The Russians Hacked Our Democracy and Everyone Knows it. Anyone Who Denies it is a Useful Idiot, or Working for Putin to Undermine our Democratic Institutions… ? …Or Our Military Industrial Gravy Train.
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Part II — “Sworn to protect us!”
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The Joint Statement, GRIZZLY STEPPE, and the ICA:
There were three official intelligence reports issued by the Obama administration to the public on the Russian hack situation. There was the October Joint Statement from the Department Of Homeland Security and Office of the Director of National Intelligence on Election Security, and the December Joint Analysis Report on GRIZZLY STEPPE. These were the first two but the one receiving the most attention was the January 6, 2017, Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections: The Analytic Process and Cyber Incident Attribution, aka the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA). The ICA is a declassified report intended for public consumption. There is also a classified version. The following are some of its most significant assessments:
We assess with high confidence that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election, the consistent goals of which were to undermine public faith in the US 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.
Moscow’s influence campaign followed a Russian messaging strategy that blends covert intelligence operations — such as cyber activity — with overt efforts by Russian Government agencies, state-funded media, third-party intermediaries, and paid social media users or “trolls.”
We assess with high confidence that Russian military intelligence (General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate or GRU) used the Guccifer 2.0 persona and DCLeaks.com to release US victim data obtained in cyber operations publicly and in exclusives to media outlets.
We assess with high confidence that the GRU relayed material it acquired from the DNC and senior Democratic officials to WikiLeaks….
Russia’s state-run propaganda machine — comprised of its domestic media apparatus, outlets targeting global audiences such as RT and Sputnik, and a network of quasi-government trolls — contributed to the influence campaign by serving as a platform for Kremlin messaging…
RT’s coverage of Secretary Clinton throughout the US presidential campaign was consistently negative and focused on her leaked e-mails and accused her of corruption, poor physical and mental health, and ties to Islamic extremism….
On 6 August, RT published an English- language video called “Julian Assange Special: Do WikiLeaks Have the E-mail That’ll Put Clinton in Prison?” and an exclusive interview with Assange entitled “Clinton and ISIS Funded by the Same Money.” RT’s most popular video on Secretary Clinton, “How 100% of the Clintons’ ‘Charity’ Went to…Themselves,” had more than 9 million views on social media platforms. RT’s most popular English language video about the President-elect, called “Trump Will Not Be Permitted To Win,” featured Assange and had 2.2 million views.
In case you are wondering if I left out the part where they provide evidence for their claims, I didn’t. They forgot to put it in.
June 15, 2016
The CrowdStrike June 15th blog post has been widely referenced and dissected but I don’t know of anyone who has pointed out the following. In the post, Alperovich states:
…we operate under strict confidentiality rules with our customers and cannot reveal publicly any information about these attacks. But on rare occasions, a customer decides to go public with information about their incident and give us permission to share our knowledge of the adversary tradecraft with the broader community and help protect even those who do not happen to be our customers. This story is about one of those cases.
In this particular case, why would that be? According to the Washington Post where we started out, the 2016 Trump Campaign, and Republican PACs were also targeted by Russian hackers but “details on those cases were not available”. In addition, according to the Washington Post, during a May 18th, 2016, Bipartisan Policy Center event, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper stated, “In 2008, Chinese hackers compromised the computer networks of Sens. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.). In 2012, foreign and domestic hackers tried to gain access to the campaign networks of Obama and Mitt Romney (R).”
None of these alleged hack cases were ever rolled out with the grand fanfare of the June 2016 DNC event. A digital hack has the potential to expose the most embarrassing vulnerabilities of any organization, and in the case of the DNC it sure did. For the Democratic National Committee to turn an alleged hack into a major media event, there had better be a good reason. Alperovich seems to suggest the good reason was one of altruism and to share, “knowledge of the adversary tradecraft with the broader community and help protect” anyone else, including Trump and all of the Clintons’ enemies, who might fall victim to the Russian Bear(s). Even to those of us who have never been properly exposed to the inside sausage making of politics but simply payed attention to news during any political campaign, does this scenario pass the smell test? Maybe it would to the most Pollyannaish among us…maybe.
