Russian interference with the 2016 election

[Mountain Man]

Actually - since the "crime" was compromise of private servers owned by a non-government entity - it is their call, as far as I know, whether or not they want an investigation or to press charges. It is also their call if they want to invite in law enforcement or engage a private agency. If they want to do either, and don't have a qualified agency do the investigation, then they will have a hard time in court. If I were head of the DNC/RNC and was hacked, I would factor in the impact on the ongoing campaign of losing access to my servers for X period of time, and the impact of having even more private information potentially compromised. And if I was as incompetent as the DNC apparently was in protecting their servers, and the DNC was as complicit as it was in sabotaging Sander's campaign, I probably would not want THAT to come to public attention either. It doesn't take much more to explain why they might want to keep things private.

So the first question we should be asking is "What is the DNC wanting to hide?" Second question, "Can we trust the evidence they provided?"

This whole thing smells rotten.

[Juvenal]

When you look at the corruption in Obama's FBI and DOJ and the lengths they went to illegally spy on the Trump campaign, I'm not willing to take anything off the table at this point.

Trump actually made that claim, but it's baseless.

The only reason Trump campaign officials were caught on tape is because we were spying on the Russians they were communicating with. And it's not as if Flynn couldn't pick up the phone and have State arrange a meeting or a call with the Russian ambassador, providing a background briefing beforehand. That's their job.

Not speaking for most of Trump's incompetents, but Flynn knew this.

The suggestion that our national security advisor shouldn't be allowed to know who's talking to the the Russian ambassador about changing U.S. policy has always been risible.

At any rate, my point is that anybody who has access to these tools (not just government agencies) could spoof fingerprints.

Again, this is a conspiracy theory. It falls apart as soon as we try to nail down who that "anybody" might be.

Hackers don't use tools that could empty a bank on a political database.

The Hillary campaign didn't have the expertise to prevent the hack itself, disposing of any suggestion they were capable of spoofing the DNC server logs themselves. They had no idea who was in their systems before they hired CrowdStrike, and the idea that a computer security company brought in to investigate the hacking would spoof the logs is similarly risible.

"Hillary hired them so they must be guilty."

That doesn't work outside the partisan echo chambers that are still discussing Seth Rich, Chris Stevens, and Vince Foster. It certainly didn't work with the FBI.

[carpedm9587]

So the first question we should be asking is "What is the DNC wanting to hide?" Second question, "Can we trust the evidence they provided?"

This whole thing smells rotten.

I provided two fairly obvious possibilities. I'm not sure why anyone would be surprised that a business/person would not want their private/internal communications exposed. I certainly have no desire to have my email history made public - and I'm not a "criminal" by any stretch of the imagination. As for "trust" what they provide, if they want it to have legal standing, they have to meet legal forensic requirements (which I just became aware of, thanks to Sparko). Otherwise...

What I see is basically partisan speculation. They are Democrats - they are left or left leaning - so they are suspicious and it "smells rotten"...ipso facto. My experience is that when the exact same things are done by one's own party, they aren't suspicious in the least, there is good reason for why they make the choices they do, and it "smells clean." It's not exactly a unique dynamic. The other side is pretty much always wrong - that's why they're "the other side."

[Sparko]

With administrator privileges, I can clone any hard drive so long as it's connected to a network, without physical access to the machine.

not forensically sound clone. You need to remove the drive, put a write lock on the original and then make a copy.

[Juvenal]

not forensically sound clone. You need to remove the drive, put a write lock on the original and then make a copy.

They weren't pursuing a criminal case.

After 9/11, under Mueller in fact, the FBI was transformed from an agency that worked exclusively on criminal cases to an agency that was also tasked with counter-intelligence work. This was a Russian incursion, part of a much wider hacking campaign of the 2016 election that's credited to the so-called Fancy Bear unit inside the GRU, accompanied by a coverup campaign tasked to Guccifer 2.0, who has since been identified by name.

That's the context under which the FBI had declined to ask for the servers.


But there's something to consider. Mueller has since taken over the Guccifer 2.0 case; this particular leak occurred during the transition to Mueller's team. Mueller has already charged members of one Kremlin-linked group.

Just possibly, someone at the DNC has recently received a request.

But that's just speculation.

But hey, in for a penny. The charges against Prigozhin's IRA came from out of nowhere. Not a whisper beforehand. If Mueller is planning on charging members of the GRU, revealing what's known about Gucci2 to the press could have been a career-ending poor decision.

Or even if he's not.

[Sparko]

They weren't pursuing a criminal case.

After 9/11, under Mueller in fact, the FBI was transformed from an agency that worked exclusively on criminal cases to an agency that was also tasked with counter-intelligence work. This was a Russian incursion, part of a much wider hacking campaign of the 2016 election that's credited to the so-called Fancy Bear unit inside the GRU, accompanied by a coverup campaign tasked to Guccifer 2.0, who has since been identified by name.

That's the context under which the FBI had declined to ask for the servers.


But there's something to consider. Mueller has since taken over the Guccifer 2.0 case; this particular leak occurred during the transition to Mueller's team. Mueller has already charged members of one Kremlin-linked group.

