Does it have Cooties? A contagious disease? What is it? Many people don’t realize that the Democrats refused to let the FBI look at their servers as part of their Russian hacking investigation, Instead, the FBI relied on a report, paid for by the DNC and prepared by a company that in a different case was caught lying about Russian despot Vladimir Putin.
During the now infamous Helsinki press conference, President Trump asked similar questions:
You have groups that are wondering why the FBI never took the server. Why haven’t they taken the server? Why was the FBI told to leave the office of the democratic national committee? I’ve been wondering that. I’ve been asking that for months and months and I’ve been tweeting it out and calling it out on social media. Where is the server? I want to know, where is the server and what is the server saying
He wasn’t saying the server was missing but was asking why the server data was never examined by the FBI.
In January 2017 Eric Walker, the DNC’s deputy communications director told Buzzfeed:
“The DNC had several meetings with representatives of the FBI’s Cyber Division and its Washington (DC) Field Office, the Department of Justice’s National Security Division, and U.S. Attorney’s Offices, and it responded to a variety of requests for cooperation, but the FBI never requested access to the DNC’s computer servers.”
But a senior FBI law enforcement official called B.S. on Walker and told Wired,
“The FBI repeatedly stressed to DNC officials the necessity of obtaining direct access to servers and data, only to be rebuffed until well after the initial compromise had been mitigated…This left the FBI no choice but to rely upon a third party for information. These actions caused significant delays and inhibited the FBI from addressing the intrusion earlier.”
Both the FBI and the Democratic Party agreed that the crime-fighting agency based its decision to blame Russians for hacking into the DNC computers on a report commissioned by the DNC and generated by a company called CrowdStrike. Yes, our intelligence agencies agree it was all the Russians fault. But can one trust the veracity of that determination when the FBI relied exclusively on information from private digital forensics company Crowdstrike who were being paid by the Democratic Party? Doesn’t anyone besides the President (and me) wonder what the Democrats are hiding and why the FBI allowed the Democrats to get away with obstructing their investigation?
Per the VOA report:
U.S. cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike has revised and retracted statements it used to buttress claims of Russian hacking during last year’s American presidential election campaign. The shift followed a VOA report that the company misrepresented data published by an influential British think tank.
In December, CrowdStrike said it found evidence that Russians hacked into a Ukrainian artillery app, contributing to heavy losses of howitzers in Ukraine’s war with pro-Russian separatists.
VOA reported Tuesday that the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), which publishes an annual reference estimating the strength of world armed forces, disavowed the CrowdStrike report and said it had never been contacted by the company.
Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense also has stated that the combat losses and hacking never happened.
CrowdStrike was first to link hacks of Democratic Party computers to Russian actors last year, but some cybersecurity experts have questioned its evidence. The company has come under fire from some Republicans who say charges of Kremlin meddling in the election are overblown.
After CrowdStrike released its Ukraine report, company co-founder Dmitri Alperovitch claimed it provided added evidence of Russian election interference. In both hacks, he said, the company found malware used by “Fancy Bear,” a group with ties to Russian intelligence agencies.
CrowdStrike’s claims of heavy Ukrainian artillery losses were widely circulated in U.S. media.
On Thursday, CrowdStrike walked back key parts of its Ukraine report.
The company removed language that said Ukraine’s artillery lost 80 percent of the Soviet-era D-30 howitzers, which used aiming software that purportedly was hacked. Instead, the revised report cites figures of 15 to 20 percent losses in combat operations, attributing the figures to IISS.
The company who the DNC and FBI relied on not only made up a problem that didn’t exist but then blamed it on Putin’s Russia. Shouldn’t that call into question the entire premise that it was the Russians who hacked into the DNC?
Now I am not suggesting that Putin is a boy scout, he is a despicable tyrant. Was the report commissioned purely for campaign purposes? Based on the fact that the company has close ties to the Obama team, is friends with Hillary Clinton, and connected to Ukrainian oligarch Victor Pinchuk (another friend of the DNC), can we really believe the report was done without DNC input? Did DNC members direct Crowdstrike toward the Russians, which the company already has a beef with? And if everything was above board—why does the party still refuse to discuss why the server is a secret?
While appearing on CNN, DNC boss the foul-mouthed Tom Perez refused to directly answer questions about FBI access to the party’s servers that were allegedly hacked by Russians. Perez continued to maintain that it was all just a distraction and the DNC cooperated with the FBI
All the questions above need to be answered, but no one is really looking into it which gives people the same feeling Marcellus had in the first act of Hamlet when he told Horatio “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark”