PATRICK LAWRENCE: Finally Time for DNC Email Evidence
August 5, 2019
The crumbling of Russiagate focuses attention on the considerable evidence
that Russian intelligence agencies charged with intrusion into DNC servers
had nothing to do with it.
By Patrick Lawrence
Special to Consortium News
Three years after the narrative we call Russiagate was framed and
incessantly promoted, it crumbles into rubble as we speak. The mini-empire
of allegations, presuppositions, fallacious syllogisms, leaps of logic,
imagined connections and mis and disinformation marshaled to support
charges of Russian interference in the 2016 elections is more or less a
ruin.
The total collapse of the Russiagate orthodoxy now appears within reach
this for the first time since the Democratic National Committee set the
narrative in motion after its email servers were compromised during the
TrumpClinton presidential contest. There is a good chance though this is
not a certainty that Attorney General William Barrs just-launched
investigation will fully expose the numerous charges of Russian intervention
as fabrications. Evidence of these fabrications, long available but ignored
in a remarkably prevalent case of willful blindness, continues to grow such
that it may be difficult to obscure it much longer.
It is now officially acknowledged that there is no credible evidence that
Donald Trump colluded with Russia to defeat Hillary Clinton in the 2016
election. At this point, the demonstrably bogus assertion that Russian
intelligence hacked into the DNCs email system in mid2016 is the one
remaining feature of the Russiagate orthodoxy that is commonly considered
rock solid.
Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton during 2016 presidential campaign. (Gage
Skidmore/Wikimedia Commons)
The mythology on this question remains deeply embedded, the absence of any
supporting evidence notwithstanding. Press and broadcast reports rarely miss
an opportunity to cast Russian responsibility for the DNC email intrusion as
a foregone conclusion. But this, too, is a tower built on sand. To put
Russiagate decisively in the past now comes to demolishing this last,
unsound edifice. The rest is already too discredited for anyone but naïve
liberals, wishful-thinking progressives and the most committed ideologues
to take seriously.
This focuses attention on the evidence considerable and accumulating
that Russian intelligence agencies, officially charged with intrusion into
the DNCs servers, had nothing to do with it. It is now two years since
technically qualified intelligence professionals of long experience reported
via Consortium News that the theft of Democratic Party email in 2016 was
neither a hack nor a Russian intelligence operation. In July 2017 Veteran
Intelligence Professionals for Sanity presented persuasive evidence that the
DNCs servers had been compromised by someone with direct access to them.
The email messages subsequently posted by WikiLeaks had been pilfered by an
insider of unknown identity: This was the conclusion VIPS drew in VIPS50,
the groups report on the mail incident, on the basis of the evidence it had
gathered while working with other independent forensic investigators. The
hack, in short, was not a hack. It was a leak.
A cacophony of objections erupted after Consortium posted VIPS50. Much
vastly too much has been made of a group of dissenters within the VIPS
organization who did not endorse the report. But neither these dissenters
nor the many others attempting to discredit VIPS50 have succeeded in doing
so. No countervailing evidence from any quarter has been presented. Based on
continuing research, VIPS subsequently altered some of its initial
conclusions, as noted in this space a year ago. But its principal findings
stand.
VIPS50
This puts VIPS50, while still officially excluded from the record, among the
most consequential documents to be published since the Russiagate narrative
took shape three years ago. If we are to recover from the destructive,
divisive nightmare Russiagate has become, VIPS50 will be key to the process.
There are indications now that its findings, based on impartially conducted
data analysis and forensic science, will soon get the consideration they
have deserved from the first. My sources suggest Barrs office is making use
of VIPS report and subsequent findings as it begins its investigation into
the genesis of the Russiagate allegations.
Much anticipation preceded the publication in midApril of the report on
Russian interference completed in the office of Special Counsel Robert
Mueller. Contrary to prevalent expectations, however, the 448page document
failed to confirm the case for Russiagate and did much to weaken it. Not
only did the report conclude that neither President Trump nor anyone in his
campaign colluded with Russia as he fought the 2016 election; it also made
clear that the special counsels office did not undertake a credible
investigation of the charge that Russian intelligence hacked the DNCs mail
servers.
