Intel Matters

[bigdog]

http://backdoorbroadcasting.net/2011/04/landscapes-of-secrecy-the-cia-in-history-fiction-and-memory-2/

[ccp]

Big dog,
At first I saw an article by John Bolton and now another link to a schedule comes up.

[bigdog]

That link works for me, ccp. Sorry.

[bigdog]

https://www.c-span.org/video/?414931-1/fbi-cia-directors-speak-intelligence-national-security-summit

[Crafty_Dog]

https://www.clarionproject.org/news/pentagon-spends-500-million-fake-al-qaeda-videos

[Crafty_Dog]

http://counterjihad.com/should-family-affiliations-with-foreign-islamist-movements-prevent-a-security-clearance

[Crafty_Dog]

Recommended to me by a serious person:

https://www.thecipherbrief.com/dead-drop

[Crafty_Dog]

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/11/will-congress-investigate-russian-interference-2016-campaign

[Crafty_Dog]

http://www.hoover.org/research/eyes-ears-and-daggers

yes, Ears, And Daggers
by Thomas H. Henriksen
via Defining Ideas (Hoover Institution)
Tuesday, November 29, 2016

Editor’s note: The following essay is an excerpt from the new Hoover Press book Eyes, Ears, and Daggers:  Special Operations Forces and the CIA in America’s Ongoing Struggle against Terrorism.

Each war tells us something about the way the next war will be fought.

—Herodotus

One of the things we have seen since 9/11 is an extraordinary coming together, particularly the CIA and the military, in working together and fusing intelligence and operations in a way that just, I think, is unique in anybody’s history.

—Robert Gates 

When Nathan Hale stood on the scaffold in 1776 and uttered his immortal regret that he had only one life to give for his country, he came to embody a timeless patriot. In retrospect, Hale was also a progenitor of the soldier-spy fusion that has become so noteworthy in the early twenty-first-century conflict with jihadi terrorism. Days before his execution, the young military officer had volunteered to dress in civilian clothes, go behind enemy lines, and scout out the Red Coats’ plans at the start of the American Revolution. His fellow officers shrank from the mission out of fear of dying from an ignominious execution by hanging, rather than an ennobling death on the battlefield. The British caught and hanged the twenty-one-year-old captain from the Seventh Connecticut regiment for spying.

Captain Hale’s secret mission is significant for its present-day relevance as well as its patriotism. His intelligence gathering inside British-occupied New York City blurred the lines separating soldier and spy. It was an early version of “sheep dipping,” the contemporary practice of informal reidentification in which soldiers become spies. More than two centuries after the Yale-educated schoolteacher’s death, America’s counterterrorism campaign underwent a similar obscuring over the roles between elite warriors and intelligence officials in the antiterrorism battle. This military-intelligence overlap was not fore­ordained. Quite the contrary, the two communities—military and intelligence—were often at odds throughout their histories. Their contemporary blending, indeed, might just be a temporary realignment. A return to their traditional rivalry is not out of the question.

Both the Special Operations Forces (SOF) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) are of relatively recent formation. Their antecedents, nonetheless, stretch back further than the immediate post–World War II era, which marked the creation of both entities. Irregular armed forces have been a part of America’s military traditions from as early as the Revolutionary War up to the current battle against violent Islamist extremism in the Middle East, Africa, and other parts of the world. Spying enjoys a less-rich tradition in America’s past, although it, too, underwent a quantum leap during the Cold War.

Both communities—special warriors and intelligence officers—have served as the nation’s eyes, ears, and daggers, often in close cooperation, but occasionally at cross-purposes, as this account traces and analyzes. Yet in bureaucratic tug-of-wars, neither the Special Operations Forces nor the Central Intelligence Agency has been each other’s main antagonist. Rather, they have clashed with their closest competitor. For SOF, this has meant turf battles with the regular military forces. For the CIA, it has meant bureaucratic tussles chiefly with the State Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), not the Pentagon. The SOF-CIA partnership grew to become a highly effective weapon against jihadi terrorists bent on murdering or converting other populations to their twisted version of Islam. The September 11, 2001, terrorist attack, in fact, heralded a new era for the two secretive security arms of the U.S. government, an era that is the subject of this anatomy.

The attack on the Twin Towers shelved America’s Cold War thinking about security. By adopting an intelligence-driven, targeted counterstrike weapon against terrorists, the United States went from a Cold War Goliath to a lithe and nimble bearer of a deadly sling, thanks in no small measure to the SOF and CIA contribution. Much of the reorientation developed from the close SOF-CIA linkage, as is well known to both communities. The purpose of this narrative is to sketch very briefly the warrior-spy connection before and then more fully after the formation of the Special Operations Forces and the Central Intelligence Agency. Even a “wave-top” skimming of this complex interaction suggests that their history is notable for instances of cooperating, competing, circumventing, and even cutting each other out of the action. By revisiting and appreciating their respective histories prior to their partnering to combat Islamist terrorism, the author hopes to provide a clearer understanding of their interaction and offer lessons for the future.

Spying, Binoculars, and Telegraph Cables

Students of America’s cloak-and-dagger operations have a nodding acquaintance with espionage that dates to the country’s war of independence from Britain. Nathan Hale’s behind-the-lines spying inaugurated the fledgling nation’s quest for intelligence about its powerful foe. In another league from Hale’s snooping was a renowned spymaster, string-pulling his agents for information. George Washington not only stood first in the hearts of his countrymen but also ranked first among the Founding Fathers in his fascination with and reliance on espionage. Young Washington learned firsthand the importance of intelligence during the French and Indian War (1754–63), when he served under British general Edward Braddock, whose defeat and death at Fort Duquesne (now Pittsburgh) stemmed, in part, from ignorance about his enemy’s forces.

When Washington assumed command of the Continental army, he resolved to obtain intelligence about his British opponent by every means. Spies were dispatched to learn British movements and designs. Worried about English spies and American sympathizers with the Crown, he took measures to prevent them from conveying information to the British about the Continental army’s maneuvers and activities. The Continental Congress also grasped the importance of foreign intelligence. It established the Committee of Secret Correspondence, which one contemporary historian characterized as “the distant ancestor of today’s CIA.” 2 The group corresponded with American well-wishers who lived in Europe so as to gain intelligence about the European governments’ predisposition toward the American Revolution. General Washington was naturally far more interested in military information.

