On the Media roots podcast this morning, Robby Martin, (that's Abby Martin's
brother), pointed out that no one is upset by the collusion between the Trump
administration and countries other than Russia who are involved with ethnic
genocide like Israel, or Saudi Arabia which is bombing and starving Yemenis to
death. There is trade in weapons, money changing hands, and those two
governments have tremendous influence over our elections and our government.
But they are seen as US allies, not adversaries. Putin is no worse than the
leadeers in those countries. The US began adding to NATO in the 90's,
surrounding Russia with adversarial countries. Why? Communism was dead. The
cold War was theoretically over. Friedman and his friends from the Chicago
School of Economics had performed shock therapy on the Russian economy and
allowed the oligarches to thrive. But Hillary Clinton and her State Department
was gunning for them in 2014. If you read mainstream press and watch TV and you
trust The New Yorker and even, many of The Nation articles, and you've never
read anything else, and then you are terrorized by Trump and his ilk, you end
up being completely brainwashed. Seymour Hersh, Robert Perry, Chris Hedges,
people who were respected mainstream reporters 30 and 40 years ago, are
completely marginalized.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Sunday, February 18, 2018 10:17 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Is Donald Trump a Traitor?
James Risen claims that we have forgotten who Father Coughlin and General Edwin
Walker are. Maybe so, but not all of us. These loud mouthed promoters of the
ugliest side of Capitalism, sneered at, and trashed everything that was decent.
Donald Trump fits well in such sour-mouthed company.
Beyond that, I would suggest to James Risen that he look past the Russian
influence on the last presidential election, and look instead to the Mega
International Corporations. As these giant International Corporations increase
their world-wide influence, and with no particular loyalty to national
boundaries or governments, and by making it easier to dump billions of dollars
into buying people favorable to the Corporate interests, these Corporate
cancers are the real threat to democracy and to all nations on Planet Earth.
By allowing ourselves to be manipulated, we are being dragged pell mell down a
road toward a world dominated by huge conglomerates. It will not end in Peace.
Instead of warring nations, we will pledge our loyalties to one corporation or
another, and continue the slaughter of innocent people.
Carl Jarvis
On 2/17/18, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Is Donald Trump a Traitor?
By James Risen, The Intercept
17 February 18
Americans must live with the uncertainty of not knowing whether Trump
has the best interests of the United States or those of Russia at heart.
I find it hard to write about Donald Trump.
It is not that he is a complicated subject. Quite the opposite. It is
that everything about him is so painfully obvious. He is a low-rent
racist, a shameless misogynist, and an unbalanced narcissist. He is an
unrelenting liar and a two-bit white identity demagogue. Lest anyone
forget these things, he goes out of his way each day to remind us of them.
At the end of the day, he is certain to be left in the dustbin of
history, alongside Father Coughlin and Gen. Edwin Walker. (Exactly –
you don’t remember them, either.)
What more can I add?
Unfortunately, another word also describes him: president. The fact
that such an unstable egomaniac occupies the White House is the
greatest threat to the national security of the United States in modern
history.
Which brings me to the only question about Donald Trump that I find
really
interesting: Is he a traitor?
Did he gain the presidency through collusion with Russian President
Vladimir Putin?
One year after Trump took office, it is still unclear whether the
president of the United States is an agent of a foreign power. Just
step back and think about that for a moment.
His 2016 campaign is the subject of an ongoing federal inquiry that
could determine whether Trump or people around him worked with Moscow
to take control of the U.S. government. Americans must now live with
the uncertainty of not knowing whether the president has the best
interests of the United States or those of the Russian Federation at
heart.
Most pundits in Washington now recoil at any suggestion that the
Trump-Russia story is really about treason. They all want to say it’s
about something else – what, they aren’t quite sure. They are afraid
to use serious words. They are in the business of breaking down the
Trump-Russia narrative into a long series of bite-sized, incremental
stories in which the gravity of the overall case often gets lost. They
seem to think that treason is too much of a conversation-stopper, that
it interrupts the flow of cable television and Twitter. God forbid you
might upset the right wing! (And the left wing, for that matter.)
But if a presidential candidate or his lieutenants secretly work with
a foreign government that is a longtime adversary of the United States
to manipulate and then win a presidential election, that is almost a
textbook definition of treason.