It’s no secret, there was in fact a very good reason to go public quick, get out in front of a major story, and gain control of the narrative in a monumental act of damage control. On June 12th, two days before the hack story burst forth from the Washington Post, WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange, in an ITV interview, announced simply, “We have e-mails relating to Hillary Clinton, pending publication”. Out of all the alleged hacks on Trump, Clinton, Republican PAC, and DNC computers, the only network about which information two days later suddenly became “available” to the Washington Post was the DNC network whose contents would comprise the carefully timed WikiLeaks July 22nd DNC e-mail publication. The Democratic Convention was set to open on the 25th and it was then when the “Russians hacked our democracy” narrative went into high gear as Jennifer Palmieri, Clinton Communications Director and Jake Sullivan, deputy chief of staff, famously “made the rounds”. In a March 2017 New York Times Op-Ed, Palmieri wrote:
At the Democratic convention in Philadelphia last summer, Jake Sullivan and I took to our golf carts one afternoon to make the rounds of the television networks’ tents in the parking lot of the Wells Fargo Center. …we were on a mission to get the press to focus on …the prospect that Russia had not only hacked and stolen emails from the Democratic National Committee, but that it had done so to help Donald Trump and hurt Hillary Clinton
We didn’t want her to talk too much about Russia because it wasn’t what voters were telling us they cared about…At the same time, we understood the issue would never rise to the front of voters’ minds if we weren’t driving attention to it.
That is quite a mouthful. Palmieri openly admits she and Sullivan were trying to plant a story, and makes no attempt to hide a clear case of collusion between Washington elites and mainstream media to drive the latest self-serving narrative in complete opposition to “what voters were telling us they cared about”. Most importantly though, the new claim had grown from Russians hacked DNC to gain intel on Trump, to Russians hacked DNC to help Trump beat Hillary. A quick look in the Washington Post and New York Times search functions shows the new Trump/Russia narrative shows up in both their pages only at the time and after the Democratic convention, not before. And, this coming almost three months before the Joint Statement. I wonder what other “intelligence” DHS and ODNI picked up from Palmieri and Sullivan?
As already implied, apparently the Clinton folks thought they needed more than just a media push to drive the ruse into the minds of voters. They needed some intelligence “credibility” and knew just where to get it. After the convention, former George W. Bush advisor, Obama deputy CIA director, and Benghazi talking points editor (over which he was forced to resign), our old friend from Part I, Michael Morell, was happy to comply as he quit his job as a CBS news analyst to become the Clinton CIA director to-be.
Inserted in his August 5th New York Times endorsement of Hillary, Morell stated, “Mr. Putin had recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation.” Morell offered no evidence or even the slightest justification for the claim, but he didn’t need to. He shouldn’t be expected to offer evidence, in fact he “couldn’t”, and how convenient is that? Owing to his connections to the “intelligence community” and his reputation as a “trusted public servant”, (which would be easy to manufacture with a forgetful public and a compliant press), not to mention the necessity of protecting “sources and methods” contained in classified material, we are to take him at his word. This narrative is so thoroughly drilled into our heads, it simply goes without saying, and that is a good thing if you are say, James Comey, or James Clapper, or the anointed first woman President to be, in need of some serious cover from a scandal involving some real election interference involving say, Bernie Sanders?
All this, of course brings me back to the ICA…
Its entire premise is dependent upon enough Americans being forgetful enough to trust “public servants” who have long proven themselves liars. (If I haven’t quite made that case yet, keep reading.) It is a bizarre document. It offers no evidence of anything but instead attempts to use bits of information that are evidence of nothing and available to anyone, yet offers them as such.
It devotes almost seven full pages to complaining about Russia Today (RT) America, an official Russian news channel. Its authors almost seem personally offended that anyone would ever say anything bad about the U.S. government or Hillary Clinton.
RT’s coverage of Secretary Clinton throughout the US presidential campaign was consistently negative and focused on her leaked e-mails and accused her of corruption, poor physical and mental health, and ties to Islamic extremism.
Never mind there exists ample evidence of at least three, the fact that RT covered them is somehow evidence that Putin ordered a hack on the DNC server?
Also:
“In an effort to highlight the alleged “lack of democracy” in the United States, RT broadcast, hosted, and advertised third-party candidate debates and ran reporting supportive of the political agenda of these candidates. The RT hosts asserted that the US two-party system does not represent the views of at least one-third of the population and is a “sham.”
Democrats and Republicans have conspired to keep third party candidates out of general election debates for the past 40 odd years. Here we have the “intelligence community” effectively endorsing tactics used by political parties to limit public debate and telling the American public essentially to either accept it or be a Russian stooge. See what I mean by bizarre?
And as expected the ICA contains the following statement:
The Intelligence Community rarely can publicly reveal the full extent of its knowledge or the precise bases for its assessments, as the release of such information would reveal sensitive sources or methods and imperil the ability to collect critical foreign intelligence in the future.