So while Nathan Hale won enduring fame, Washington commanded a constellation of spies who proved much more successful than the young Connecticut officer. This eyes-and-ears network also performed counterespionage, detecting the treason of Benedict Arnold—the infamous American turncoat who switched to George III’s side. General Washington also utilized agents to spread bogus information about his army’s strength and intentions. He even deceived British generals about his strategy until the trap was sprung, leading to the surrender of Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown and the American defeat of Great Britain.

As the first president of the new Republic, George Washington retained his interest in things clandestine. His secret service fund, a line item in the nation’s budget, grew to nearly 12 percent, or about $1 million, by his third year in office. President Washington disbursed these monies for bribing foreign officials and even ransoming sailors held by the Barbary pirates. These predators operated out of North African city-states and preyed on American merchant ships. Despite the contemporary view of late-eighteenth-century gentility, Congress understood the necessity of covert measures; it cut the nation’s first commander-in-chief considerable slack in espionage endeavors. Congress merely required the president to certify the amounts expended but permitted him to conceal the purpose and recipients. These and related operations foreshadowed those practiced after the Central Intelligence Act of 1949.3

George Washington’s role as spymaster notwithstanding, his successors did not follow his pioneering role. If anything, they allowed the U.S. intelligence capacity to atrophy with dire consequences. America’s dismal intelligence service contributed to the lack of adequate defense for the White House, which the British burned during the War of 1812. President James Madison barely escaped the capital in advance of Britain’s capture and torching of his residence. Behind their Atlantic moat, Americans seemed oblivious to the importance of intelligence about their potential adversaries. Even during the Mexican War (1846–48), the commanding officer, General Zachary Taylor, obtained his knowledge of the Mexican army through his binoculars. His deputy, Winfield Scott, did gain approval from President James Polk to set up the Mexican Spy Company, which relied on the outlaw Manuel Dominguez and his bandit followers to hand over military intelligence about Mexican defenses. It was not the last time that U.S. presidents and their military officers paid off less-than-savory agents to spy.

The Civil War (1861–65) marked a period of mostly amateurish spying by both sides. In fact, Northern and Southern military officers and civilian officials regularly scoured each other’s newspapers to glean information about their foes. Then, as now, the press’s war coverage revealed actionable intelligence. Journalists published details on the troop strength, location, and destination of military units. This breach of security concerned both sides. Washington and Richmond tried to shut down the newspapers. Political leaders did hire spies to collect information on their enemies. Field commanders likewise set up their own intelligence operations to do reconnaissance on their adversaries and to limit knowledge of their respective forces. The history of Union and Confederate espionage, with its passions and bumbling, is ably told by Alan Axelrod in The War between the Spies. But as Axelrod acknowledged, the spies were amateurs, “usually ordinary soldiers and civilians who, on one or more occasions, did some spying.” 4 His account overflowed with assassins, conspirators, and secret service forerunners—all part of present-day intelligence and covert operations.

After the Civil War, investments in spies, espionage, and covert operators dwindled through the end of the nineteenth century. Some noteworthy departments were established, however. The Secret Service came into existence in 1865, first as an agency to investigate forgeries in the new paper currency that had appeared three years earlier. After the Secret Service uncovered a plot in 1894 to assassinate President Glover Cleveland, it assumed the mission of safeguarding the president, the vice president, and their families, as well as the integrity of the American currency. Its dual missions became permanent after the assassination of President William McKinley in 1901.

In the course of the 1880s, both the U.S. Navy and U.S. Army established intelligence departments. The Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) collected information about foreign navies that might be useful in time of war. Likewise, the Military Intelligence Division, staffed initially by one officer, gathered material on foreign armies of possible use to the War Department and the Army. For the U.S. Navy, the ONI played a pivotal role in the extraordinary naval expansion at the dawn of the twentieth century. Theodore Roosevelt, as assistant secretary of the Navy (well before his presidency), capitalized on ONI reports to push for a giant shipbuilding program that saw the Navy’s blue-water fleet mushroom in capital ships.5 As president, Roosevelt was not averse to using underhanded measures to accomplish his goals abroad.

Covert action, in fact, played a hand in the White House’s acquisition of the Panama Canal Zone. Unmistakable U.S. sympathy for the Panamanian insurrectionists encouraged them to revolt against their Colombian rulers in 1903. Next, Washington ran interference for the rebels. The Colombian commander of the offshore fleet was bribed to sail away without shelling the Panamanians. The U.S. Navy also blocked Colombia’s ships from landing reinforcements to reestablish its rule. The United States formally recognized the Republic of Panama in 1904, leased the ten-mile strip on each side of the proposed waterway, and resumed construction of the transoceanic canal, which was completed in 1914.

During World War I, U.S. intelligence efforts foiled Germany’s operations to influence American public opinion against Great Britain. German agents tried to shift U.S. sentiment toward Germany and away from Britain. Along with planting pro-German articles in American newspapers, the Kaiser’s agents blew up two large munitions factories in New Jersey. Despite Berlin’s sabotage and media manipulations, which often backfired against Germany, Washington lacked a specialized espionage department. As a defense, President Woodrow Wilson ordered the Secret Service to investigate German businessmen paying subsidies to German-American organizations. The U.S. Justice Department, moreover, linked the German embassy with subversive actions.6

The Army and Navy beefed up their military intelligence proficiency during the war. Each branch employed more than a thousand personnel by the armistice signing in 1918. A prominent innovation during the war was the first signals intelligence office, whose focus was on preventing domestic subversion. The signals intelligence specialists deciphered encrypted messages and handed over evidence to the Bureau of Investigation, the forerunner of the FBI. All the fledgling counterespionage departments were very busy because of the large number of German immigrants living within the United States.

Once at war against Imperial Germany and its allies in 1917, the Wilson administration engaged in a covert operation with Britain to persuade Russia to remain in the war after its February Revolution, which overthrew the tsar in early 1917. Washington spent modest sums of money to place pro-war newspaper articles in the Russian press. London took an even more extravagant approach by wining and dining Russian government officials. Still, Washington’s modest contribution to persuading the Russian Provisional Government to stay in the fight against the Central Powers came to naught. By mid-1917, the Russian army collapsed as a fighting force after repeated defeats at the hands of the German forces and their Austro-Hungarian allies. Moscow’s contribution to the Allied cause ended when Vladimir Lenin’s Bolsheviks tossed out the provisional government in the October Revolution. Soviet Russia’s new rulers soon broke ranks with the Allies and concluded a separate peace with Berlin in order to concentrate on consolidating their power amid the ensuing civil war, which engulfed much of the country. The capitalist West had no sway with Communist Russia. After Lenin settled for a harsh peace with the Central Powers, the Allies slugged it out with Germany, now freed from the two-front war.

As expected, the end of the war brought a hasty return to business as usual for the United States. It made severe reductions in the nation’s military and intelligence capabilities. The federal government quickly slashed funding for intelligence as well as demobilized its armed forces. Unlike other major powers, America still lacked a specialized foreign espionage organization at the close of the war. The war had recorded a temporary boost in manpower and effectiveness of army and naval intelligence, but peace scuttled that progress. Nor were the 1920s and early 1930s the propitious environments for setting up overseas spy operations. President Wilson subscribed to a brave new world of open diplomacy openly arrived at, departing from what the old powers of Europe did behind closed doors. Moreover, America looked inward as isolationist sentiments took hold among political elites and ordinary people alike. American naiveté about the outside world came into sharp relief when Henry L. Stimson (Herbert Hoover’s secretary of state and Franklin Roosevelt’s secretary of war) averred that “gentlemen don’t read each other’s mail.” 

That said, the United States did score an intelligence coup during the first year of the incoming Warren Harding administration. At the Washington Conference on the Limitations of Armaments in 1921, Americans decrypted Japanese telegraph cables from Tokyo. Knowledge of Japan’s real diplomatic bargaining position enabled Washington to stand firm on Japanese demands to exceed the 10:6 naval ratio of capital ships with the United States.8 The U.S. position prevailed. The Japanese, whose real threshold was revealed in the decoded message, accepted the lower ratio. American intelligence breakthroughs, however, were all too rare in the interwar period, as the attack on Pearl Harbor attested. But they were not unprecedented once the Pacific war started. The American proficiency in cracking the wartime Japanese codes enabled Washington to learn of Tokyo’s plans for the conquest of Midway Island. The astounding U.S. naval victory over the Imperial fleet was, in part, made possible by foreknowledge of Japan’s strategy. America’s signals intelligence came of age during the Pacific war.

Protected by two vast oceans, the United States progressed through the first 170 years of its history without a meaningful national intelligence enterprise. The American embrace of the Marquess of Queensberry rules for collecting intelligence lingered into the twentieth century before the gloves finally came off. It was World War II and the Cold War aftermath that revolutionized American attitudes.9 Before considering the extraordinary transformation that the 1941–45 war brought to American intelligence resources, however, it is appropriate to shift attention to the other pillar of the contemporary SOF-CIA alignment—the irregular warfare tradition.

Irregular Warfare as an American Tradition

Unlike spying, America’s irregular warfare tradition enjoys a deeper cultural heritage. Its lineage stretches back to at least the French and Indian War, when regular soldiers embraced the tactics of Native American warriors. Rather than following the parade-ground drills of troops marching into battle, the Native American tribesmen resorted to ambushes, small-unit attacks, and firing from behind trees to catch their adversaries off guard. Both French and American soldiers observed, adopted, and put into practice this hit-and-run warfare.

When the American Revolution broke out, the colonists relied on different tactics. George Washington fought a largely con­ventional conflict along European lines. But as every schoolchild knows, other American forces fired from behind cover as they fell back when confronted with superior Red Coat formations. Some legendary local commanders emerged. Francis Marion, the “Swamp Fox,” disrupted British control of the Carolinas with surprise attacks and unexpected maneuvers. Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys kept the Red Coats off balance with hit-and-run assaults in New England. These unconventional leaders waged an insurgency against an army of occupation that demanded loyalty to the Crown and payment to George III’s treasury.

Decades later, the American Civil War witnessed a host of irregular warfare practitioners on both sides of the four-year conflict. These fighters operated behind the lines of the conventional infantry and cavalry forces. The renegades raided, disrupted governance, and tied down disproportionate numbers of regular forces who strove to kill or capture their tormentors. John Mosby and his Mosby’s Rangers, as well as Nathan Bedford Forrest and his raiders, carved out bloody reputations as effective tacticians of guerrilla warfare in the cause of the Confederate States. From the Union’s regular army came such scorched-earth commanders as Philip Sheridan, who pillaged and burned the Shenandoah Valley, and William Tecumseh Sherman, who laid waste to the Deep South in his infamous March to the Sea.

After the Civil War, the U.S. Army turned its attention back toward the untamed forests and plains in the West to secure a continental passage to California. Irregular-fighting tactics played a prominent role in the westward conquest of the American continent until near the end of the nineteenth century. Conflicts raged against the indigenous inhabitants as land-seeking settlers streamed from the Eastern Seaboard to the interior plains. Most engagements were small-unit actions in which the U.S. Army borrowed American Indian tactics of stealth, surprise, and ambush. Not all the engagements ended in a U.S. victory. General George Custer’s defeat at the Little Bighorn, a loss born of hubris, poor planning, and tactical errors, has served as a cautionary lesson for students of war ever since 1876.

The conclusion of the so-called Indian Wars marked the eclipse of the irregular-fighting capacity among U.S. military forces for nearly a quarter of a century. The American traditions of frontier warfare and inherent Yankee ingenuity, however, are traits that must not be dismissed without brief reference. These frontier soldiers possessed the qualities of stealth, surprise, and self-reliance that later generations of Special Operations Forces would draw on and incorporate into the present-day antiterrorism campaign and counterinsurgency operations.

Not until the Spanish-American War would U.S. ground forces wage a modern-day counterinsurgency against guerrillas. The Philippine War (1899–1902) found the United States on the receiving end of an insurgency fought by a determined band of Filipinos for the right of independence against colonial-type rule from Washington. Ultimately, the United States prevailed in its counterinsurgency campaign by a mixture of innovative techniques and military competency.10 Afterward, the U.S. military occupied Haiti in an operation that turned into an early version of nation building on the impoverished island. The Marine Corps soon found itself embroiled in a string of small conflicts in Cuba, Honduras, Nicaragua, and the Dominican Republic. Marines wrote of their experiences in the “Banana Wars” in a series of articles, which were distilled into their encyclopedic Small Wars Manual in 1940, a classic handbook for security operations in underdeveloped lands.

The lessons learned from the Philippines and Caribbean interventions were overshadowed by the mammoth conventional world wars of the twentieth century. World War I’s trench warfare swept away the lingering familiarity with irregular fighting. Counterinsurgency proficiency no longer seemed relevant with the introduction of biplanes, tanks, and massed infantry charges across no-man’s-lands in the teeth of machine gun fire. The toll in lives was so steep that the war did seem to be a harbinger of lasting peace. After all, the war had been fought to end wars. Immediately following World War I, the United States demobilized its land forces and looked inward to the Roaring Twenties and then the Great Depression. In a short time, though, hypernationalism, rampant militarism, and wicked ideologies stalked the European and Asian landscapes, drawing America into a second world conflagration. This time, however, the events during World War II prompted some American leaders to turn to irregular warfare tactics.

[bigdog]

https://www.amazon.com/Washingtons-Spies-Story-Americas-First/dp/0553383299

[Crafty_Dog]

A phenomenal true story!

The TV series on this is actually quite good.

[bigdog]

https://www.cyberscoop.com/nsa-morale-down-keith-alexander-mike-rogers/

[Crafty_Dog]

That is quite a pay disparity; a dynamic similar to what SF operators can make still fighting the fight as contractors.

I would presume the Nat. Sec. Advisor (another NSA acronym, this could get confusing!) and former NSA head Flynn is well apprised of this issue.  It seems quite plausible to assume he will have President Trump's ear on this.

[bigdog]

Small note: Flynn was DIA.

[Crafty_Dog]

Yes you are quite correct-- thank you for the catch Big Dog!

[Crafty_Dog]

http://thehill.com/homenews/309897-bolton-questions-if-russian-hacks-were-false-flag#.WE4omYPtuIY.facebook

[ccp]

But, “if you think the Russians did this, then why did they leave fingerprints?” that led the CIA to its conclusion, Bolton questioned.

This point has been raised before.  Anyone as sophisticated as the Russians who could do this, one might logically think, might also be able to cover their tracks.
I brought this point up earlier (obviously my good friend John reads my posts) that there are other entities that would have wanted to influence the election with one sided release of, and not let us forget, truthful information on one political side.

The Right should with EVERY breath be sure to include that the information from whomever was all true.
Re focus the point the Dems and Billiary have themselves to blame for their corruption - not the messenger.

[Crafty_Dog]

The DNC (and RNC) servers are, like Hillary's server, private servers.  May we assume the US govt servers dedicated to state secrets and intel are more secure?  I sure hope so!!!

Yet our enemies have regularly penetrated our governments systems-- witness e.g. the seizure of the highly personal records of literally millions of federal employees by , , , well, do we even know?  (Yet somehow the Russians left tracks getting into the easier to crack private servers of the DNC)  Sen. McCain today is wondering if we even know whether our military satellites are secure.  There is good reason to wonder if our infrastructure has been penetrated, and sits awaiting highly disruptive commands at our enemies' convenience.

But we only worry when the Dems claim to have been hurt in an election because the Truth about their action was revealed?

[Crafty_Dog]

Second post:

IIRC during the Bush 43 years when President Bush was trying to build an alliance to pressure Iran to stop its nuke program the CIA unexpectedly and oddly came out with a study purporting to find that Iran had dropped its nuke program.  Bush's effort to build collective sanctions was lastingly damaged , , , but then it came out that the CIA study was wrong and may have been acting politically with the odd findings of its study.

Could someone please help me find this?

It could be very useful now in PE Trump's challenge of the CIA's purported finding of Russian favoritism.

[ccp]

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/25/world/middleeast/us-agencies-see-no-move-by-iran-to-build-a-bomb.html

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-02-20/cia-s-nuclear-bomb-sting-said-to-spur-review-in-iran-arms-case

reports of CIA claiming  Iran stopped nuclear bomb acquisition in 2003 and later we hear that the deal stops them from doing it.  And we also hear about stutnik .  FRankly we hear a lot of shit.  Who really knows?


http://armscontrolcenter.org/the-real-facts-on-the-iran-nuclear-negotiations/

[Crafty_Dog]

The first of those is quite on point and the second contains fascinating info that I did not know.  The third link is not directly on point but a good summary of the case for the Agreement.  Thank you very much.

[Crafty_Dog]

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/442928/donald-trump-intelligence-agencies-reorganization?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Daily%20Trending%20Email%20Reoccurring-%20Monday%20to%20Thursday%202016-12-09&utm_term=NR5PM%20Actives

[Crafty_Dog]

Third post

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/12/john-bolton-russia-hack-a-false-flag-232490

[Crafty_Dog]

Fourth post:

A FB post of mine responding to a friend indignant about "Russian meddling in our election" and the apparent lack for concern about this on the Trump side:

 A few questions:

a) As Bolton asks "If you think the Russians did this, then why did they leave fingerprints?" In other words, there remains the false flag question

b) The Russians and Chinese and the Iranians and the North Koreans and the teenage boy who hacked the CIA director do it to penetrate our infrastructure, steal our trade secrets, steal our military secrets, and so forth -- so why has Obama done jack shit about this? Isn't this even more important?

c) The NY Times revealed illegally hacked/stolen tax records/financials from Trump and this was understood to be part of the game.

Assuming for the sake of the argument, that this was the Russians hacking into the DNC's private server, were we to close our eyes? Again, the alleged interference was the dissemination of true information concerning Democratic skullduggery. What would your response be if the NY Times received and published the hacked info?

Given our history of Radio Free Europe etc and our meddling in numerous elections around the world (including the Israeli elections by Obama and commentary by Hillary on the Russian "elections" btw), what is the nature of our argument viz the Russians? Is it an assertion of raw power on our part? Or is it something else? If so, what is the nature of our argument with the Russians. Imagine yourself to be the American Secretary of State having a meeting with Putin. Exactly what is it that you tell him?