In Article 3, Section 3, the U.S. Constitution states that “treason
against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against
them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.”
Based on that provision in the Constitution, U.S. law – 18 U.S. Code §
2381 – states that “[w]hoever, owing allegiance to the United States,
levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid
and comfort within the United States or elsewhere” is guilty of
treason. Those found guilty of this high crime “shall suffer death, or
shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this
title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any
office under the United States.”
Now look at the mandate given to former FBI Director Robert Mueller
when he was appointed special counsel by Deputy Attorney General Rod
Rosenstein, who was acting in place of Attorney General Jeff Sessions,
who had recused himself because of his role in the Trump campaign and
the controversy surrounding his own meetings with the Russian
ambassador to the United States.
On May 17, 2017, Rosenstein issued a letter stating that he was
appointing a special counsel to “ensure a full and thorough
investigation of the Russian government’s efforts to interfere in the
2016 presidential election.” He added that Mueller’s mandate was to
investigate “any links and/or coordination between the Russian
government and individuals associated with the campaign of President
Donald Trump; and any matters that arose or may arise directly from
the investigation.” Rosenstein noted that “[i]f the Special Counsel
believes it is necessary and appropriate, the Special Counsel is
authorized to prosecute federal crimes arising from the investigation
of these matters.”
How closely aligned is Mueller’s mandate with the legal definition of
treason? That boils down to the rhetorical differences between giving
“aid and comfort, in the United States or elsewhere” to “enemies” of
the United States and “any links and/or coordination” between the
Russian government and Trump campaign aides related to “the Russian
government’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.”
Sounds similar to me.
As a practical matter, the special counsel is highly unlikely to
pursue treason charges against Trump or his associates. Treason is
vaguely defined in the law and very difficult to prove. To the extent
that it is defined – as providing aid and comfort to an “enemy” of the
United States – the question might come down to whether Russia is
legally considered America’s “enemy.”
Russia may not meet the legal definition of an “enemy,” but it is
certainly an adversary of the United States. It would make perfect
sense for Russian President and de facto dictator Vladimir Putin to
use his security services to conduct a covert operation to influence
American politics to Moscow’s advantage. Such a program would fall
well within the acceptable norms of great power behavior. After all,
it is the kind of covert intelligence program the United States has
conducted regularly against other nations – including Russia.
Throughout the Cold War, the CIA and the KGB were constantly engaged
in such secret intelligence battles. The KGB had a nickname for the
CIA: glavnyy vrag or “the main enemy.” In 2003, I co-authored a book
called “The Main Enemy” with Milt Bearden, a retired CIA officer who
had been chief of the CIA’s Soviet/Eastern European division when the
Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed. The book was about
the intelligence wars between the CIA and the KGB.
Today’s cyber-spy wars are just the latest version of “The Great
Game,” the wonderfully romantic name for the secret intelligence
battles between the Russian and British empires for control of Central
Asia in the 19th century.
Russia, the United States, and other nations engage in such covert
intelligence games all the time – whether they are “enemies” or simply
rivals.
In fact, evidence of the connections between Trump’s bid for the White
House and Russian ambitions to manipulate the 2016 U.S. election keeps
piling up.
Throughout late 2016 and early 2017, a series of reports from the U.S.
intelligence community and other government agencies underlined and
reinforced nearly every element of the Russian hacking narrative,
including the Russian preference for Trump. The reports were notable
in part because their findings exposed the agencies to criticism from
Trump and his supporters and put them at odds with Trump’s public
dismissals of reported Russian attempts to help him get elected, which he has
called “fake news.”
In addition, a series of details has emerged through unofficial
channels that seems to corroborate these authorized assessments. A
classified NSA document obtained by The Intercept last year states
that Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU, played a role in
the Russian hack of the 2016 American election. In August, a Russian
hacker confessed to hacking the Democratic National Committee under
the supervision of an officer in Russia’s Federal Security Service, or
FSB, who has separately been accused of spying for the U.S. And Dutch
intelligence service AIVD has reportedly given the FBI significant
inside information about the Russian hack of the Democratic Party.
On February 16, just hours after this column was published, the
special counsel announced indictments of 13 Russians and three Russian
entities for meddling in the U.S. election. The special counsel
accused them of intervening to help Trump and damage the campaign of
Hillary Clinton. The indictments mark the first time Mueller has
brought charges against any Russians in his ongoing probe.
