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What the reader will see throughout this series is a gradual evolution to the beginning of an understanding of what actually happened at the alleged Russian hack of the DNC network. I wasn't sure I knew what actually happened, despite Mainstream Media (MSM) reporting and the assertions of government officials. I think an understanding began as I obtained more research, in order to add to my knowledge, and pulled the original stories apart starting with the third part of this series. The first two parts were the start of this journey, and, with Part 3 the door was coming open a bit for a look inside what has been hidden from the public, and even some evidence about how it was hidden from all of us. Part 4 is the real gateway toward the truth, whatever that turns out to be.
Part 3 discusses a recent experiment conducted by former NSA executive and whistleblower William Binney to analyze the download speed of an alleged hacker download on the DNC network to determine if the download was directed from Russia. The experiment turned out to be outside the timeline of when the DNC emails were stolen and Julian Assange of Wikileaks received them.
Part 4 is a critique of the disasterous Crowdstrike engagement to eliminate the hacking of the DNC network, allegedly perpetrated by Russian intelligence directed by Vladimir Putin. We will show with copious documentation that the Democratic Party did not need to lose all of those emails that wound up with Wikileaks sometime before June 12, 2016. We put parts of two articles side-by-side, including Ellen Nakashima's article in the June 14, 2016 Washington Post and an article by Scott Ritter that draws its content from Crowdstrike's actual report. What we see are significant contradictions that demand explanation as Ms. Nakashima's article was an exclusive, personally given to Ms. Nakashima by DNC and Crowdstrike executives. So, the rest of the MSM relied on Ms. Nakashima's work to report what happened to the general public.
Additional analysis based on the facts presented in Part 4 has resulted in additional alternative theories about what could have happened in the DNC network besides an attack by Russian intelligence hackers, which is looking more difficult to prove all the time. The main impetus for this new set of theories is the violation of Best Practices in Incident Response committed by Crowdstrike in their long engagement at the DNC in May and June of 2016. When cyber security professionals conduct themselves in such a way that the client's data is placed in extreme risk, that behavior needs some explanation that has not been properly demanded by higher authority. Journalists, many of whom lack the expertise, don't even think about looking at what Crowdstrike did to the DNC, let alone asking why they did it.
An article in the October 30, 2017 posting on the blog Liberty Unyielding, we have the timeline of Chuck Ross that covers the events around the history of the "Trump-Russia-Wikileaks" narrative. This one is particularly important as it reveals a claim that the DNC executives responsible for the Crowdstrike engagement agreed to continue operating with the Russian hackers still having access to the network. The stated reason for this was to give Crowdstrike the chance to track stolen emails and other material through the Internet to the network from which the Russian hackers originated, which was the destination of the stolen documents. We read about this alleged capability of Crowdstrike in other on-line journals, but gave it no importance for the reasons we cite in this focused article.
As I wrote in the introductory remarks to Part 6 directly above, I did not place any importance on the claims by Crowdstrike that they can track the packets of data, that comprise a document stolen by hackers, as Wiliam Binney, who is in a good position to know, stated on video that only the National Security Agency (NSA) can track packets through the Internet to their destination. Well, I didn't realize that, as a US Government contractor, Crowdstrike has potential access, through the FBI, for example, in queries of the massive NSA database of eletronic communications of all American citizens and private entities. Perhaps access to that data is how Crowdstrike really tracks packets of stolen documents through the Internet to their illegal destinations. Let's address this possibility and discuss the recent findings that FBI contractors have abused FISA 702 "About" queries of that NSA database.
The research about the DNC hack demonstrates that my estimates of media coverage from June 14, 2016, when the hack was first made public, until July 22, 2016 when the emails were published by Wikileaks, that the coverage was light, there was no follow-up research or investigation, and everything was thrown at the Orlando Pulse Nightclub alleged shooting on June 12, 2016 until later in the month of June were accurate. The story only picks up days after the DNC emails were published by Wikileaks on July 22, 2016. Still no depth of investigation was done as the Russians were blamed without any kind of independent verification.
Today, January 25, 2018, I stumbled onto the Tyndall Report Web site which, in part, displays all the news reports of individual stories/subjects and maintains statistics about the amount of minutes spent in coverage total over a period of time. I needed such research for the Pied Piper Candidate Strategy story as evidence that the media were executing their part of Mrs. Clinton's plan to ensure that Donald J. Trump won the Republican nomination by wall-to-wall, 24/7 stories about Trump. It got so bad that NPR complained about the obsessive coverage of the billionaire in August 2016. They weren't the only ones. All the media kept it up day after day, "Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump. Trump this. Trump that. Trump something else." This was how Trump was "elevated" to being the presumptive nominee by the media even before the bombastic billionaire was nominated. It wasn't the Russians. You will not believe the discrepancies in the number of minutes dedicated to each candidate. By the way, the media have not learned and still dedicate most of their coverage to Trump. It continues to backfire on them. One remembers the old saw about doing the same thing over and over expecting a different outcome.
I forgot all about how any potential hackers could have just used copy-and-paste, or making screen captures, to steal the DNC emails, the email attachments, and other documents stored on the File server, Email server, or DNC employees' workstations. A very efficient method of pilfering the contents of documents, these two methods are examined as evidence that Crowdstrike should have ended the hack faster than the 36 days they took to allegedly elimnate the hackers from the DNC network.
Whoever stole the DNC emails, and maybe took them to Wikileaks as well, did not have a lot of scandalous, salacious emails to choose from until April 19, 2016. It appeared that only about 1.72 emails per day were being created through all of 2015 and into 2016, but when a possible retention policy is added to the recipe, it is possible to estimate when the emails were stolen, by date and possibly the time on that date.