Does your argument mean that we were wrong to have had Radio Free Europe?

[bigdog]

Am I to understand that the conservatives on this forum are willing to excuse Russian interference into the U.S. presidential election? If I am reading this correctly, consider me stunned.

[G M]

Am I to understand that the conservatives on this forum are willing to excuse Russian interference into the U.S. presidential election? If I am reading this correctly, consider me stunned.

I don't think you are reading this correctly.

[bigdog]

Am I to understand that the conservatives on this forum are willing to excuse Russian interference into the U.S. presidential election? If I am reading this correctly, consider me stunned.

I don't think you are reading this correctly.

OK. Good. Thanks, GM. I'll go back to the several threads where this is being discussed.

[DougMacG]

Am I to understand that the conservatives on this forum are willing to excuse Russian interference into the U.S. presidential election? If I am reading this correctly, consider me stunned.

I've been out of town, just catching up on this today.

I oppose Russian interference into the U.S. presidential election (for the record).  i'm not aware that is what happened.  Still looking for facts.  

I also opposed Obama administration and US inference in the Israeli elections.  I oppose the illegal Saudi and Qatar and other foreign entities buying influence here with the losing campaign.

Much of the mainstream discussion of this story does not match the actual report, and the actual report was not definitive,  got another part of it wrong, RNC hacked, and the CIA confirmation was not fully confirmed by the CIA.  See quotes below.  

I'm seeing a lot of hypocrisy on the other side.   For example, where was their objection to the Israeli interference and where was the outrage when Russia hacked our White House?  Who called for an investigation in October 2014??  Hope to not commit hypocrisy on this of my own; if there is credible reason to investigate further, do so.

There were at least 4 sources to the Hillary emails.  Wikileaks was one.  Also the FBI, the (kerry) State Department and Hillary herself.  Didn't she promise that we would see all her work related product long before now?  Wasn't it court ordered, or promised under oath to a committee of Congress?

THAT DOES NOT EXCUSE THE CRIMINALITY OR ACT OF WAR OF RUSSIA (or whoever hacked) AND/OR WIKILEAKS.  Nor does our lax and incompetent security excuse their crimes.  Investigate and prosecute.

Wikileaks has said with certainty Russia was not the source. They have been as reliable as the other sources mentioned.  The CIA is not linking the hack directly with certainty to the Kremlin either, that we know.  

I cringed in the campaign when Donald Trump seem to encourage Russian hacking even though I recall it was hedged in parsing.  He was wrong to do that and I oppose it.  Yet we know our enemies and rivals spy and hack, with best results on unsecured networks.  Better that this information came out early and often than to have it held back, bought, sold, and used as blackmail against a new administration, IMHO.  Had Hillary released her emails, there was nothing to leak.  Had Debbie Wasserman Schultz not assisted and steered the nomination to Hillary, there was nothing to leak.  Had Hillary's closest associates kept their work product and confidential communications on secure government servers, there was nothing to leak.  And how is it that John Podesta still has a job?  Unbelievable that she stood silently by him and no one called for his resignation. 

I can't see a reason why Putin or Russia would prefer Trump over Hillary, so the underlying motive of that theory makes no sense to me.  The motive to de-legitimize the election outcome is all around us, whether it was driving this or not.  

As the internet gets less and less secure, we should note that our outgoing administration gave up control of aspects of the internet to the self described "global multistakeholder community" who mostly can't tell friend from foe from a US point of view, or care.  I would put fixing security flaws of the internet on a higher priority than ceding authority.

Though I oppose enemies around the globe committing espionage here, the communications hacked and leaked include material we were already promised and entitled to.  These people who committed and tried to hide criminal activities were exposed.  What is the competing argument that we should never have seen the behind the scenes corruption that took place?  Punish the hackers but expose the corruption.

The report of this is a leak of its own.  

Is this the original story that started the stir?  Was there any new information in it?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/obama-orders-review-of-russian-hacking-during-presidential-campaign/2016/12/09/31d6b300-be2a-11e6-94ac-3d324840106c_story.html?utm_term=.aa8849eb591c

A NY Times story that followed:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/11/us/politics/cia-judgment-intelligence-russia-hacking-evidence.html?_r=0

From the reporting:  "...said a senior U.S. official briefed on an intelligence presentation made to U.S. senators."  (A "senior US official" includes some unreliable people, like a guy who told me I could keep my healthcare...)

"it was an analysis of what many believe is overwhelming circumstantial evidence — evidence that others feel does not support firm judgments ..."  (The conclusion might be true  and it might be false.)

"The dispute cuts to core realities of intelligence analysis. Judgments are often made in a fog of uncertainty, are sometimes based on putting together shards of a mosaic that do not reveal a full picture, and can always be affected by human biases." (in other words, no definitive facts.)

As Bolton said, finding their fingerprints on it could be a contrary indicator.

The argument made by those wanting the Electors briefed on this (not Bigdog) is that this election was hacked, which to me implies a vote counting exploitation, which is not alleged in the reports.   What happened instead was that truths were wrongfully revealed to the voters that were intended to be concealed.  

It was our lack of knowledge of key facts, like cheating on debate questions, that was creating election interference before it was exposed, IMHO.  Does that excuse enemy hacking and illegal leaking?  No.  Not even the leaking of this alleged CIA briefing.

[Crafty_Dog]

Big Dog:

Said without snark or sarcasm-- you are smart, well-educated man who has rubbed elbows with major players. 

Thought experiment:  You are the US Ambassador to Russia and you have a meeting with Putin or Lavarov (sp?  the foreign minister guy)  You believe the idea that the Russians hacked both DNC and RNC, and assume that there was the political/moral equivalent of the DNC/Podesta emails in the RNC emails and that the Russians chose to put their thumb on the scales in favor of Trump.

What do you say in that meeting?

[G M]

https://pjmedia.com/rogerlsimon/2016/12/11/the-democrats-nauseating-putin-hypocrisy/?singlepage=true

The Democrats' Nauseating Putin Hypocrisy
By Roger L Simon December 11, 2016


The degree to which the Democrats have changed their tune on Vladimir Putin almost on a proverbial dime is either black comic or nauseating or both, depending on how you want to look at it. Whatever it is, it is a extremely obvious example of how party politics is conducted in our era (possibly always).