Given all this, it seems increasingly likely that the Russians have
pulled off the most consequential covert action operation since
Germany put Lenin on a train back to Petrograd in 1917.
There are four important tracks to follow in the Trump-Russia story.
First, we must determine whether there is credible evidence for the
underlying premise that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Trump
win.
Second, we must figure out whether Trump or people around him worked
with the Russians to try to win the election. Next, we must scrutinize
the evidence to understand whether Trump and his associates have
sought to obstruct justice by impeding a federal investigation into
whether Trump and Russia colluded. A fourth track concerns whether
Republican leaders are now engaged in a criminal conspiracy to
obstruct justice through their intense and ongoing efforts to discredit
Mueller’s probe.
This, my first column for The Intercept, will focus on the first track
of the Trump-Russia narrative. I will devote separate columns to each
of the other tracks in turn.
The evidence that Russia intervened in the election to help Trump win
is already compelling, and it grows stronger by the day.
There can be little doubt now that Russian intelligence officials were
behind an effort to hack the DNC’s computers and steal emails and
other information from aides to Hillary Clinton as a means of damaging
her presidential campaign. Once they stole the correspondence, Russian
intelligence officials used cutouts and fronts to launder the emails
and get them into the bloodstream of the U.S. press. Russian
intelligence also used fake social media accounts and other tools to
create a global echo chamber both for stories about the emails and for
anti-Clinton lies dressed up to look like news.
To their disgrace, editors and reporters at American news
organizations greatly enhanced the Russian echo chamber, eagerly
writing stories about Clinton and the Democratic Party based on the
emails, while showing almost no interest during the presidential
campaign in exactly how those emails came to be disclosed and
distributed. The Intercept itself has faced such accusations. The hack
was a much more important story than the content of the emails
themselves, but that story was largely ignored because it was so easy for
journalists to write about Clinton campaign chair John Podesta.
To anyone who has studied the history of the KGB, particularly during
the Cold War, the attack on the Clinton campaign and the Democratic
Party during the 2016 U.S. election looks like the contemporary
cyber-descendant of countless analog KGB propaganda efforts. Back in
the 1970s and 1980s, the KGB frequently engaged in ambitious
disinformation campaigns that were designed to sow suspicion of the
United States in the developing world. The KGB’s so-called “active
measures” programs would use international front organizations,
cutouts, and sometimes unwitting enablers in the press to disseminate
their anti-American propaganda.
The most infamous and dangerously effective KGB disinformation
campaign of the Cold War was known as Operation Infektion. It was a
secret effort to convince people in developing countries that the
United States had created the HIV/AIDS virus.
In 1983, a newspaper in India printed what purported to be a letter
from an American scientist saying the virus had been developed by the
Pentagon. The letter went on to suggest that the U.S. was moving its
experiments to Pakistan, India’s archenemy. Meanwhile, the KGB got an
East German scientist to spread misinformation supporting the
Moscow-backed conspiracy theory that the U.S. was behind the virus.
While these lies never penetrated the U.S. mainstream, they
nonetheless spread insidiously through much of the world.
Vladimir Putin was a KGB officer during the 1980s when the KGB was
conducting this disinformation campaign. He was stationed in East
Germany in the late 1980s, and there is a good chance he knew about
the East German component of Operation Infektion.
After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the KGB was broken up and
its successor agencies renamed. But the KGB never really went away.
Instead, it underwent an extensive rebranding that did little to
change its culture and traditions.
The KGB’s First Chief Directorate, its foreign intelligence service,
was renamed the SVR. Like its predecessor agency, it was still housed
in the First Chief Directorate’s headquarters in the Yasenevo District
of Moscow, which was known as the “Russian Langley” for its
similarities to CIA headquarters. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, I
met many former KGB officials in Moscow, including Leonid Shebarshin,
the last leader of the First Chief Directorate, who was running the
agency in 1991 when communist hardliners launched a coup against
Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. By the time I met Shebarshin, he
was retired and running an “economic intelligence” firm out of an
office in Moscow’s old Dynamo Stadium, the home of the KGB’s soccer
team. A mural on his office wall depicted scenes from the Battle of
Stalingrad and the Bolshevik Revolution, signaling his immersion in
the Soviet era.