Something came up recently that caused the Seth Rich story to get pushed back one or more positions in this series. Back in Part 4, I stated that something must have happened between the meeting of Crowdstrike and DNC executives with the Washington Post's Ellen Nakashima to throw the final report out of reconcilement with the article written by Ellen Nakashima. I think that event might have been right in front of me for a long time now hiding in plain sight.
The Special Counsel's indictment of the 12 Russians alleged to have been involved in the hacking of the DNC, along with giving the stolen DNC emails to Wikileaks for publication, is analyzed in the parts that involve the protection of the DNC network's audit and event logs that would contain evidence of the origin of any hack. The timing of when the DNC emails were given to Wikileaks is also reviewed, along with the significance of the alleged "Russian hackers" identifying the presence of Crowdstrike on the DNC network sometime in May 2016 and continuing the hack despite knowing Crowdstrike was observing them. Finally, was Crowdstrike given a "Stand Down Order" from DNC leadership, or someone else?
We find proof of a Stand Down Order issued to cybersecurity company Crowdstrike from a Mainstream, Democratic National Committee source. Things are actually a lot clearer than there were before, although the number of plausible explanations of this mess only grow.
Flawed reporting in the Mainstream Media is one reason why misinformation about the DNC Data Loss persists. This article marks the first time the term "data loss" is used in place of "hack" to describe what happened in the DNC network. The relationship between the Russian GRU military intelligence agency and the Russian SVR political intelligence agency is discussed.
Stealing the emails was not the first theory about the motive for the murder of Seth Rich, and it was not the last. Most people did not know about the DNC hack until Wikileaks published the emails, so the first theory had nothing to do with emails. There have been three theories about the motive for Rich's murder. This article will demonstrate that none of the theories have been proven as no suspects for the murder have been identified or apprehended. How some of the theories rely on the "proof" of Seth Rich being murdered as support for the theory that he stole the emails and gave them to Wikileaks. If Seth Rich had worked for the Commerce Department rather than the DNC, would any of us know his name today?
When Glenn Simpson, who puts the "S" in GPS, came up with the idea of starting a company like Fusion GPS while a reporter with the Wall Street Journal, it is doubtful that he thought he would get this much publicity. Simpson approached the job almost like a covert CIA operative. The company was not one for a lot of publicity and noise. People and companies who needed the services of Fusion GPS, such as "opposition research," a fancy name for searching for dirt on people, in a way that is not unlike The National Enquirer, were those who would use the services of a "private intelligence contractor" like Fusion GPS. Yes, Fusion also did contract work for CIA and FBI, who, unknown to most Americans, are doing some outsourcing now and then. Fusion GPS also does lobbying of elected office holders in the United States on behalf of private interests both in the United States and in foreign countries. Fusion GPS also does election campaign consulting in the United States and in countries all over the world. Work like that puts people from Fusion GPS in positions that the CIA would identify as advantageous to be occupied by one of their agents or "assets." After all, "meddling in the elections of another country" is something that has been done by our government, and other governments, in the past. If the CIA could arrange to have one of their assets in the job as election consultant from Fusion GPS to, say, the president of another country, the CIA is in a position to covertly manipulate the outcome of the election in that country. The scary thing is, if I can see that you can sure bet the CIA has seen that. Part of Fusion GPS' business comes from intelligence outfits like CIA and FBI. We now know Glenn Simpson hires people with CIA backgrounds, such as Justice Department executive Bruce Ohr's wife, Nellie Ohr, who worked for the CIA as an expert on Russia. Nellie Ohr worked long enough at Fusion GPS to have been possibly involved in creating the "Peegate Dossier."
In lobbying, Fusion GPS was a contractor of a Russian company with indirect ties to the Putin regime. Fusion GPS was lobbying Congress to eliminate the Magnitsky sanctions against the Putin government for the death of a political opponent of Vladimir Putin who was found dead one day in his jail cell. The Magnitsky case was not unlike the case of Kenneth Trentadue, a man found slaughtered in his cell in a maximum security federal transfer facility in Oklahoma. No one put any sanctions on our country for that one, but we care when one of Putin's opponents is killed in a Russian jail. No one to this day has been so much as charged with Trentadue's torture and murder. As we will see, one of Fusion GPS's lobbyists was Russian attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya, who met with Donald Trump, Jr., Paul Manafort, and Jared Kushner at Trump Tower in June 2016. So much happened in June 2016 to put us where we are now. So much meddling in the election by so many people! To study Fusion GPS is to study people who make a living, in part, by meddling in other countries' elections. People who make their living doing things like that are a real hoot. Until they screw up and destabilize a country, or start a war. Uh, wait a minute, isn't our country just a little destabilized right now?
With all the talk about "collusion" between the Trump campaign and the Russian government of Vladimir Putin to influence the election in a way that helped Donald Trump against Hillary Clinton, and the level of the accompanying outrage, I thought I would use Antony Sutton's seminal research into Cold War "East-West Trade" with the Soviet Union to find some "collusion" that is really outrageous. This section will have its own index page for all of it's many parts. Clicking on the link above will take you away from the Election Index. By the way, if there has been anything that has shocked me about the public reaction to hearing about the effects of "trade" with the former Soviet Union (Russia) it was the largely blase' response. Apparently "hacking" Hillary Clinton is worse than literally arming Russia during the Cold War, which one person on Twitter dismissed in a reply to me as being "how business operates."