If your side does it, it's diplomatic genius bound to yield peace in our time. If the other side does the exact same thing, it's a horrendous mistake bordering on treason likely to cause a national calamity, if not global Armageddon.

If there were any decent, even semi-even-handed political science departments left in our country (okay, maybe there are one or two), what we might call the Democrats' "Great Putin Flip Flop" would be a textbook case for classroom discussion.

Let's start at the beginning, March 2009, but a few weeks after the first inauguration of Barack Obama, when a smiling Hillary Clinton presented Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov the red "reset" button, signaling the arrival of a supposed era of peace between the two countries.  The new administration was greeted with hosannas for their great symbolism from their loyal claque at the New York Times, Washington Post, NBC, et al., who were oblivious, needless to say, that the word "peregruzka" printed in Cyrillic on the button, thought to mean "reset" in Russian by the linguistic geniuses in our State Department, was actually the word for "overload."
Sponsored

No wonder Lavrov has such a quizzical look on his face in the all the photos. (Imagine what the reaction of the press would have been had Trump's putative secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, done something similar. Media lynch mob?) Much more important, however,  was the extreme ignorance of the Russian character, from the Czars through Lenin and Stalin and on into the present, evinced by such a naive, almost childish, "reset." Throughout the East, of which Russia has always been a signal part despite intermittent yearnings for the West, a powerful leader has always been the center of national and tribal life.  Silly, symbolic gestures like “reset” buttons are seen as weakness, not compromises or attempts at global comity. They are something to exploit.

Obama, Russia, the Election, and a Visitor From Mars

Barack Obama, however, went on undeterred. The U.S. president, in South Korea in March 2012 for a nuclear security summit, was caught on open mic with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev confidentially informing the Russian president, as if Medvedev would be so stupid as not to know, that  "after my election, I will have more flexibility." Obama wanted that news conveyed to Medvedev's boss Putin so the true Russian president would give Obama some "space." Only Barack clearly didn't realize Vladmir was a capo di tutti capi and would behave like one -- not, say, a Republican senator from a swing state who could be swayed with a "chummy presidential phone call."

We all know how it turned out.  Putin read Obama well. Within a couple of years Russia had retaken the Crimea, destabilized Ukraine, and, making matters so bad that even the namby-pamby John Kerry has admitted it was a mistake, Obama's red line on Assad's use of chemical weapons had been crossed with our president doing absolutely nothing about it, allegedly in order not to offend dear Vlad, who was making him "promises."  The Russian air force was reputedly going to help us extinguish ISIS  -- or what Obama for reasons unknown insists on calling ISIL -- but ended up somehow misfiring and hitting our quasi-allies in the field, helping rend them at this point virtually non-existent, while Assad is now marching into Aleppo and has Syria, forever a Russian client, practically all to his despotic self again.

And then there's the little matter of Iran, also a client of Russia when Putin wants it to be, financing as much mayhem as it can from Iraq to Yemen and beyond (they are believed to have camps in Venezuela), arming the terrorist thugs of Hezbollah, all with unbelievable sums of money donated by Obama for an inexplicable and unwelcome nuclear deal hardly a single American understands and about which Vladimir Putin knows far more than any member of the U.S. Congress (which never had a chance to vote on it anyway).

Has any American president done more for Russia for less reason?  (At least FDR united with Stalin to defeat Hitler.)

Obviously not, although the same media claque (aka court eunuchs) aren't even mentioning this as they all go into a full-tilt attempt, with CIA help, to malign Donald Trump as the next American president selected (but not apparently elected) by the hackers of the Russian Republic.


Bolton: DNC Hack May Have Been a 'False Flag' Operation

Do I believe Trump actually was the Russians' preference? That would be mighty optimistic on their part. How could they do better than Obama, considering the last eight years?  And why not just as well elect a weakened Hillary? My guess is, if (big if) they were the instigators of the hacking of the embarrassingly cyber-incompetent DNC  (what is wrong with these people -- it's 2016), they were equal-opportunity hackers, anxious to create confusion and finger-pointing (they succeed with that), rather than specific results that would be hard to control.

This would be consistent with Russian/Soviet behavior over generations.  For those who have not read it, one of the best places to understand this is Disinformation, a remarkable book by sometime PJ Media contributor Ion Pacepa, one of the highest-ranking defectors from the East.  (He once ran Romanian intelligence under Ceausescu.) Mandatory reading on a similar topic is Whittaker Chambers' extraordinary memoir Witness, with its stories of the Soviet infiltration of our government way back to the 1920s.

The question we should all be asking about the CIA's sudden revelation of online tampering with our election by the Russians is how come it took our intelligence agencies so long to figure this out?  That's assuming it's all not a "false flag" operation, as John Bolton is alleging. (I wouldn't bet against him.)  Nevertheless, why are we so permeable to anyone and everyone? Why did John Podesta fall for a phishing scheme most fourteen-year olds would have avoided? What's wrong with our cyber-defenses? Didn't we invent the Internet? Al Gore, where are you?

Well, we know.

But let me ask one last question whose answer should be evident to any sentient being not a member of the editorial board of The New York Times. Who do you think would better understand and deal with Vladimir Putin -- Barack Obama or Donald Trump?

Yes, the KGB  and its successors know the difference between a community organizer and a CEO.  Don't we all?

[G M]

Am I to understand that the conservatives on this forum are willing to excuse Russian interference into the U.S. presidential election? If I am reading this correctly, consider me stunned.

Do you have any evidence to back up the assertion, Bigdog?

December 11, 2016
The great Russia-hacked-the-election con
By Thomas Lifson

Most of the American media are “reporting” that President Obama ordered an investigation of “Russian hacking of our election,” and that the intelligence community “confirms” that it happened. Yet there is not yet any evidence that Russia hacked the election or was responsible for the DNC email hacks. None.

When self-interested people and their media allies proclaim something is true, and form a chorus that drowns out any other views, I always suspect a con. It is so easy for the Left, since it controls education and the media, to sell any tale it wishes, from global warming to Michelle Obama as a glamorous fashion icon. Most people will simply fall in line because it is too much trouble and risky to dispute what is regarded as a received truth by the power elite.