After the Soviet collapse, the KGB’s Second Chief Directorate, which
handled spy-hunting and counterintelligence, along with other
directorates that handled the KGB’s internal police state functions,
were bundled into a new organization known as the FSB, the Federal
Security Service. I conducted extensive interviews with one of the
most legendary spy-hunters of the Second Chief Directorate, Rem
Krassilnikov, a man whose personal history showed how entwined Russian
intelligence still was with its Soviet past.
His
first name, Rem, was an acronym for Revolutsky Mir – the “World Revolution”
Soviet leaders had longed to bring about. His father had been a
general in the NKVD, the Stalinist predecessor to the KGB, and
whenever I talked to him, Krassilnikov made it clear that he still
considered the United States his adversary. He proudly took me on a
tour of sites around Moscow where he had arrested American spies.
No one even bothered to rename the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence
agency. During the Cold War, the KGB considered the GRU a lower-class
cousin, much as the CIA has always looked down upon the Pentagon’s
Defense Intelligence Agency. Today, the GRU has added cyber and
hacking capabilities like those of the National Security Agency. The
GRU was involved in the Russian hack of the 2016 American election,
according to a classified NSA document obtained by The Intercept, yet
it still operates in the shadows of the more influential FSB and SVR.
Russian intelligence was briefly weakened following the collapse of
the Soviet Union, but under Putin – the first KGB man to run the
country since Yuri Andropov died in 1984 – it has come roaring back.
During his KGB career, Putin served in both the First and Second Chief
Directorates. One of his key formative experiences occurred in 1989,
when the Berlin Wall fell.
Putin was stationed in East Germany at the time, and his biographers
have written that the personal humiliation he felt watching the Soviet
empire collapse helps explain his drive to return Russia to great power
status.
In 1998, Russian President Boris Yeltsin named Putin director of the FSB.
Since coming to power himself, Putin has deployed his country’s spies
in Chechnya, Georgia, the Crimea, eastern Ukraine, and Syria in a bid
to reassert Moscow’s global influence.
Why wouldn’t he be willing to deploy his spies inside the computer
system of the DNC as well?
The chronology of the attack on the Democratic Party is a sad
testament to the overconfidence of the Clinton campaign. It also
highlights the inattention of American intelligence and law
enforcement and their failure to adequately warn the major political
parties of looming cyberthreats to the U.S. electoral system.
In September 2015, the FBI made a halfhearted effort to tell the DNC
that its computer system had been invaded. In November 2015, the FBI
told the DNC that its computers were sending data to Russia, but even
that didn’t seem to prompt much concern on the Democrats’ part. In
March 2016, Podesta’s email account was hacked in a phishing attack,
giving thieves access to thousands of his emails.
In May 2016, CrowdStrike, a cybercompany hired by the DNC after the
party finally recognized it had a problem, told DNC officials that its
computers had been compromised in two separate attacks with two sets
of malware associated with Russian intelligence.
While the DNC used CrowdStrike, a private contractor, to conduct an
investigation, it did not give the FBI access to its computer systems.
That fact has since been seized upon by skeptics who say that
CrowdStrike’s analysis can’t be considered credible. But according to
a November BuzzFeed story, CrowdStrike’s lead investigator, Robert
Johnston, was a former Marine captain who had previously worked at the
U.S. Cyber Command, where he had investigated an attempted hack of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff that he identified as likely associated with the
FSB. He had recent experience in identifying the signatures of hacking
linked to Russian intelligence.
In June 2016, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said WikiLeaks had
obtained emails associated with Clinton. Just days later, the
Washington Post reported that Russian intelligence had hacked the DNC’s
computers.
In July 2016, just before the Democratic National Convention,
Wikileaks released thousands of DNC emails, and the party’s
chairwoman, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, was forced to resign.
In September 2016, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the ranking Democrat on the
Senate Intelligence Committee, and Rep. Adam Schiff, the ranking
Democrat on the House Intelligence panel, issued a statement that they
had received classified briefings that made it clear that Russian
intelligence was trying to intervene in the election.
“We believe that orders for the Russian intelligence agencies to
conduct such actions could come only from very senior levels of the
Russian government,” their statement noted.
The key moment in the 2016 campaign came on October 7, when three
events unfolded one after another. That afternoon, the Department of
Homeland Security and the Director of the Office of National
Intelligence issued a statement that U.S. intelligence believed Russia
was behind the Democratic Party hacks and email releases.
“The U.S. Intelligence Community (USIC) is confident that the Russian
Government directed the recent compromises of emails from US persons
and institutions, including from US political organizations,” the
statement read. “The recent disclosures of alleged hacked e-mails on
sites like DCLeaks.com and WikiLeaks and by the Guccifer 2.0 online
persona are consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed
efforts.
These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the U.S.
election process.”
That statement was immediately overshadowed later that afternoon when
the Washington Post published the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape, in
which Trump is heard talking about how easy it is for him to get away
with sexual assault, including groping and forcibly kissing women.
Later that afternoon, WikiLeaks started tweeting links to emails
hacked from Podesta’s account. WikiLeaks then began releasing Podesta
emails on a regular basis throughout the last month of the campaign.
Meanwhile, a group called DC Leaks, which is now believed to be a
front for the Russian hackers who sought to intervene in the election,
released more Democratic Party-related documents.
Within days, Trump was telling his supporters at rallies: “I love
WikiLeaks.”
The scope of the impact of Russian hacking and subsequent disclosures
of Democratic Party emails and data on the outcome of the 2016
election remains unclear. But the disclosures certainly helped take at
least some of the media’s attention off Trump, and probably should be
credited with giving him time to recover from the disastrous “Access
Hollywood” tape. The pattern and timing of the disclosures also
strongly suggests that the objective was to damage Hillary Clinton’s
campaign and help Donald Trump.
In December 2016, a month after the election, the FBI and the National
Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center issued a joint
report detailing the cybertools used by Russian intelligence to attack
the Democratic Party.
The report is still illuminating today because it suggests that the
original DNC hack in 2015 was part of a much broader Russian
cyberassault on a wide array of American institutions, including
government agencies. Originally, it seems, the Russians were not
specifically targeting the Democrats, but were simply casting a wide
net in Washington to see who might take the bait.
The agencies’ report determined that in the summer of 2015, “an APT29
[Advanced Persistent Threat 29, one of two Russian intelligence “actors”
identified in the report, also known as Cozy Bear] spearphishing
campaign directed emails containing a malicious link to over 1,000
recipients, including multiple U.S. Government victims. APT29 used
legitimate domains, to include domains associated with U.S.
organizations and educational institutions, to host malware and send
spearphishing emails. In the course of that campaign, APT29 successfully
compromised a U.S. political party.”
The report adds that the Russians quickly followed up when they gained
access to the Democrats. “APT29 delivered malware to the political
party’s systems, established persistence, escalated privileges,
enumerated active directory accounts, and exfiltrated email from
several accounts through encrypted connections back through operational
infrastructure.”
While intervening in the 2016 election may not have been the initial
purpose of the cyberattack, once the Russians opportunistically struck
gold by breaking into the DNC, they went after the Democrats
relentlessly.
“In spring 2016, APT28 [another Russian intelligence “actor”]
compromised the same political party, again via targeted
spearphishing,” the report states. “This time, the spearphishing email
tricked recipients into changing their passwords through a fake
webmail domain hosted on APT28 operational infrastructure. Using the
harvested credentials, APT28 was able to gain access and steal
content, likely leading to the exfiltration of information from
multiple senior party members.”
By luck or design, Russian intelligence had obtained a vast trove of
inside information from the Democratic Party in the middle of a
presidential campaign.
In January 2017, just days before Trump took office, a remarkable
report from the CIA, FBI, and NSA was made public, plunging the U.S.
intelligence community into American politics in an unprecedented way.
Its aftershocks continue to reverberate a year later.
The report states that “we assess Russian President Vladimir Putin
ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential
election.” It
continues: “Russia’s goals 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. We have high confidence in these judgments. We also assess
Putin and the Russian Government aspired to help President-elect
Trump’s election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary
Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to him.”
The report also notes that “further information has come to light
since Election Day that, when combined with Russian behavior since
early November 2016, increases our confidence in our assessments of
Russian motivations and goals.”
Trump has sought to discredit the report, and by extension, the entire
intelligence community, ever since. His cronies have chimed in,
dismissing it as the work of the so-called deep state.
Yet interestingly, CIA Director Mike Pompeo – a Trump loyalist who has
been criticized for transparently currying favor with Trump in hopes
of being named secretary of state – still stands by the January
intelligence assessment. In November, after Trump once again publicly
trashed the intelligence community’s conclusions, the CIA issued a
statement that “[t]he Director stands by and has always stood by the
January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment.” According to the CIA,
“the intelligence assessment with regard to Russian election meddling
has not changed.” Pompeo’s willingness to stand by the assessment is
clearly not in his own political interest and thus, lends credibility
to the assessment.
Earlier this week, meanwhile, top intelligence officials, including
Pompeo and Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, underlined
their ongoing concerns about Russian election meddling, warning that
Moscow once again seems to be seeking to intervene, this time in the 2018
midterm elections.
In a congressional hearing, Coats suggested that the Russians believe
they were successful in 2016 and want to build on their success in
2018. Coats said that “the 2018 midterm elections are a potential
target for Russian influence operations,” and that “at a minimum, we
expect Russia to continue using propaganda, social media, false flag
personas, sympathetic spokespeople, and other means of influence to
try to exacerbate social and political fissures in the United States.”
Text. (photo: The Intercept)
Further documentary evidence of Russian intervention in the 2016
election came from an important story published by The Intercept last June.
The story was notable because it was based on a classified U.S.
intelligence
document about Russian election hacking obtained through an
unauthorized leak. All the other U.S. intelligence assessments and
reports that have so far been made public about the issue have come
through officially authorized channels. Thus, the NSA report leaked to
The Intercept has the enhanced credibility that comes from being
disclosed against the will of the U.S.
intelligence community.
The classified report is significant because it reveals that Russian
interference in the election extended beyond the direct attack on the
Democratic Party and included attempts to gain access to the basic
infrastructure involved in actually counting American votes. It
details how the GRU conducted a cyberattack on a U.S. voting software
supplier and engaged in spear-phishing to try to hack local election
officials before the
2016 vote
The classified May 2017 NSA report, provided anonymously to The
Intercept, shows that Russian hackers sought to pose as an e-voting
vendor and trick local government officials into opening Microsoft
Word documents loaded with malware that would let the hackers remotely
control the government computers. To fool the local officials, the
Russians first sought to gain access to the vendor’s internal systems,
which they hoped would provide a convincing disguise.
“Russian General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate actors [redacted]
executed cyber espionage operations against a named U.S. company in
August, 2016, evidently to obtain information on elections-related
software and hardware solutions, according to information that became
available in April, 2017,” the report states. “The actors likely used
data obtained from that operation to create a new email account and
launch a voter registration-themed spear-phishing campaign targeting
U.S. local government organizations.”
The compromise of the vendor would provide cover for the direct attack
on the local officials. “It was likely that the threat actor was
targeting officials involved in the management of voter registration
systems,” the report adds. “It is unknown whether the aforementioned
spear-phishing deployment successfully compromised the intended
victims, and what potential data could have been accesses by the cyber
actor.”
The growing evidence that Russia was behind the attack on the
Democratic Party now includes the confession of a Russian hacker in a Moscow
court.
The
story of Konstantin Kozlovsky appears to be one of the most
significant of the entire Trump-Russia saga. It is one of several
intriguing tales now emerging that suggests that the secrecy
surrounding the Russian hacking is beginning to unravel.
In December 2017, The Bell, an independent Russian news site, reported
on Kozlovsky’s stunning testimony in Moscow City Court. Kozlovsky — a
young Russian hacker who had been arrested, along with other members
of the Lurk hacking group, in connection with the cybertheft of more
than $50 million from Russian bank accounts — testified that he had
conducted the Democratic Party hack on behalf of Russian intelligence.
In an August 15 court hearing in Moscow, Kozlovsky said he “performed
various tasks under the supervision of FSB officers,” including
hacking “of the National Committee of the Democratic Party of the USA
and electronic correspondence of Hillary Clinton,” and hacking “very
serious military enterprises of the United States and other organizations,”
according to the Bell.
