Today Donald Trump finally gets his briefing on the Russian hacks of the DNC. And he has a difficult decision coming before him, he will either have to do an about face on all of his previous denials and deflections that Russia and Putin were ultimately behind the various hacking attacks against Hillary Clinton and Democrats or he’ll continue making the specious argument that the intelligence community is only pointing the finger at Russia to undermine the legitimacy of his Presidency.
Or he might find a third path that finally admits the truth (as he ultimately did on the validity of President Obama’s birth-certificate) while pointing the finger in a third direction and making himself the hero of the story by claiming that he, and only he, was the one to force this revelation to light.
I’m betting that he’ll be taking Door #3, Johnny.
All he needs to do is build the scenario correctly, find the right scapegoat, and he’s covered his rear-end but in he meantime how much damage has he done to America’s National Security in the process?
First off, the conclusion that this hack was conducted by GRU and FSB did not begin with the intelligence community, it first began with CrowdStrike the cyber security firm hired by the DNC to examine their systems and what they discovered back in June.
In the wee hours of June 14, the Washington Post revealed that “Russian government hackers” had penetrated the computer network of the Democratic National Committee. Foreign spies, the Post claimed, had gained access to the DNC’s entire database of opposition research on the presumptive Republican nominee, Donald Trump, just weeks before the Republican Convention. Hillary Clinton said the attack was “troubling.”
It began ominously. Nearly two months earlier, in April, the Democrats had noticed that something was wrong in their networks. Then, in early May, the DNC called in CrowdStrike, a security firm that specializes in countering advanced network threats. After deploying their tools on the DNC’s machines, and after about two hours of work, CrowdStrike found “two sophisticated adversaries” on the Committee’s network. The two groups were well-known in the security industry as “APT 28” and “APT 29.” APT stands for Advanced Persistent Threat—usually jargon for spies.
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CrowdStrike linked both groups to “the Russian government’s powerful and highly capable intelligence services.” APT 29, suspected to be the FSB, had been on the DNC’s network since at least summer 2015. APT 28, identified as Russia’s military intelligence agency GRU, had breached the Democrats only in April 2016, and probably tipped off the investigation. CrowdStrike found no evidence of collaboration between the two intelligence agencies inside the DNC’s networks, “or even an awareness of one by the other,” the firm wrote.
That assessment has not changed in the intervening months.
Crowdstrike: Our firm CrowdStrike actually did catch them in the act. When the DNC hired us back in May we actually deployed our technology, called Falcon, on all of the systems in the corporate network. We actually watched these adversaries for a number of days and weeks while preparing to kick them out.
Wolf: Who were these adversaries, who were these people who were actually doing the hacking of the DNC?
Crowdstrike: Two indépendant working groups that we associate with Russian Intelligence. One of them we associate with GRU, the primary military intelligence agency in Russia. They’re responsible for what they call “Active Measures”, disinformation campaigns such as this. They also responsible for the take-over of Crimea, taking over miliary bases in Crimea, Putin had admitted that these were GRU operatives.
There was a delay until the intelligence agencies came to the same conclusion and ultimately both FBI and CIA concurred that Russia was the source of the hack and that they did it not just to generally disrupt our election but to specifically put their thumb on the scale against Hillary to benefit Trump.
Previously, the FBI had maintained that it didn’t know the true motives behind Russia’s hacks on Democrats, but The Washington Post reports that FBI Director James Comey has now acknowledged that the FBI shares the CIA’s conclusions.
“Earlier this week, I met separately with FBI James Comey and DNI Jim Clapper, and there is strong consensus among us on the scope, nature, and intent of Russian interference in our presidential election,” wrote CIA Director John Brennan in a message to employees cited by the Post.
While the FBI and the CIA both agree that Russia was trying to help Trump win the election, they also believe the Kremlin had other goals in mind, such as undermining the confidence of the American electoral system.
Now the FBI, CIA and other intelligence agencies have not claimed that this hack extended to the actually voting machines or the ballot counting machines. They’ve argued such an effort is too difficult because those systems are not connected to the internet. I argue that view is naive because the U.S. itself managed to get it’s own sabotage malware, Stuxnet, installed on Iranian centerfuge computers without those being on the net, but still such an intrusion hasn’t been detected.
None of these facts have deterred Trump or his surrogate from constantly whining that the Intel community is “out to get them.”
Trump’s former campaign manager, who now serves as a senior advisor, appeared Friday morning on “New Day” ahead of the president-elect’s briefing by intelligence officials, who are expected to identify the Russian officials who fed purloined emails to WikiLeaks.
“Finish the sentence, what is it that we’re trying to know — that Russia is trying to interfere with the election results?” Conway said. “Do you really think that Russia wanted Donald Trump to be elected president?”
Yes. Because they said so.