Now, if anyone feels like responding with, “Of course, intelligence officials have to keep secret classified material to protect the lives of assets in the field, protect ordinary Americans and our democratic institutions from our enemies!” You’re either reading the wrong article or you might be willing to consider the following:
Absolutely, intelligence officials need to keep secrets to stay out of federal prison, but what did the 2010–11 Chelsea Manning sourced publications by WikiLeaks reveal? In July 2013 The Guardian, reported testimony to Private Manning’s sentencing hearing by U.S. Brigadier General Robert Carr (no relation to Jeffery Carr), which is reflected in the article’s headline, “Bradley Manning leak did not result in deaths by enemy forces…”.
Also, the WikiLeaks short film, “Collateral Murder” made from Manning leaked video of the July 12, 2007 Baghdad airstrike, depicts up close, one of myriad examples of the U.S. military, not fighting but rather creating more of “our enemies”, (In this case murdering Al Jazeera journalists) thus ensuring full employment for even more “public servants” who are also sworn to secrecy about these exact types of atrocities. Anytime, anywhere, I will call the above argument exactly what it is…Bullshit.
In a May 2003 article for The New Yorker, two months after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Seymour Hersh wrote:
They call themselves, self-mockingly, the Cabal — a small cluster of policy advisers and analysts now based in the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans [OSP]. In the past year, according to former and present Bush Administration officials, their operation, which was conceived by Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, has brought about a crucial change of direction in the American intelligence community. These advisers and analysts, who began their work in the days after September 11, 2001, have produced a skein of intelligence reviews that have helped to shape public opinion and American policy toward Iraq.
Formed in September of 2002, the purpose of this special pentagon unit was charged by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to supply senior George W. Bush administration officials with intelligence on Iraq. In the process, according to Hersh, they also managed to intimidate and out maneuver the key officials in the CIA and the DIA.
Only a month later, under the label of “The Intelligence Community”, the declassified version of the National Intelligence Estimate — Iraq’s continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction was released to the public. The NIE asserted the existence of Saddam Hussein’s WMD programs and was used to justify the invasion of Iraq in March of 2003. The classified version of the same document, declassified in 2014, contains the “Alternative View” presented by the Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence and Research (INR), stating:
The activities we have detected do not, however, add up to a compelling case that Iraq is currently pursuing what INR would consider to be an integrated and comprehensive approach to acquire nuclear weapons.
This INR assessment was not included in the version of the report the public was allowed to see. The public only saw those portions supporting the Bush war agenda.
More recently…
…We have seventeen, seventeen intelligence agencies, civilian and military who have all concluded that these espionage attacks…come from the highest levels of the Kremlin…I am not quoting myself! I am quoting seventeen, seventeen intel/ You doubt? Seventeen military and civilian agencies? Well, he’d rather believe Vladimir Putin than the military and civilian intelligence professionals who are sworn to protect us! — Hillary Clinton in final Presidential debate, October 19, 2016.
The ICA was not an assessment by “Seventeen intelligence agencies… who have all concluded…”, and not even three agencies as the logos on the ICA cover page would suggest but, according to former Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper in testimony on May 8th, 2017 before the Senate Judiciary Committee, “The two dozen or so analysts for this task were hand-picked, seasoned experts from each of the contributing agencies.” Hand-picked by Clapper by what criteria we are not told, but no matter, these are the professionals who are, “sworn to protect us” like Clapper himself.
Okay, but let’s not forget this is the same James Clapper who testified in March of 2013, before Congress that the NSA was not collecting data on American citizens and in June shown, by Edward Snowden’s revelations to the Guardian and the Washington Post, to have lied to Congress. Clapper was never prosecuted, but if it’s any consolation, he wrote a non-admission apology to Dianne Feinstein, the contents of which are… I won’t swear twice in the same article. Given what we know about Clapper, and the proven propensity for the U.S. intelligence apparatus to lie to the public in advancement of a political or military agenda, with what credibility can it be possibly be claimed that in hand-picking the analysts, every assessment of the ICA was not also pre-determined, or if you like, “hand-picked?”
Just one more thing, no member of the “seventeen intelligence agencies” is “sworn to protect us”. All members of the intelligence community, both military and civilian swear an oath to “…support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic….” So, on the subject of lying to congress about NSA mass surveillance, that Constitution contains the Bill of Rights which contains the Fourth Amendment which reads:
“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized”.
In thinking about the oath to protect the Constitution, in particular the word, “enemy” as it relates to “domestic”, something more than a little crazy comes to light. Since the fruits of illegal mass surveillance are not enjoyed by NSA alone but shared throughout the entire “intelligence community”, and given the above quote is the law of United States, at it’s most fundamental, superseding any legislation, regulation, or executive order, that means every intelligence official swears an oath to protect the Constitution, against every other intelligence official in the agencies.