evaluation — a National Intelligence Assessment, entailing participation by a number of agencies and including any dissenting judgements — was NOT FOLLOWED. Rather, the histrionic Russophobes James Clapper and John Brennan were allowed to hand-pick a group of a couple dozen intelligence personnel from just 3 agencies. The declassified version of the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) which they drafted, free of any dissents, accused the Russian government of a conscious campaign to support the candidacy of Trump by hacking several key political websites and providing their contents to Wikileaks and other outlets. Guccifer 2.0 was specifically cited as a Wikileaks source.

Critics immediately noted that the declassified ICA provided no hard evidence whatever to document its claims, and that over half its length was devoted to a criticism of the RT television network as a supposed propaganda outlet. In particular, no insight was provided as to how the authors of the report had concluded that the hacked documents had been transferred to Wikileaks. The conclusions of this report evidently fit seamlessly into a broader strategy of demonizing Russia, the intent being to insure that our military-industrial complex and NATO continue to receive an outrageous level of funding, and that the warped policy agendas of the neo-cons are satisfied.

Our MSM immediately embraced the conclusions of the ICA as Gospel truth, frequently referring to “our 17 intelligence agencies” as the source for this report. They completely ignored the fact that the “assessments” of this report are in effect just “best guesses”, that the preamble of the report pointed out that “assessments” should not necessarily be equated to “facts”, and that the NSA — which, as William Binney notes, should have been able to obtain definitive proof for any actual hacking that had occurred — expressed only “moderate confidence” in the conclusions. This sycophantic credulity is particularly inexcusable in the context of the previous “Saddam’s WMDs” hoax which they likewise had swallowed uncritically, resulting in an illegal war with utterly catastrophic consequences.

The initial claims of Russian interference were soon embellished by media reports claiming that, according to anonymous intelligence sources, the Russian government had attempted to hack into the voter registration files of 21 states, had conducted hacking operations intended to interfere in German and French elections, and had hacked into the Qatari state news agency to plant a fake news story. The veracity of each of these unsourced claims has been called into question, and in some cases disproved, by cyberanalysts, intelligence experts, and journalists. The conclusions of the NSA document leaked by Reality Winner have likewise been shown to be purely speculative. Claims that Russian bots and paid trolls assaulted our social media in the months prior to the election are poorly documented, and, in any case, rather comical.

Following the election, the Russian interference narrative was echoed unceasingly by the Democratic establishment, as this was the necessary concomitant of the “Trump collusion” claims that they were using to slam and cripple Trump — in the hopes of eventually impeaching him. (It presumably would have been hard for Trump to collude in Russian election interference if in fact there had been no Russian interference.) Hysterical attacks on Russia accelerated to the point that some pols referred to the “Russian interference” as “an act of war”. This New McCarthyism ultimately led to our Congress placing severe new sanctions on Russia which also harm our European allies, and which these allies decry as illegal. In other words, we are punishing Russia for a crime they almost certainly did not commit, alienating key allies in the process, and amping up a Second Cold War, with all the expense and severe danger which this may entail.

All because the DNC and its associates concocted an overt fraud to protect and excuse Hillary, and to use as a cudgel over Trump — a fraud that was readily lapped up and sold to the public by hand-picked Russophobes in our intelligence community, and by a MSM that cares far less about truth than about access and ratings.

We need to determine who created the Guccifer 2.0 hoax, and prosecute them to the full extent of the law. The “intelligence agents” who concluded “with high confidence” that Guccifer 2.0 was a Wikileaks source need to be fired or demoted. If the FBI has known all along that Seth was a Wikileaks source, those who shielded the public from this crucial information need to be unmasked. The “journalists” who have been credulously spreading the “Russia interfered” narrative 24/7 for most of a year, without making the least effort to question the veracity of these assertions, should be recognized by the public as the willing tools of lying warmongers that they are, and their future work studiously ignored. The sanctions recently implemented on Russia should be lifted, and the politicians who played the most egregious role in hyping the Russian interference narrative and pushing the sanctions should be repudiated at the polls when they come up for re-election. (I confess, however, that I will not hold my breath waiting for any of these things to happen.)

And let’s do our best to find out who murdered Seth Rich, and why. The DNC and its media acolytes have been heaping hysterical abuse on anyone who entertains the possibility that Seth may have been a Wikileaks source, or who undertakes to investigate his murder. Donna Brazile and Seth’s brother Aaron have done their best to impede the investigative efforts of Rod Wheeler. There is reason to suspect that the DC police have backed off the investigation of the murder, accepting the very dubious view that Seth’s murder was just a “botched robbery”. And why did Democratic operatives feel it necessary to supply the Rich family with a “crisis consultant” after Assange mentioned Seth — when they couldn’t be bothered to offer an award for apprehension of Seth’s murderer? This behavior is highly suspicious — if Seth was indeed the victim of random street violence, what would the DNC have to fear from further investigation? Let’s get to the bottom of this!

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I appreciate your presenting and thoroughly examining the facets of this issue, and I think the more we look at it the better equipped we'll be to deal with whatever happens when the Attorney General or the Republicans begin to address what happened, if they do.

The part of your essay I question is this:

The evident intent of this charade was to trick our intelligence agencies into concluding that Guccifer 2.0 was the Wikileaks source and was acting at the behest of the Russian government.

Why do you not see this as our intelligence agencies working with the DNC and providing them with bogus clues to work with? Doesn't the record now show that the CIA provided the premise for starting the FBI counterintelligence investigation into collusion? And doesn't the record now show that the premise was based on the activities of CIA and FBI informant actors infiltrated into the Trump campaign?

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sources of good investigative journalism on the subject, which I think you've probably read, but just to have them here:

https://www.theepochtimes.com/spygate-the-inside-story-behind-the-allege...

Spygate: The Inside Story Behind the Alleged Plot to Take Down Trump
BY JEFF CARLSON
March 28, 2019 Updated: April 11, 2019

https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2019/05/02/big-puzzle-pieces-connec...

Big Puzzle Pieces Connecting – The CIA, FBI, and 2016 Political Surveillance is Merging…
Posted on May 2, 2019 by sundance

The admissions within the New York Times story today -outlining how President Obama’s intelligence apparatus ran simultaneous intelligence operations against the Trump campaign- are starting to merge the FBI and CIA operations. CTH anticipated this.

With new information about the “U.K. operation” using Stefan Halper (CIA asset and FBI informant); and the details of the contacts by U.S. intelligence operative Azra Turk; we can overlay the timeline and see a clear picture…

https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2019/05/02/papadopoulos-responds-to...

Papadopoulos Responds to Admissions the FBI/CIA Ran “Operations” Against Him….
Posted on May 2, 2019 by sundance

Former Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos appears on Fox with Tucker Carlson to discuss the revelations of the FBI/CIA running spy operations against him during the 2016 election. Papadopoulos says the FBI spy wanted him to slip up and say something; however, he had no information...

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@Linda Wood Thanks in particular for the links to the Conservative Treehouse blog - I hadn't looked at their work for a while. They are diligent.

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Mark F. McCarty

I have not followed this as closely as others, so I greatly appreciate this review. I think Linda may have a point about our "seventeen" intelligence agencies working with the guilty. Everyone from Hillary to Morning Joe has mentioned so many times what our intelligence agencies have said about Russia. The universal repetition makes it smell coordinated and therefore fishy.

And all America, if not the world, knows that Clapper had no compunction about lying to Congress about an unrelated subject. Nor did he need to have any compunction about it. At the very least, he should have been fired for it, if not prosecuted. Neither happened, even though he served "at the pleasure of the President."

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Trump and leaking to the press. Barr says he's digging into it and the D's are in full freak-out.