Russian president Vladimir Putin called for a new era of “fully fledged relations” between his country and the US yesterday after a surprise victory which was applauded in the Russian parliament and prompted speculation that US-imposed sanctions could be lifted.
After an election campaign in which Russia was openly accused of interfering in favour of Donald Trump, Putin congratulated the president-elect on his victory and said Russia was ready to work for better ties.
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Sergei Markov, a pro-Kremlin political analyst, was jubilant at the result and said a Trump presidency would make it more likely the US would agree with Russia on Syria, where the two powers back different sides and Moscow has intervened decisively on behalf of the president, Bashar al-Assad.
Markov also said it would mean less American backing for “the terroristic junta in Ukraine”. He denied allegations of Russian interference in the election, but said “maybe we helped a bit with WikiLeaks.”
But does any of that impact Conway? Not a wit.
Cuomo pressed on, asking why the president-elect refuses to acknowledge evidence that the intelligence community agrees shows Russian involvement in the DNC hacking — but Conway threw her boss a pity party.
“Speaking of disparagement, I really believe there are those out there that are trying to delegitimize his presidency, review the election results — and you know it,” she said.
There it is. Right there. They are literally terrified of anyone questioning the election results. Of considering the impact of allegations that the DNC sandbagged Bernie Sanders — even though they didn’t — and how that may have depressed turnout, or drove them so far against Clinton that even people in the rust belt who had voted for Obama in the previous two elections, voted for Trump this time out. There was lots of “Sanders was robbed” stories.
In its recent leak of 20,000 DNC emails from January 2015 to May 2016, DNC staff discuss how to deal with Bernie Sanders’ popularity as a challenge to Clinton’s candidacy. Instead of treating Sanders as a viable candidate for the Democratic ticket, the DNC worked against him and his campaign to ensure Clinton received the nomination.
One email from DNC Deputy Communications Director Eric Walker to several DNC staffers cites two news articles showing Sanders leading in Rhode Island and the limited number of polling locations in the state: “If she outperforms this polling, the Bernie camp will go nuts and allege misconduct. They’ll probably complain regardless, actually.”
Instead of treating Sanders with impartiality, the DNC exhibits resentful disdain toward him and the thousands of disenfranchised voters he could have brought into the party.
“Wondering if there’s a good Bernie narrative for a story, which is that Bernie never ever had his act together, that his campaign was a mess,” wrote DNC Deputy Communications Director Mark Paustenbach to DNC Communications Director Luis Miranda, in response to backlash over DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz shutting off the Sanders campaign’s access to voter database files
But in the end this griping about Sanders by members of the DNC didn’t cause Bernie to lose.
Nebraska and Washington are part of a pattern. As Sanders fans claim that the Democratic primary system is rigged against their candidate and that Sanders wins when turnout is higher, they fail to point out that Sanders has benefited tremendously from low-turnout caucuses. Indeed, if all the caucuses were primaries, Clinton would be winning the Democratic nomination by an even wider margin than she is now.
He lost because he lost, and I say that as a Bernie voter. He had a good run, he didn’t make it — the DNC didn’t take it away from him even if they didn’t like him.
Conway blamed Obama and Hillary Clinton for the hacks, saying they were so certain Trump would lose that they didn’t seriously address Clapper’s warnings about Russian interference.
“They politicized it,” Conway said, as Cuomo agreed they deserve shame for downplaying the threat. “They politicized it because they didn’t even understand in America what was going to happen in the election.”
Uh, um — that hack was discovered and stopped in June. Clinton didn’t have to wait until Clapper said something in October, the damage was already done.
This is all deflection.
Most of the key questions are answered. Russia implemented the hacks. Russia then crafted a strategic disinformation campaign using information gained by the hacks directed by Putin with the specific goal of impacting our election.
U.S. intelligence officials now believe with "a high level of confidence" that Russian President Vladimir Putin became personally involved in the covert Russian campaign to interfere in the U.S. presidential election, senior U.S. intelligence officials told NBC News.
Two senior officials with direct access to the information say new intelligence shows that Putin personally directed how hacked material from Democrats was leaked and otherwise used. The intelligence came from diplomatic sources and spies working for U.S. allies, the officials said.
So they very clearly tried to impact the results, they tried to change the voters minds about Hillary Clinton in order to benefit Donald Trump. Was that influence enough to change the 10,000 Votes that Hillary lost by in Michigan, the 27,000 she lost by in Wisconsin, or the 68,000 she lost by in Pennsylvania?
Nobody knows the honest answer to that question and I suspect no one ever will. The intelligence agencies aren’t even addressing that issue. However, it’s pretty clear by Trump’s reaction that he’s thinking about that question any time someone brings up the Russia hack.