Mueller failed to call numerous key witnesses, among them Julian Assange,
the WikiLeaks founder and publisher, and Bill Binney, formerly a technical
director at the National Security Agency and one of several technical
experts in the VIPS group. He also failed to pursue alternative theories in
the email-theft case; a duty of any investigator in Muellers position. Only
the willfully blind can accept these irregularities as legitimate conduct.
Bill Binney: Not interviewed. (Miquel Taverna / CCCB via Flickr)
Bill Binney: Not interviewed. (Miquel Taverna / CCCB via Flickr)
Remarkably enough, Muellers investigation appears to have conducted no
forensic tests of its own to verify allegations of a Russian hacking
operation. It relied instead on the patently faulty findings of Crowdstrike,
the disreputable cyber-security firm that was working for the DNC by
mid2016. Critically, the special counsel also appears to have neglected to
consult the NSA for evidence pertaining to the DNC incident. Had the
intrusion been a hack conducted over the internet, by Russians or anyone
else, the agency would have a fully detailed digital record of the operation
and the means to trace the intervention to its perpetrators. Why, it is
perfectly logical to ask, was such a record not cited prominently in the
Mueller report?
Muellers testimony before two congressional committees on July 24 was a
further blow to the Russiagate thesis. The special counsel came over as a
detached, out-of-touch figurehead with a very loose grip on his own
investigation and poor knowledge of the report bearing his signature. Soon
afterward, even Trumps adversaries in the Democratic camp began to give up
the ghost. In the hours and days after Mr. Mueller gave his opening
statement before the House Judiciary Committee, wrote Samuel Moyn, a Yale
law professor, it became clear how tenaciously many liberals and
progressives are clinging to fantasy. Moyns piece appeared in The New York
Times. The headline reads, The Mueller Fantasy Comes Crashing Down.
Robert Mueller giving congressional testimony on July 24. (C-span screen
shot)
Despite the stunningly anticlimactic outcome of the Mueller report and his
subsequent appearance on Capitol Hill which was intended from the first to
be a matter of spectacle rather than substance new allegations of Russian
interference continue to arrive on front pages and in news broadcasts. The
latest came the day after Muellers testimony, when the Senate Intelligence
Committee reported that Russia intruded into the election systems of all 50
states during the 2016 campaigns. The report offered no supporting evidence,
per usual. It was heavily redacted at the request of the relevant
intelligence agencies, again per usual.
Question of Evidence
This brings us to the question of evidence. To go back to the initial
allegations of Russian interference three years ago, at no point since have
any of these commonly accepted charges been accompanied by hard, legally and
logically sound evidence to back them up. This astonishing lacuna, while
intently papered over in the media, on Capitol Hill, at the Justice
Department, in the intelligence apparatus, and among law-enforcement
agencies, has rendered the Russiagate orthodoxy vulnerable from the first.
It now emerges that the evidence problem is worse than even the most
committed critics of the Russiagate narrative had thought.
This came to light this spring, during the pre-trial discovery phase of the
case against Roger Stone, the onetime Trump aide charged with obstructing
justice and misleading Congress. When Stones attorneys requested
Crowdstrikes final report on the DNC email theft, which they said was
relevant to his defense, prosecutors returned with the stunning revelation
that Crowdstrike, the DNCs cyber-security firm, never submitted a final
report. The government does not possess the information the defendant
seeks, the Justice Department responded via a court filing.
The Federal Bureau of Investigations failure to take possession of the
DNCs email servers from Crowdstrike after the mid2016 intrusion, a
shocking case of official malfeasance, has long been dismissed as an
unimportant detail. We now know that the FBI, the Justice Department and the
Mueller investigation relied on nothing more than three Crowdstrike drafts
all of them redacted by Crowdstrike to build the case for Russias
culpability in the theft of the DNCs email.