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chuck utzman

TULSI 2020

Pluto's Republic's picture

See Shawn Henry. Big investors in the public side of this entity include Google and other media giants. Seth worked at DNC headquarters. Crowdstrike was in house and/or inside DNC servers from mid April 2016 until mid-July and beyond. Crowdstrike has a long term government contract with FBI and received retainers in 2016. 2016 was all about cyber crimes and spying. There were many active participants in this. The years that follow are about cover-ups that came out of the FBI and DOJ (Executive branch entities.) The State Department went rogue and opaque a long time ago.

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____________________

The political system is what it is because the People are who they are. — Plato
lotlizard's picture

Oh, sorry, just having a bad dream or flashback — thought I was one of the Inquisitorial Squad at That Other Place. /s

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Dawn's Meta's picture

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A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they know they shall never sit. Allegedly Greek, but more possibly fairly modern quote.

Consider helping by donating using the button in the upper left hand corner. Thank you.

@Dawn's Meta Love that quote. Analogously, Izzy Stone said that it is crucial to fight for causes that are hopeless, so that, some day, owing to your previous efforts, someone will prevail. (Of course, he said it much better than that!)

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Mark F. McCarty

what is fact and what is fiction in this whole narrative. The current MSM treatment invariably includes assertions along the lines of, "It has been proved that the Russian government interfered in our elections via social media blah blah." I don't know why they think that. I don't know why others think the opposite. Articles such as VM's main post here, or those quoted above by Linda Wood, set forth avalanches of assertions derived from god knows what sources, assertions I have neither time nor means to investigate. In particular, I'm overwhelmed by stuff like citations of meetings between people I've never heard of, who are often labeled as agents of the CIA, or the FBI, or the Russian government, or MI5, or whomever:

With new information about the “U.K. operation” using Stefan Halper (CIA asset and FBI informant); and the details of the contacts by U.S. intelligence operative Azra Turk;

I don't know anything about these guys, and I don't know whether I can trust whomever was the original source for assigning them to one agency or another. It's a phenomenon I've experienced in other contexts -- e.g., McCoy's reporting on CIA involvement in the heroin trade. If you follow any "well-aged" conspiracy theories, you've seen this sort of thing at its worst: The explosion of the names and connections, as people chase a thousand threads down endless narrative side-plots. You can "prove" almost anything you want about JFK's assassination, just by carefully selecting from among the enormous collection of facts and maybe-not-so-much-facts that have been thrown into that mix.

So I'm going around telling people that there's no actual evidence "the Russians" -- meaning, agents of the Russian government, not just random Russian mischief-makers and click-baiters -- "interfered" with our election, but even as I'm saying that, I'm wondering, have I missed something somewhere, because I've self-selected an information stream that omits the "smoking gun"? I don't know. Lately, rather than worry about that, I rely on the more pertinent argument, which is that I'm more concerned about Sheldon Adelson's 9-figure "interference" in our elections, than I am about whatever some people in Russia might have done.

This week, in my vicinity, there is going to be a public forum in which a journalism professor is going to set forth her own analysis of patterns of something or other in social media, an analysis she says "proves" the case for Russian interference. I can't decide whether to attend. I can't decide whether to get up and question the qualifications of a researcher in mass communications to carry out the extremely sophisticated forensic statistical analysis necessary to "prove" very much about a tiny subset of a gigantic dataset. I can't decide whether to ask whether she has carried out a similar analysis tracing the same sort of patterns for social media posts originating in, I don't know, Miami, or Chicago, or Denver, or Omaha. I can't decide whether to raise the simple question: How is it possible that our elections were successfully manipulated in a controlled fashion by a foreign government, spending a minuscule fraction of what our own political organizations spent? I can't decided whether to stand up and denounce the entire proceeding as a dangerous and misleading distraction from the real threats to our "democracy" (such as it is), all of whom carry American passports?

Ugh.

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The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.