Just possibly, someone at the DNC has recently received a request.

But that's just speculation.

But hey, in for a penny. The charges against Prigozhin's IRA came from out of nowhere. Not a whisper beforehand. If Mueller is planning on charging members of the GRU, revealing what's known about Gucci2 to the press could have been a career-ending poor decision.

Or even if he's not.

Federal investigations have even more stringent rules and regulations than state and local civil or criminal cases. Here is a guide to evidence collection for state cases

https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/219941.pdf

[Juvenal]

Federal investigations have even more stringent rules and regulations than state and local civil or criminal cases. Here is a guide to evidence collection for state cases

https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/219941.pdf

That would be useful if the FBI was planning to take someone to court over the DNC hacking.

I suppose the conspiracy theory would have it that CrowdStrike should be indicted for spoofing a Russian incursion. But that's a conspiracy theory, and while I'm fine with conspiracies in the thread, because sometimes they lead to interesting questions, I don't plan on spending time with them myself.

Asking who's going to court is an interesting question.

The more I think about this, the less likely it seems.

Yes, Mueller indicted the Prigozhin group, but Prigozhin wasn't official. They call him Putin's chef. He's just another of the oligarchs around Putin. He was deniable, a semi-autonomous agent. That's Putin's signature. And so long as Putin denied them, because they were just private citizens, they were indictable.

But this is the GRU now, Russia's principle intelligence agency. They take their orders from Putin, and you don't indict heads of state.

That puts it in the CIA's court.

[Sparko]

That would be useful if the FBI was planning to take someone to court over the DNC hacking.

I suppose the conspiracy theory would have it that CrowdStrike should be indicted for spoofing a Russian incursion. But that's a conspiracy theory, and while I'm fine with conspiracies in the thread, because sometimes they lead to interesting questions, I don't plan on spending time with them myself.

Asking who's going to court is an interesting question.

The more I think about this, the less likely it seems.

Yes, Mueller indicted the Prigozhin group, but Prigozhin wasn't official. They call him Putin's chef. He's just another of the oligarchs around Putin. He was deniable, a semi-autonomous agent. That's Putin's signature. And so long as Putin denied them, because they were just private citizens, they were indictable.

But this is the GRU now, Russia's principle intelligence agency. They take their orders from Putin, and you don't indict heads of state.

That puts it in the CIA's court.

well considering they did not know who had hacked the servers at first, and they were looking for evidence of how it was breached, they would have had to use the same investigative rules as in any other criminal case.

[Juvenal]

well considering they did not know who had hacked the servers at first, and they were looking for evidence of how it was breached, they would have had to use the same investigative rules as in any other criminal case.

Before the breach was made public, there was this.

2016 Under Scrutiny: A Timeline Of Russia Connections

May 18, 2016: James Clapper, then the director of national intelligence, warns of some indications of cyberattacks against the 2016 presidential election. In a cyber-event at the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington, D.C., Clapper said "as the campaigns intensify we'll probably have more of it."

...

June 14, 2016: News breaks of two separate Russian breaches into the Democratic National Committee's computer network. The hacks were perpetrated by Russian groups that have become known as Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear, identified by Washington, D.C., computer security company CrowdStrike. The hackers had been monitoring the DNC's computer network for a year.

In May 2016, Clapper offered no details on the hackers, but by its nature, the warning had to have been based on particular actors. He did mention that the FBI was working with the campaigns to let them know what to watch for.

In June, 2016, the DNC noticed some odd network traffic and brought in CrowdStrike to check it out. Chances are good DNC IT professionals were responding to the FBI information, as the hackers had been in the system for a year undetected.

We don't know what "they" knew, but we do know the DNI was talking to the FBI about outside threats before CrowdStrike was hired, and that when the breach was publicized, officials noted that other political organizations, including the RNC, were also hacked by Russians, information that would not have been available to CrowdStrike.

Everything I'm seeing points to the DNC hack being seen as a Russian counter-intelligence issue from the outset. The DNI doesn't do prosecutions.

[Juvenal]

Mueller told Trump’s attorneys the president remains under investigation but is not currently a criminal target

Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III informed President Trump’s attorneys last month that he is continuing to investigate the president but does not consider him a criminal target at this point, according to three people familiar with the discussions.

In private negotiations in early March about a possible presidential interview, Mueller described Trump as a subject of his investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. Prosecutors view someone as a subject when that person has engaged in conduct that is under investigation but there is not sufficient evidence to bring charges.

The special counsel also told Trump’s lawyers that he is preparing a report about the president’s actions while in office and potential obstruction of justice, according to two people with knowledge of the conversations.

Mueller reiterated the need to interview Trump — both to understand whether he had any corrupt intent to thwart the Russia investigation and to complete this portion of his probe, the people said.

[Mountain Man]

Here's a story I hadn't come across before: it seems that the majority of emails exfiltrated from the DNC servers happened after the intrusion was discovered by Crowdstrike on May 6, 2016. So did they just sit there and do nothing for almost a month while a hacker was rooting through the system? Also curious is the fact that the number emails being sent and received inexplicably spiked right around the time of the supposed "hack", that no emails prior to April 19, 2016, the date of intrusion, were ever released even though the "hacker" would have had access to them, and that no emails after May 25, 2016 were ever released, a full two-weeks before Crowdstrike spent a weekend locking down the system.