Glenn Greenwald debunks the media rush to proclaim fact-free conclusions as if they were certainties.

    THE WASHINGTON POST late Friday night published an explosive story that, in many ways, is classic American journalism of the worst sort: The key claims are based exclusively on the unverified assertions of anonymous officials, who in turn are disseminating their own claims about what the CIA purportedly believes, all based on evidence that remains completely secret.

    These unnamed sources told the Post that “the CIA has concluded in a secret assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win the presidency, rather than just to undermine confidence in the U.S. electoral system.” The anonymous officials also claim that “intelligence agencies have identified individuals with connections to the Russian government who provided WikiLeaks with thousands of hacked emails” from both the DNC and John Podesta’s email account. Critically, none of the actual evidence for these claims is disclosed; indeed, the CIA’s “secret assessment” itself remains concealed.

    A second leak from last night, this one given to the New York Times, cites other anonymous officials as asserting that “the Russians hacked the Republican National Committee’s computer systems in addition to their attacks on Democratic organizations, but did not release whatever information they gleaned from the Republican networks.” But that NYT story says that “it is also far from clear that Russia’s original intent was to support Mr. Trump, and many intelligence officials — and former officials in Mrs. Clinton’s campaign — believe that the primary motive of the Russians was to simply disrupt the campaign and undercut confidence in the integrity of the vote.”

Why it’s just as settled as the science that told us we wouldn’t be seeing any more snow, right about 2016 or so.  The Post did manage to allow that there might be a teeny-weeny bit of doubt about entirely unimportant details, though:

    Deep down in its article, the Post notes — rather critically — that “there were minor disagreements among intelligence officials about the agency’s assessment, in part because some questions remain unanswered.” Most importantly, the Post adds that “intelligence agencies do not have specific intelligence showing officials in the Kremlin ‘directing’ the identified individuals to pass the Democratic emails to WikiLeaks.”

Where is the skepticism? The Russian hacking scenario is an excuse for the Democrats to explain away their loss without blaming themselves or their candidate, and it serves to delegitimize the next president – a bad thing for the country.

My own suspicion is that an insider at the DNC leaked the emails. There is as much evidence for the public to see supporting that assertion as there is for the claim that the Russians did it.

Hat tip: Clarice Feldman

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2016/12/the_great_russiahackedtheelection_con_.html

[G M]

*Anyone remember the good old days, when anyone who protested Obama getting donations from overseas was raaaaaaaacist? It's only a scandal when dems lose elections.*


http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2012/05/dubious-donations-gangster-government-edition.php

Posted on May 3, 2012 by Scott Johnson in 2012 Presidential Election, Obama Administration Scandals
Dubious donations (gangster government edition)

We have published a series of posts on Obama’s “dubious donations” — i.e., the Obama campaign’s invitation of fraudulent and illegal giving through the disabling of basic credit card/debit card verification devices. I wrote about the Obama campaign fundraising operation in the October 2008 New York Post column “Dubious donations.” The Post subhead observed: “Bam’s Web site invites fraud.”

The Washington Post reported on the matter two days later in the story “Obama accepting untraceable donations,” by Matthew Mosk. Mosk quoted Obama campaign officials on their practices. According to them, everything was copacetic.

It having worked so well the first time around, and it having aroused so little interest among the mainstream media, Obama is doing it again. So we have reported in the series of posts beginning with “Dubious donations (2012 edition).” There is a story here, but you’d never know it if you get your news from the mainstream media.

In his Washington Examiner column today, also posted here at NRO, Michael Barone picks up where we left off:

    It has been reported that the Obama campaign this year, as in 2008, has disabled or chosen not to use AVS in screening contributions made by credit card.

    That doesn’t sound very important. But it’s evidence of a modus operandi that strikes me as thuggish.

    AVS stands for Address Verification System. It’s the software that checks whether the name of the cardholder matches his or her address.

    If a campaign doesn’t use AVS, it can wind up accepting contributions from phony names or accepting contributions from foreigners, both of which are illegal.

    The 2008 Obama campaign pocketed money from “John Galt, 1957 Ayn Rand Lane, Galts Gulch CO 99999” and $174,000 from a woman in Missouri who told reporters she had given nothing and had never been billed. Presumably she would have noticed an extra charge of $174,000.

Barone continues:

    The Obama campaign is evidently happy to pocket the money. After all, this is the president who, according to political scientist Brendan Doherty, has appeared at more fundraisers in three and a half years than his six predecessors did in 35 years.

    Obama has been to at least two fundraisers just in my apartment building. I often see police and Secret Service blocking traffic for a block around Washington’s posh Jefferson Hotel at 16th and M streets.

    Obama talks a good game on transparency and openness, but he’s ready to flout the law by avoiding AVS and to break his high-minded campaign promises.

    In the 2008 campaign cycle, he promised to take public financing for the general election. He broke that promise when it became apparent he could raise far more money on his own.

    During much of this cycle, he’s been criticizing Republican super-PACs as a perversion of the political process. But when he saw that Republicans might be able to raise as much money as Democrats, he broke that promise too and authorized Cabinet members to appear at fundraisers for the super-PAC headed by his former deputy press secretary.

    Democrats outraised Republicans in 2004 and 2008. Evidently Obama considers it grossly unfair that they might not do so this year. That’s not how things work in Chicago.

Barone being Barone, he assimilates Obama’s dubious donations to a larger theme. The theme is that of Obama’s Chicago-style politics. Barone himself dubbed it “Gangster Government” in a May 2009 column that I can’t find online at the moment.

He concludes today’s column with a return to the dubious donations: “Other campaigns have not disabled their AVS systems. But then their candidates are not from Chicago. Obama likes to talk about the need for civility. He just doesn’t like to practice it.”

UPDATE: Reader Jeryl Bier of Speak With Authority forwards the link to the May 2009 Examiner column in which Barone first identified the Obama administration’s practice of “Gangster Government.”