The news site reported that Kozlovsky said he had conducted the hack
at the direction of Dmitry Dokuchaev, a major in the FSB’s Information
Security Center, the intelligence agency’s cyber arm.
When Kozlovsky made this statement in court, he was already facing
serious criminal charges for hacking. He may have thought that
claiming involvement in the DNC hack would help him with his ongoing
criminal case, or he may have thought that he had nothing left to lose
and so should tell all. He remains in pretrial detention in Moscow.
Dokuchaev, meanwhile, is a fascinating character, and his involvement
in Kozlovsky’s story plunges it into the wilderness of mirrors of
present-day espionage battles between the U.S. and Russia.
In December 2016, Dokuchaev was arrested in Moscow and charged with
spying for the United States. He and three others have reportedly been
accused of providing information to U.S. intelligence on the Russian
hack of the Democratic Party. Along with Dokuchaev, FSB Col. Sergey
Mikhailov, Ruslan Stoyanov of Kaspersky Labs, and Georgy Fomchenkov, a
Russian businessman, have been charged with treason in the case.
Dokuchaev is now being detained in Russia, but since Kozlovsky’s
confession was made public, Dokuchaev, through his lawyer, has told
the Russian press that he doesn’t know the hacker and was not involved
with the theft of documents from the Democratic Party.
In March 2017, just months after Dokuchaev was arrested in Moscow for
spying for the United States, the U.S. Justice Department announced
that he had been indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of
hacking Yahoo’s network and webmail accounts. Dokuchaev, identified by
the Justice Department as a 33-year-old FSB officer, was one of four
men indicted in the case. “The defendants used unauthorized access to
Yahoo’s systems to steal information from about at least 500 million
Yahoo accounts and then used some of that stolen information to obtain
unauthorized access to the contents of accounts at Yahoo, Google and
other webmail providers, including accounts of Russian journalists,
U.S. and Russian government officials, and private-sector employees of
financial, transportation and other companies,” according to the
Justice Department.
At the press conference announcing the indictments, officials
displayed a large FBI wanted poster for Dokuchaev.
This chain of events leaves plenty of questions unanswered, but I
wouldn’t be surprised if Dokuchaev’s December 2016 arrest for treason
in Moscow and his March 2017 indictment in the United States were somehow
related.
While the Washington press corps has been obsessing over Donald
Trump’s tweets and a ginned-up memo from House Republicans seeking to
discredit the Trump-Russia investigation, another major break in the
story has just begun to unfold in the Netherlands. In late January, a
Dutch newspaper, de Volkskrant, along with Nieuwsuur, a Dutch current
affairs television program, reported that Dutch intelligence service
AIVD has turned over to the FBI conclusive inside information about
the Russian hack of the Democratic Party.
The two news organizations reported that in 2014, Dutch hackers
working for the AIVD gained secret access to the Russian hacker group
known as Cozy Bear – also known as Advanced Persistent Threat 29 – a
Russian intelligence unit behind the hack of the DNC.
Dutch intelligence first told their American counterparts about their
successful penetration of Cozy Bear in 2014, tipping off Washington
that the Russian hackers were trying to break into the State
Department’s computer system. That warning led the NSA to scramble to
counter the Russian threat.
In 2015, the Dutch were also able to watch, undetected by the
Russians, as the Cozy Bear hackers launched their first attack on the
Democratic Party, according to the two news organizations. In addition
to gaining access to the Cozy Bear computers, the Dutch were able to
hack into a security camera that recorded who was working in Cozy
Bear’s office in a university building in Moscow near Red Square. The
Dutch discovered that there were about 10 people working there, and
they were eventually able to match the faces to those of Russian
intelligence officers who work for the SVR.
The information flowing from the Dutch was considered so vital by the
Americans that the NSA opened a direct line with Dutch intelligence to
get the data as fast as possible, according to the Dutch news
organizations. To show their appreciation, the Americans sent cake and
flowers to AIVD headquarters in the Dutch city of Zoetermeer.
If the Dutch story is accurate, it would help explain why the U.S.
intelligence community is so confident in its assessment that Russian
intelligence was behind the attack on the Democratic Party.
The Dutch news organizations say that the AIVD is no longer inside the
Cozy Bear network, and that Dutch intelligence has become increasingly
suspicious of working with the Americans.
Since Trump’s election, who can blame them?
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