Source: Email Dates in the Wikileaks DNC Archive

(Sep 2017) Most of the damage was done after Crowdstrike installed its software. Ritter further asked: “Did Overwatch detect the spread of malware into the servers of the DCCC? If the answer is yes, one must question the competence of a cyber security company whose job is to prevent just that kind of activity.”

Overall, the most serious question is the validity of Crowdstrike’s attribution of the DNC hack to the “Russians”. Alperovitch is an Atlantic Council associate who is vituperatively anti-Russian, with questionable attribution history. Before being baked into government policy, any Alperovitch findings ought to be cross-checked in the most minute detail. However (unlike Climategate), the police (FBI here) never took possession of the hacked server and were thus unable to carry out their own forensic analysis. The intel assessments provided to the public consist of little more than assertions, repeated over and over, louder and louder, rather than objective evidence. The intel community hides behind a supposed need to protect “sources and methods”, but I seriously wonder whether these caveats [were] nothing more than a figleaf to prevent exposure of their own shortcomings.

https://climateaudit.org/2017/09/02/...s-dnc-archive/

© Copyright Original Source

[Juvenal]

It should be noted that the so-called Steele dossier is not a dossier. It's a collection of 17 company intelligence reports based on interviews between June and December 2016 with Russian contacts Steele developed while working the Russia desk for MI-6.

It's raw intelligence, subject to the usual caveats. Portions have subsequently been relatively well verified, including details about the Russian actors cited as directing the interference campaign. Others have been relatively well disputed, including the Cohen meeting in Prague. The salacious elements concerning prostitutes remain in unverified limbo.

News on Cohen in Prague

McClatchy reported on Friday evening that special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s team has evidence of a trip by President Trump’s personal lawyer to Prague in the late summer of 2016. Overseas travel to non-Russian countries might strike some observers as an incremental — if not unimportant — development in Mueller’s probe. That is not the case. Confirmation that Cohen visited Prague could be quite significant.

Sources: Mueller has evidence Cohen was in Prague in 2016, confirming part of dossier

The Justice Department special counsel has evidence that Donald Trump’s personal lawyer and confidant, Michael Cohen, secretly made a late-summer trip to Prague during the 2016 presidential campaign, according to two sources familiar with the matter.

If the Prague trip happened, and Mueller can prove it, the largest known hole in the Steele dossier vanishes, and Cohen is implicated in direct cooperation, as described in the dossier, by his categorical denials. And by the positioning of the accusation with his consigliere, it would implicate the don.

I see no real alternative to any sourcing for this story outside the Mueller team, so there's that, though I have sincere doubts that Mueller would have authorized its release. If it's true, and we'll have to wait for solid evidence on that, this would be a bombshell leak, the sort of thing that would headline articles of impeachment.

Cohen has responded.

Cohen doubles down on claim he's never been to Prague after Mueller report

President Trump’s longtime personal lawyer Michael Cohen on Saturday responded to a report that special counsel Robert Mueller has evidence that Cohen went to Prague during the 2016 election, slamming it as “bad reporting.”

“Bad reporting, bad information and bad story,” Cohen tweeted, calling out the reporter behind the story by name.

“No matter how many times or ways they write it, I have never been to Prague. I was in LA with my son. Proven!”

Cohen Again Denies He Made Prague Visit During Trump Campaign

Michael Cohen is denying a new McClatchy report which said that the Mueller investigation has uncovered evidence that he visited Prague in the summer of 2016, which, if true, may confirm one of the key claims made in infamous Steele dossier. Cohen, President Trump’s longtime personal lawyer and fixer, tweeted on Saturday that the story was “bad reporting, bad information and [a] bad story.”

[Mountain Man]

This is FAKE NEWS that was debunked last year! Steele's handlers inside the FBI/DOJ who were feeding him intel screwed up and identified the WRONG Michael Cohen.

https://theconservativetreehouse.com...-occams-razor/

It was independently confirmed that Trump's Michael Cohem was visiting his son in Los Angeles at the time the other Michael Cohen was in Prague.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics...trump/512762/a

[Tassman]

This is FAKE NEWS that was debunked last year! Steele's handlers inside the FBI/DOJ who were feeding him intel screwed up and identified the WRONG Michael Cohen.

https://theconservativetreehouse.com...-occams-razor/

It was independently confirmed that Trump's Michael Cohem was visiting his son in Los Angeles at the time the other Michael Cohen was in Prague.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics...trump/512762/a

Your loyalty is admirable if misguided. We shall see in due course whether or not this is "fake news". But overall, I would say that Cohen is screwed. And Trump too!

[Mountain Man]

We shall see? But we've already seen. The story was proven false over a year ago!

Jan 2017: "Cohen said that during the time the report places him in Prague, he was actually with his son visiting USC and meeting with the baseball coach. A USC baseball source confirmed Tuesday night that Cohen and his son had visited USC on August 29th."
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics...r-trump/512762