Not only did the FBI fail to establish a proper chain of evidentiary custody
after the incident at the DNC; it is now clear the bureau knows of the email
theft only what Crowdstrike chose to tell it. There is no evidence that the
FBI asked the NSA for its records of the incident. Nor is there any
indication that Crowdstrike has ever given the FBI or prosecutors in the
Stone case the data it used to produce its never-completed report.
Crowdstrike appears to have destroyed evidence or is hiding it, Bill
Binney said in a telephone interview.
The corporate media continue to pretend in their press reports and news
broadcasts that the official investigation of the DNC email incident was
conducted according to the highest standard of legitimacy. Democrats on
Capitol Hill, still pursuing their own investigations, never question the
validity of the officially constructed case alleging Russias
responsibility. The revelation of negligence the Stone trial brings to
light, which amounts to corruption, could hardly expose this prolonged
charade more starkly.
Roger Stone on his way to court in February. (Victoria Pickering/Flickr)
Forensic investigators, meantime, continue to gather evidence supporting the
leak-not-hack case made in VIPS50. The gap thus widens between the official
story of the DNC mail incident and the case supported by forensic research
done by VIPS and other independent investigators working in association with
it.
Last February these investigators discovered that email pilfered in 2016 and
subsequently conveyed to WikiLeaks had been stored according to a system
called File Allocation Table, or FAT. The FAT system time-stamps data
according to their last modifications and, because it is less precise than
other storage systems, it rounds up time stamps to the next even number. If
the FAT system is used to store data, it is a strong indication that the
data were stored on a memory key or another such portable device.
In the 35, 816 email messages investigators examined, the FAT system
assigned even-numbered time stamps to all of them. Binney, a mathematician
by training, puts the chance of this occurring without the use of a portable
storage device at 1 in 2 to the 35,816thpower meaning it is a virtual
impossibility.
The FAT numbering pattern detected in the email messages tested does not
indicate at what stage or where a portable device was used. It shows only
that such a device was used at some point in the handling of the data; a
portable device may or may not have been used to execute the initial
download. But the presence of the FAT system in the metadata of the emails
tested adds another layer of circumstantial evidence supporting the VIPS
case that the theft of DNC mail was a leak executed locally via a portable
device and not a remote hack conducted through the internet. At the very
least, it is an additional line of inquiry the FBI, the intelligence
agencies, and the Mueller investigation have left unexamined.
VIPS Dissenters
Among the critics of VIPS50, none has influenced public opinion as much as
the dissenters within the groups membership. The presence of these
dissenters has been evident since VIPS50 went through repeated drafts over a
period of nearly two weeks. This is a group of honorable, in many cases
brave people. But they advanced no coherent objections to the VIPS document
prior to its publication, and this remained the case for some time after
Consortium News posted it on July 24, 2017. Having begun reporting on VIPS50
shortly after that date, I found and continue to find the dissenters
position heavily inflected with personal animosities and political leanings
having no bearing on the validity of the VIPS50 findings.
A number of dissenters signed a contribution to a forum The Nation hosted
after the magazine published a piece I wrote on VIPS50 in August 2017. This
was the first time the dissenters publicly presented substantive objections
to VIPS50, and they focused on the core of the VIPS case. This case
continues to rest primarily on the speed at which a mail theft could be
executed in mid2016. The transfer speed, identified by an analysis of
metadata found on documents stolen at that time, was considerably faster
than the rate possible over the internet at the time of the intrusion,
indicating a leak by someone using a portable storage device and with direct
access to the DNCs servers.
The dissenting group took specific issue with these findings. Data-transfer
speeds across networks and the Internet measured in megabits per second (or
megabytes per second) can easily achieve rates that greatly exceed the cited
reference in the VIPS memo, the dissidents wrote.
It was at this point the dissenters repeated the failures of the
intelligence apparatus and the Mueller investigation: They produced no
evidence. There is no indication the dissenters conducted tests to support
their assertion on the speed question. The VIPS memo applied scientific
method to the DNC mail theft for the first time and was intended as an
evidence to date document. This marked a transformative advance in how the
DNC incident can be understood: The imperative since has been to bring
countervailing evidence to the investigative process, which continues. No
one not the dissenters, not the DNC, not the intelligence community, not
Mueller, not the press has done so.
The dissenters have been silent since their contribution to The Nations
forum. Members have declined invitations to work with VIPS50 signatories to
develop further the evidence presented in the memo. When I queried a number
of dissenters for this commentary, one replied. This person did not address
the findings of forensic investigators while reproducing what VIPS50
signatories term the emotional arguments that have characterized the
dissenters response to the memo since the drafting phase two summers ago.
These continuing difficulties appear partly to reflect a desire not to be
seen defending either Trump or the Russians.
Barrs Investigation
The NSA, the CIA, the FBI, the Mueller investigation, the press none has
shown the slightest interest in the findings outlined in VIPS50. This can
come as no surprise, given the heavy investments all of these entities have
made in the Russians-did-it explanation of the DNC email incident. But this
omission is nonetheless negligent when one considers the contradicting
evidence VIPS and those associated with it continue to amass. A key question
now arises: Will the Barr investigation into the genesis of allegations of
Russian interference, begun three months ago, transcend this politically
inspired ignorance to expose official accounts of the mid2016 mail theft as
fallacies?
William Barr meets with the Justice Department leadership, February 2019.
( Department of Justice)
The early signs were that Barrs investigators would at last explode the
Russiagate narrative. Trump was unmistakably determined to do so when he
urged Barr to investigate the investigators last spring. In midMay Barr
appointed John Durham, a federal prosecutor, to direct this effort. Ten days
later Trump gave Barr full and complete authority to declassify
information related to the conduct of the intelligence agencies, the FBI,
and the Justice Department.
It was clear very early that Trump was aware of VIPS50 and entertained a
lively interest in its findings. In September 2017, two months after
Consortium published the memo, he ordered Mike Pompeo, then director of the
CIA, to interview Bill Binney, the leading technical expert within the VIPS
group. Pompeo did so in October 2017, but by Binneys account he flinched:
Pompeo heard Binney out at the presidents insistence, but he never pursued
the forensic findings the former NSA technical director walked him through.
This was an early sign, it is now plain, that even efforts to unearth the
truth of the allegations against Russia that emanate from the White House
would meet political resistance. Another came last Friday, when Trump was
forced to drop John Ratcliffe, a Texas Republican who pledged to support a
full investigation of Russiagate, as his nominee to replace Dan Coats as
director of national intelligence. While Ratcliffe considered the orthodox
Russiagate narrative bogus, Coats was vigorous in his promotion of it.
This makes political will another key question to ask of the Barr
investigation: Full exposure of the travesty of Russiagate is almost
certainly within Barrs power to achieve. Will he do so?
Whether Trump will remain consistent in his backing of Barr is another such
question. While Trump habitually terms Russiagate a hoax, he has also
indicated on a number of occasions that his true objective is simply to
escape the charge that he colluded with Russians to win the 2016 election.
I never said Russia did not meddle in the election, Trump tweeted earlier
this year. I said, It may be Russia, or China, or another country or
group, or it may be a 400pound genius sitting in bed and playing with his
computer. The Russian hoax was that the Trump campaign colluded with
Russiait never did!
A president who slips and slides, an administrative state the Deep State
if you like thoroughly committed to defending falsified accounts of the
mid2016 intrusions into the DNCs email servers, a supine press: It is
impossible to say when or whether the truth of the events of three years ago
will emerge. The evidence is there, sufficient now to conclude the Russigate
case. The greatest remaining obstacle is the willful ignorance that
incubated the Russiagate narrative and now prolongs it. We reach a point
when evidence and more evidence, along with political integrity, are the
only effective replies to this cynical, foolish, and costly recalcitrance.
Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the
International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, author and lecturer.
His most recent book is Time No Longer: Americans After the American
Century (Yale). Follow him on Twitter @thefloutist. His website is Patrick
Lawrence. Support his work via his Patreon site.
