Fabricating the Russian DNC Hack by Larry C Johnson

I will make this very simple. The DNC emails that ultimately were published on Wikileaks likely originated with a DNC staffer, Seth Rich. It was not the Russians. The decision to blame the Russians was an intelligence construct that was concocted once U.S. and British intelligence officials plotting against Donald Trump realized that Rich had downloaded the emails and was communicating with Julian Assange and his cohorts.

Here are the facts:

1. It was 29 April 2016, when the DNC claims it became aware its servers had been penetrated. No claim yet about who was responsible.
2. According to CrowdStrike founder, Dimitri Alperovitch, his company first supposedly detected the Russians mucking around inside the DNC server on 6 May 2016. A CrowdStrike intelligence analyst reportedly told Alperovitch that:
   1. Falcon had identified not one but two Russian intruders: Cozy Bear, a group CrowdStrike’s experts believed was affiliated with the FSB, Russia’s answer to the CIA; and Fancy Bear, which they had linked to the GRU, Russian military intelligence.
3. The Wikileaks data shows that the last message copied from the DNC network is dated Wed, 25 May 2016 08:48:35.
4. 10 June 2016–CrowdStrike waited until 10 June 2016 to take concrete steps to clean up the DNC network. Alperovitch told Esquire’s Vicky Ward that: ‘Ultimately, the teams decided it was necessary to replace the software on every computer at the DNC. Until the network was clean, secrecy was vital. On the afternoon of Friday, June 10, all DNC employees were instructed to leave their laptops in the office.”
5. On June 14, 2016, Ellen Nakamura, a Washington Post reporter who had been briefed by computer security company hired by the DNC—Crowdstrike–, wrote:
   1. Russian government hackers penetrated the computer network of the Democratic National Committee and gained access to the entire database of opposition research on GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump, according to committee officials and security experts who responded to the breach.
   2. The intruders so thoroughly compromised the DNC’s system that they also were able to read all email and chat traffic, said DNC officials and the security experts.
   3. The intrusion into the DNC was one of several targeting American political organizations. The networks of presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were also targeted by Russian spies, as were the computers of some Republican political action committees, U.S. officials said. But details on those cases were not available.
6. 15 June, 2016, an internet “personality” self-described as Guccifer 2.0 surfaces and claims to be responsible for the hacks but denies being Russian. However, the meta data in the documents posted by Guccifer 2.0 appear to be deliberately crafted to show “Russian” involvement.
7. The DNC emails that were released on July 22, 2016 by Wikileaks covered the period from January 2015 thru 25 May 2016.

The public has been sold a phenomenal lie–i.e., that a top-notch cyber security company discovered on May 6, 2016 that the Russians were in the DNC network but did not act to remove the Russians until 35 days later. Crowdstrike’s behavior defies common sense–who waits more than a month to shutdown a network that you claim was penetrated by a foreign power? No serious, competent cyber security expert would countenance such misconduct.

There are other critical facts that are not readily recognized by  most pundits pontificating on the faux-Russian hack. One of the most important of these is understanding that U.S. and British intelligence are monitoring and recording every communication going into and out of Wikileaks. Julian Assange started getting this special treatment after he and his crew started publishing Chelsea Manning’s classified document dump and helped Edward Snowden escape the clutches of U.S. law enforcement. Anyone who communicated with Julian Assange and/or Wikileaks was recorded.

Which brings me to Seth Rich. I will not speculate about Seth Rich’s murder. Was it a robbery or was it because of his role in downloading the DNC emails from the server and passing them to Wikileaks? I do not know.

But we do know the following:

Seth Rich was murdered early on the 10th of July 2016. In reviewing the media coverage of the DNC “hack” during June and July the name of Seth Rich does not surface even as a minor concern.

On August 9, 2016, Wikileak’s Julian Assange announced via Twitter “a $20,000 reward for information leading to a conviction in Rich’s killing on July 10 in the 2100 block of Flagler Place NW.” Assange subsequently discussed the murder of Seth Rich during an interview with Dutch TV:

WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange suggested that the Democratic National Committee staffer shot dead last month in Washington, DC, was killed because he was a “source.”

“Whistleblowers go to significant efforts to get us material and often very significant risks. As a 27-year-old, works for the DNC, was shot in the back, murdered just a few weeks ago for unknown reasons as he was walking down the street in Washington,” he told Dutch TV, referring to Seth Rich, who was gunned down in the early morning hours of July 10 while walking to his apartment in Bloomingdale.

The interviewer followed up by asking, “That was just a robbery, I believe. Wasn’t it?”

The WikiLeaks founder cryptically replied, “No, there’s no finding … I’m suggesting that our sources take risks.”

Assange clearly refers to Seth as one of Wikileak’s sources. Those were his words, not mine.

There is corroborating testimony from Ellen Ratner, whose brother, a lawyer, represented Julian Assange. Ellen appeared on November 9th, 2016, at an Embry Riddle University symposium and said the following:

Ellen Ratner:By the way, as an fyi, I met with Wikileaks. I spent three hours with Julian Assange on Saturday at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. Well, I did. One thing he did say was the leaks were not from, they were not from the Russians, they were an internal source from the Hillary Campaign. From somebody who knew Hillary, an enemy. He does not think they’re from Russians. And he says Russia should not get credit for something Wikileaks should have gotten credit for.

And then there is a letter from the National Security Agency. In response to a FOIA request filed in November 2017 by attorney Ty Clevenger on behalf of his client, Edward Butowsky, Clevenger requested any information regarding Seth Rich and and Julian Assange. The NSA informed Clevenger in a letter dated 4 October 2018 that:

Your request has been processed under the provisions of the FOIA. Fifteen documents (32 pages) responsive to your request have been reviewed by this Agency as required by the FOIA and have found to be currently and properly classified in accordance with Executive Order 13526. These documents meet the criteria for classification as set forth in Subparagraph (c) of Section 1.4 and remains classified TOP SECRET and SECRET.

Some critics insist this proves nothing because Clevenger’s request was “overly broad.” But I have confirmed through a knowledgeable source that communications between Seth Rich and Wikileaks are in the hands of the U.S. intelligence community.

The targeted collection against Wikileaks revealed to U.S. and British intelligence agencies that Seth Rich had emails and was working a deal to put them in the hands of Julian Assange. Now comes the supposition. I cannot prove at this time that the Crowdstrike story about Russian hacking was cooked up after the 25th of May, but I can prove, based on the public claims by Crowdstrike’s CEO, that no action was taken to stop Russians from spearphising until the 10th of June. That is a sixteen day gap from the time the emails were taken until Crowdstrike supposedly took action. But there is no evidence to support the spearphising hypothesis.

The final nail in the coffin of the Russian DNC Hack hoax is the meta-data in the emails posted on Wikileaks. If the Russians had actually “entered” the network as claimed by Crowdstrike, then the emails would have been removed over the internet. Remember, the culprits reportedly were “Fancy Bear” and “Cozy Bear.” But the meta data tells a different story.

Bill Binney, a former Technical Director of the National Security Agency, and I co-authored a piece that appeared in February 2019. Put succinctly, the meta-data in the DNC emails on Wikileaks shows that those messages were downloaded onto a physical device, such as a thumb drive. Bill and I made the following key points:

Special Counsel Mueller declared that the emails were obtained via a “spearphising” attack:

In 2016, officials in Unit 26165 began spearphishing volunteers and employees of the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton, including the campaign’s chairman. Through that process, officials in this unit were able to steal the usernames and passwords for numerous individuals and use those credentials to steal email content and hack into other computers. They also were able to hackinto the computer networks of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) through these spearphishing techniques to steal emails and documents,covertly monitor the computer activity of dozens of employees, and implant hundreds of files of malicious computer code to steal passwords and maintain access to these networks.

If the DNC network actually was penetrated by a spearphising attack, i.e., an internet based hack of the DNC computer network, then the National Security Agency would have that evidence. The technical systems to accomplish this task have been in place since 2002. The NSA had an opportunity to make it clear that there was irrefutable proof of Russian meddling, particularly with regard to the DNC hack, when it signed on to the January 2017 “Intelligence Community Assessment,” regarding Russian interference in the 2016 Presidential election. They made no such claim.

The NSA is still collecting the full content of U.S. domestic e-mail, without a warrant. We know this because of the highly detailed information contained in the documents leaked by former NSA-contractor, Edward Snowden. The communications collected include the full content and associated metadata of phone calls, e-mail, text messages, and web queries performed by almost all United States citizens. (Metadata consists of information about other data. For e-mail, it would include information such as the name of the sender and recipient; the date and time it was sent; and the internet service provider used to send the message.)

These records are collected inside the United States, as well as at overseas locations. The data is then stored in data centers located at Fort Meade, Maryland; Bluffdale, Utah; and at other sites in the United States. Since 2001, NSA collection has expanded to collect everything on the fiber Communications inside the US. This is achieved within the “Upstream” NSA Program. This program includes subprograms for each communications company assisting them.

An examination of the Wikileaks DNC files shows they were created on 23 and 25 May and 26 August respectively. The fact that they appear in a FAT system format indicates the data was transfered to a storage device, such as a thumb drive.

How can you prove this? The truth lies in the “last modified” time stamps on the Wikileaks files. Every single one of these time stamps end in even numbers. If you are not familiar with the FAT file system, you need to understand that when a date is stored under this system the data rounds the time to the nearest even numbered second.

Bill examined 500 DNC email files stored on Wikileaks and found that all 500 files ended in an even number—2, 4, 6, 8 or 0. If a system other than FAT had been used, there would have been an equal probability of the time stamp ending with an odd number. But that is not the case with the data stored on the Wikileaks site. All end with an even number.

When you consider this information in its entirety there is an enormous amount of evidence that implicates Seth Rich as the source for the DNC emails supplied to Wikileaks. There is no evidence–just assertions by Robert Mueller and the Intelligence Community–that Russian operatives spearphised their way into the DNC network. Let me repeat that–there is not one shred of evidence provided by either Robert Mueller or the U.S. Intelligence Community to support their claim that Russia was behind the DNC hack.

As an old fan of Dragnet, that show’s punchline remains my guiding principle–just the facts. The facts surrounding the so-called DNC hack point to an inside job. Not a bunch of Russian intel operatives.