@UntimelyRippd

I vote to recommend your comment because I take it as an honest expression of your misgivings. Essentially, it seems your're saying,

I don't know anything about these guys, and I don't know whether I can trust whomever was the original source for assigning them to one agency or another.

I can only speak for myself and say that I have a foundation born from a moral compass. If CIA lies lead to the slaughter of innocent people, drug addiction killing more people, money being made by companies that profit from this death, injustice, and plunder, I see a pattern. I don't see any benefits to the American people. I see no war wins. I see no democracy resulting. I see death, destruction, starvation, mutilation, atrocity and profiteering. So the CIA has no credibility for me.

If all the players in this scandal appear equal to you in credibility, I can understand how frustrating it may be to hear all their claims. But as people's grandmothers are reputed to say, the proof is in the pudding. What you see is what you get. And I respect the fact that some Americans are unable to watch what happens, what has happened, who met with whom, who lied to whom, and so forth. But you are paying for ALL of this, and I hope you will start penciling out what you get. That process may provide you with a foundational perspective.

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@Linda Wood
CIA is an agent of unredeemed evil; nor that i don't recognize that the CIA has no credibility at all. (It's worth observing, mind you, that having no credibility doesn't mean we can conclude that anything they say is a lie. It only means that we have no way of knowing whether anything they say is a lie. That leaves us the choice of deciding whether to simply ignore everything they say, or to play the role of Vizzini from the Princess Bride: "We know that they know that we know that they know ...")

Anyway, the problem is that I no longer know anything about the origins of much of the information on any side of Russiagate. The rhetoric of both sides now has the holistic gestalt of conspiracy theory rhetoric: as i put it, "avalanches" of information, of accusation, of uncited assertions, of names and labels and meetings and locations, passed along from one writer to the next until their sources are lost. I have no idea who Stefan Halper is -- I've never heard of him -- so his name popping up with the associated labels of "CIA asset" and "FBI informant" isn't helpful, as I don't actually know whether he's either of those things; or whether anybody else really "knows", or upon what evidence somebody in the chain of knowledge asserted those labels, which are now passed along as truth. I do know that when I have perused CT rhetoric over the past 40 years, I have usually found the epistemologies wanting: Conclusions are drawn from inferences weak or worse -- often in forms such as, "What other explanation is there?" (when alternative explanations abound), or "X would never do Y, so Z must be true," (as if X's motivations, capabilities, and knowledge are perfectly known to us), and other instances of a form of reasoning I've just decided to call, "Credulous cynicism". My "foundational perspective" is one of skeptical, rationalist inquiry. I don't assume that just because the CIA is evil, that the explanation for every evil thing on earth is that "The CIA did it." Not even if I believe that the CIA might have had an interest in doing it. Suspicion is not proof, nor even evidence.

At this point, I don't even know what information the Russiagaters have supplied, true other otherwise. If I say to someone, "We haven't seen one shred of proof," I not only don't know whether that's true, I don't even know whether we've seen one shred of purported proof.

I am completely lost in this morass of competing claims and counterclaims.

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The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.

@UntimelyRippd ,

and I respect what you're saying. This is a marathon scandal that's almost impossible to keep track of and make sense of. The people who chronicle what has happened must work full time at it.

I think what makes people like me passionate about bringing the CIA to justice is that they have never been brought to justice. It naturally electrifies me if it appears the Papadopolous/Mifsud screw-up may cause the CIA to face legal repercussions. But will it bring them to justice? No one is holding their breath.

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entire testimony to the House Judiciary and Oversight Committees is worth reading, although it takes a lot of time. But it provides a basic understanding of the "predicate" process for the FBI investigation.

https://www.lawfareblog.com/document-transcript-george-papadopoulos-inte...

Also, Congressman Nunes talks about his request for information about Mifsud from Mueller on Fox News linked here.

https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2019/05/03/devin-nunes-discusses-hi...

And among the comments to the Nunes article is a link to AG Barr succinctly making the case for no obstruction.

https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/bk8hxt/icymi_the_only_minut... )

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