And that simply because this bruises his paper-thin ego, he’s repeatedly insulted the integrity of our intelligence agencies, including undercover operatives and covert assets overseas — including inside the Kremlin — who are the ultimate sources for the reports of Putin’s direct involvement in this effort.
That has very dangerous ramifications as some intel experts have stated.
“I fear that Trump’s rejection of both the content and the conclusions offered to him by the intelligence community will have a profound chilling effect on the recruitment of new assets, and the willingness of existing assets to continue to provide information,” Carleson writes. “Because, why should someone risk his or her life to provide sensitive information that the world now knows will go unread in our highest office?”
According to the former CIA official, Trump’s disregard for human intelligence has “consequences beyond Trump’s own dearth of information, because once again, it serves to erode the motivation of those who might provide us with information we desperately need—information that may include details of threats to American lives and infrastructure, for example.”
That’s what the downside of this could be, a demoralized and virtually crippled intel apparatus. Is Trump so small a person that he’ll put his own hurt fee fees ahead of protecting the nation?
Well, I guess we’ll find out in a few hours after he finally gets access to the “crown jewels” of this intel.
Then we’ll know, is he underneath it all still an American, or is he only a Trumpian.
The argument that the CIA can’t be trusted now because of the WMD intel 14 years ago is specious on it’s face, which is besides the fact that the intel community doubts and skepticism about Iraqi WMD were totally ignored and buried by the Bush political machine.
The intel wasn’t wrong, they were.
WASHINGTON — In a classified National Intelligence Estimate prepared before the Iraq war, the CIA hedged its judgments about Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction, pointing up the limits of its knowledge.
But in the unclassified version of the NIE — the so-called white paper cited by the Bush administration in making its case for war — those carefully qualified conclusions were turned into blunt assertions of fact, according to the Senate Intelligence Committee's report on prewar intelligence.
The repeated elimination of qualifying language and dissenting assessments of some of the government's most knowledgeable experts gave the public an inaccurate impression of what the U.S. intelligence community believed about the threat Hussein posed to the United States, the committee said.
So the problem then, was politics, not bad intel.
Also the argument that there was no reaction to the Chinese hack of the OPM is wrong as well.
The Chinese government has quietly arrested a handful of hackers at the urging of the U.S. government — an unprecedented step to defuse tensions with Washington at a time when the Obama administration has threatened economic sanctions.
The action came a week or two before President Xi Jinping’s state visit to Washington late last month. The hackers had been identified by U.S. officials as having stolen commercial secrets from U.S. firms to be sold or passed along to Chinese state-run companies.
Would I like for this election to have gone a different way? Certainly, we wouldn’t be in the middle of this fracking discussion for example. But would I like to take the White House away from Trump based on the interference in the election by Russia? Heck, no. That would make the ability of anyone else in the White House untenable. It would be a disaster.
Well, it would be an even greater disaster than this already is.
Friday, Jan 6, 2017 · 10:45:45 PM +00:00 · Frank Vyan Walton
The Unclassified version of the Intel Report on Russia hacking has been released and it makes it quite clear that Russia goal was the discredit Clinton and to elect their preference — Trump.
In "Key Judgments," the report says, "We assess Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the U.S. presidential election. Russia's goals were to undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency. We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump."
The report says that the Russian government tried to help Trump "by discrediting Secretary Clinton." It says that the CIA, the FBI have "high confidence" in this judgment, while the NSA "has moderate confidence." [...]
The report does not offer any assessment about whether the hacking, leaking, and proliferation of fake news stories helped Trump win. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told Congress Thursday that "we have no way of gauging the impact…it had on the choices the electorate made. There's no way for us to gauge that."
Ten minutes after his briefing Trump had this to say.
While Russia, China and other outside groups are consistently trying to break through the cyber infrastructure of our government institution, businesses and organizations including the Democratic National Committee, there was absolutely no effect on the outcome of the election including the effect there was no tampering with voting machines. There were attempts to hack the Republican National Committee, but the RNC had strong hacking defenses and the hackers were unsuccessful.
I have two points 1) you don’t have to hack the voting machines when you’ve already essentially hacked the voters with anti-Clinton propaganda that was distributed via RT and other Kremlin outlets such as Sputnik — much of which was used and parroted word-for-word by Trump and his campaign and 2) the Russians actually did hack the RNC, they just didn't release that information as the report states.
Russia collected on some Republican-affiliated targets but did not conduct a comparable disclosure campaign.
They also collected information on several states and election boards.
So he’s still full of shit, naturally.
In short, he took Door #3, admitted as little as possible, pointing the finger at the DNC for being “too weak” to protect themselves and is now arguing that he’s have a “strong” Cyber-Security Plan in 90 days, never mind the fact that the President already has a Cyber Security Plan with a $19 Billion budget for FY2017.