Date of NSA reality Winner leak suggesting Russia accessed election software:

https://theintercept.com/2017/06/05/top-secret-nsa-report-details-russia...

TOP-SECRET NSA REPORT DETAILS RUSSIAN HACKING EFFORT DAYS BEFORE 2016 ELECTION
Matthew Cole, Richard Esposito, Sam Biddle, Ryan Grim
June 5 2017, 12:44 p.m...

Date of Comey hearing, including these questions and responses:

http://www.politico.com/story/2017/06/08/full-text-james-comey-trump-rus...

Full text: James Comey testimony transcript on Trump and Russia
By POLITICO STAFF 06/08/2017 11:14 AM EDT Updated 06/08/2017 01:48 PM EDT

… BURR: Do you have any doubt that Russia attempted to interfere in the 2016 elections?

COMEY: None.

BURR: Do you have any doubt that the Russian government was behind the intrusions in the D triple C systems and the subsequent leaks of that information?

COMEY: No, no doubt.

BURR: Do you have any doubt the Russian government was behind the cyber intrusion in the state voter files?

COMEY: No.

BURR: Are you confident that no votes cast in the 2016 presidential election were altered?

COMEY: I'm confident. When I left as director I had seen no indication of that whatsoever.

… BURR: Okay. When did you become aware of the cyber intrusion?

COMEY: The first cyber — there was all kinds of cyber intrusions going on all the time. The first Russian-connected cyber intrusion I became aware of in the late summer of 2015.

BURR: And in that time frame, there were more than the DNC and the D triple C that were targets?

COMEY: Correct, a massive effort to target government and nongovernmental, near governmental agencies like nonprofits.

BURR: What would be the estimate of how many entities out there the Russians specifically targeted in that time frame?

COMEY: It's hundreds. I suppose it could be more than 1,000, but it's at least hundreds.

BURR: When did you become aware that data had been exfiltrated?

COMEY: I'm not sure exactly. I think either late '15 or early '16.

BURR: And did you, the director of the FBI, have conversations with the last administration about the risk that this posed?

COMEY: Yes.

BURR: And share with us, if you will, what actions they took.

COMEY: Well, the FBI had already undertaken an effort to notify all the victims, and that's what we consider the entities attacked as part of this massive spear-phishing campaign so we notified them in an effort to disrupt what might be ongoing, and then there was a series of continuing interactions with entities through the rest of '15 into '16, and then throughout '16, the administration was trying to decide how to respond to the intrusion activity that it saw.

BURR: And the FBI in this case, unlike other cases that you might investigate, did you ever have access to the actual hardware that was hacked, or did you have to rely on a third party to provide you the day that that they had collected?

COMEY: In the case of the DNC, and I believe the D triple C, but I'm sure the DNC, we did not have access to the devices themselves. We got relevant forensic information from a private party, a high class entity, that had done the work but we didn't get direct access.

BURR: But no content.

COMEY: Correct.

BURR: Isn't content an important part of the forensics from a counter-intelligence standpoint?

COMEY: It is but what was briefed to me by the people who were my folks at the time is that they had gotten the information from the private party that they needed to understand the intrusion by the spring of 2016.

The NSA Reality Winner leak was supposed to make this testimony believable. But it's not. He can say 1,000's, he can say no doubt, he can even say slam dunk. But what has been released to us as evidence is suggestive, never definitive, and his descriptions of the actual sequence of events concerning warning the "victims" is unconvincing, confusing, and like all of the innuendo in this saga, full of hot air.

I agree, they're just going with whatever might work. Throw something against the wall and see if it sticks.

"Can't blind 'em with brilliance,
baffle 'em with bullshit".

“[Jeff Bezos] recently secured a $600 million contract from the CIA. That’s at least twice what Bezos paid for the Post this year. Bezos recently disclosed that the company’s Web-services business is building a ‘private cloud’ for the CIA to use for its data needs.”

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-12-20/cia-washington-post-and-russia-...

Another important fact is Reality Winter has plead NOT GUILTY. The assumption of guilt is from the NSA. You might want to read the transcript here:
https://theintercept.com/2017/06/14/intercepted-podcast-the-trump-mixtap...

here's one paragraph...

Now, this may seem like a minor point, but facts matter. And when you smear people — when you piece together innocuous bits of information and act as though they just exist in a straight line — it’s very damaging. People who are believing everything that the Trump Justice Department are saying in these affidavits, and saying, well, that must be the full story…that’s insane. That’s insane to just say, well, government assertion should just be treated as facts. So, I’m not speaking right now for The Intercept. And I believe in the integrity of the internal review that is being conducted right now at The Intercept, and I believe that in the end, we are going to be able to state clearly the facts as we understand them, and to be accountable to our readers and to be people who support our journalism.

throughout this whole "election" hacking mania are two of the three distinct steps to our system of representation, campaigns and elections, the third being what follows - governance.

While elections (voting and the vote counting process) and governance are both public government functions with and worthy of strict protections against interference, campaigns are private enterprises that lie far outside lawful regulation. The DNC has already offered their concurring legal opinion on that. Campaigns are the wild west of our system, where lies, distortions, diversions and all types of "interference" are accepted as normal. Even our Supreme Court has decided that money, as speech, cannot be regulated either as to how much or where from, even to include foreign funding.

For months now, we've been pounded with the idea that Russia interfered with our elections, when in fact the content of the accusations were of campaign interference, which, given how our system works, is neither unusual or a crime.

If the latest claim, the first of its kind, that Russia hacked actual elections systems are true, we have something to look at. But it's turning out to be, so far, another in a long series of evidence-free accusations. But now that the public has been whipped into a frenzy by months of empty accusations conflating elections with campaigns, evidence is no longer required. And that's a shame, because we do need to know the facts about any election (not campaign) interference.

Let those of us with reason take a step toward clarity by no longer referring to political campaigns as "elections", because they're not, and not at all similar or similarly protected. Try this on the next Russophobe who rattles on about election hacking..."Oh, you must be talking about the campaign. Tell me now, what is it that's illegal in a campaign?"

You asked the question I've been asking. Is she an operative or just really bad at this whistleblower thing? The carelessness that I've read she exhibited almost seems like she was trying to get caught. But, I know I regularly blow people's minds by pointing out that I can track pretty much everything they're doing at work IT wise. (Not that I'd want to!) Seems no one reads the employee handbooks, because I've noticed there's always language in there to that effect. I would expect someone in her line of work would know that anyway.

The whole issue is a distraction from an embarrassing fact - take away either New York or L.A. (L.A. metro - you might have to add San Jose) and Hillary loses the popular vote as well. In fact, reduce her percentage to 60% in the city and she loses New York. The same would apply in several other states - Colorado (Denver) Nevada (Las Vegas) Illinois (Chicago) Minnesota (Minneapolis St Paul) and Virginia (Its share of the D.C. metro, though this runs counter to my point)
We all know about the racial divide between the parties, (and supposedly well to do white professionals, except in extreme red states) but the Democrats are an extreme geographical minority party - more so than the Republicans were in 2006, when the media was trumpeting its incipient demise, it's just that their geographical limitation is superficially more diffuse. Run down the list of American states and tell me how many a Democrat could do better than a Libertarian without a big city. (O.K., I'm exaggerating about the Libertarian thing)
The Democrats are as unrepresentative as the Republicans, but we are too busy whining about the Electoral College to admit that. Fix the problem, not a symptom.

My thoughts exactly!

And the NSA would have that evidence if it existed.
Scott Ritter's careful reading of the document shows that all the links to Russia that they have are purely speculative, and ultimately based on the unverified claims of the discredited DNC vendor Crowdstrike. While the MSM is screaming that this is further proof of their pet Russia propaganda piece, it is actually the exact opposite. The NSA has no evidence, just hearsay claims of a biased DNC contractor which had to retract a similar claim about Russian hacking Ukraine artillery systems which was based on the same type of forensic 'evidence'. The fact that the NSA has no evidence shows not only that the leak didn't come from Russian hackers, but actually that it wasn't done with external access, but was actually an insider releasing internal documents. This is, of course, what WikiLeaks and others have maintained all along.
If the DNC realized that their documents had been stolen, it would be in their interest to claim (or hire a contractor to investigate a 'hack' and claim) that they had been hacked. Moreover, claiming they were hacked by Russians not only plays into Hillary's Cold-Warrior policy stance, and makes Trump look like a commie-lover, it also lets them smear anyone who publishes the documents or even discusses them as russky dupes or agents. This not only distracts from the discussion of content, but also scares off journalists and pundits in the MSM. Any discussion of the contents of the leaks was quickly turned into a discussion of evil foreign forces working to harm the annointed one. A very positive spin, all things considered.

Bottom line, I believe there was no hack of the DNC whatsoever, and the whole hack/Russians story is a campaign fabrication.