[G M]

https://westernrifleshooters.files.wordpress.com/2016/12/everyone-i-dont-like-is-a-russian.jpg

[G M]

https://static.pjmedia.com/instapundit/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/putininfluence.jpg

[G M]

http://hotair.com/archives/2016/12/13/reuters-odni-isnt-completely-buying-cia-take-on-russia-hacking-motives-either/

Reuters: ODNI isn’t completely buying CIA take on Russia hacking motives, either
POSTED AT 8:01 AM ON DECEMBER 13, 2016 BY ED MORRISSEY

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Hacking occurred? Check. Russians involved? Check. An operation by the Russian government to elect Donald Trump? Er … not so fast. After leaks that the CIA believes that the Russians deliberately set out to crown Trump set off days of angry demands and accusations, Reuters reports that the highest levels of the intelligence structure don’t share that view. Instead, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence appears to side with the FBI — that the CIA hasn’t produced evidence of motive for the hacks:

The overseers of the U.S. intelligence community have not embraced a CIA assessment that Russian cyber attacks were aimed at helping Republican President-elect Donald Trump win the 2016 election, three American officials said on Monday.

While the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) does not dispute the CIA’s analysis of Russian hacking operations, it has not endorsed their assessment because of a lack of conclusive evidence that Moscow intended to boost Trump over Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton, said the officials, who declined to be named. …

The CIA conclusion was a “judgment based on the fact that Russian entities hacked both Democrats and Republicans and only the Democratic information was leaked,” one of the three officials said on Monday.

“(It was) a thin reed upon which to base an analytical judgment,” the official added.
Reince Priebus emphatically denies that Republicans got hacked at all. As RNC chair, one would assume he’d know if it happened, but as Donald Trump’s new chief of staff, he’d certainly have some interest in denying it now, too. Senator John McCain alluded to that when insisting on a Senate investigation, saying that just “because Mr. Priebus says that doesn’t mean it’s true.” True, but considering that this appears to be the entire fulcrum of the CIA’s analysis, perhaps that should be the first point either corroborated or debunked in the upcoming hearings.

This doesn’t make a lot of sense anyway. First off, as Gabriel Malor points out, the hacks in question started well before anyone thought Trump would win the nomination, let alone the general election:

View image on Twitter
View image on Twitter
 Follow
 Gabriel Malor @gabrielmalor
An issue here is the DNC hacks started before Trump won the primary. One of them LONG before.
12:41 PM - 12 Dec 2016
  133 133 Retweets   116 116 likes
18h
 Gabriel Malor @gabrielmalor
An issue here is the DNC hacks started before Trump won the primary. One of them LONG before. pic.twitter.com/L2GD99YCmL
 Follow
 Gabriel Malor @gabrielmalor
That image is from the independent report DNC commissioned about the hacks.
12:41 PM - 12 Dec 2016
  4 4 Retweets   14 14 likes
To believe that the entire exercise was designed to elect Trump, one would have to see evidence that Russians were hacking Trump’s Republican rivals in the primaries. No such attacks have ever been noted, although some of them would certainly prefer that explanation than the reality of how they lost to Trump. Several of them attacked Trump for his attitude toward Putin, so if these candidates saw hacking attempts from Russia coming at them, it seems almost unbelievable that they would have remained quiet about it. A DNC hack would be a really indirect way of electing any Republican, let alone Trump.

Perhaps one can express this in the negative — that the Russians wanted to keep Hillary Clinton from getting elected rather than wanting to boost Trump. But does that make any sense? Hillary was going to keep Barack Obama’s foreign policy largely in place, under which Putin and Russia had managed to do pretty much what they wanted in the Middle East and in eastern Europe. Perhaps Trump’s foreign-policy comments made him more attractive, but those didn’t start coming out until well after the Russians began penetrating the DNC in summer 2015. Hillary was the Secretary of State that offered up the “reset button” to Sergei Lavrov, and Obama was promising Dmitry Medvedev “more flexibility” after the 2012 election while Hillary was still at Foggy Bottom. Hillary was the architect of Obama’s incoherent “Arab Spring” response, which opened the door to Russian military adventurism in Syria and an overt military alliance with Iran. Hillary and the Obama administration barely even mentioned Russia as a threat until Trump gained traction in the primaries.

Let’s also remember what was going on at State under Hillary’s management. Russians took control of a significant portion of American uranium in the Uranium One deal, approved on Hillary’s watch while her husband Bill took in $500,000 from the Russian bankers involved. That was also accompanied by over two million dollars in donations to the Clinton Foundation. Putin seemed to find the Clintons pretty easy partners, as long as he could launder cash to them through speeches and the foundation.

Finally, if Putin really wanted to torpedo Hillary Clinton, they had one sure and direct way of accomplishing it: the secret e-mail server. If the DNC and (allegedly) the RNC got penetrated by Russian intelligence in order to manipulate American elections and governance, does anyone have any doubt at all that Meemaw’s home-spun e-mail server (Now Wiped With Cloths!) remained inviolate? Once Hillary and her lawyers deleted over 32,000 e-mails that were supposedly “personal,” the FSB or whichever agency was involved could have leaked those all day long. They could have begun leaking them in 2014, when Hillary clearly was putting the band back together for a White House run and the existence of the server wasn’t yet publicly known. Do we really believe that the Russians penetrated non-governmental systems like the DNC, RNC (allegedly), and the Center for American Progress but totally missed the Secretary of State’s unprotected communications over four years? Come on, man.

The Wall Street Journal isn’t convinced by the CIA’s logic, or their track record:

Somewhere in the Kremlin Vladimir Putin must be laughing. The Russian strongman almost certainly sought to undermine public confidence in American democracy this year, and as the Obama Administration leaves town it is playing into his hands.

That’s the real story behind the weekend reports that U.S. intelligence services have concluded that Russia intervened to assist Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. The stories are attributed to “senior administration” officials who won’t go on the record but assert murky details that are impossible to verify without seeing the evidence. …

If the CIA really does have “high confidence” about Mr. Putin’s motives, this would also be the first time in recent history. These are the same seers who missed the Russian invasion of Crimea, missed the incursion into southern Ukraine, and missed Mr. Putin’s foray into Syria. The intelligence community also claimed “high confidence” in 2008 for its judgment that Iran had suspended its nuclear-weapons program. That judgment conveniently shut down any further Bush Administration action against Iran. But a year later, in the Obama Administration, our highly confident spooks disclosed Iran’s secret Fordo underground facility.
Hopefully the Congressional investigations to come will shed much more light on the hacks. If the Russians used the hacks to fuel Wikileaks and attempt to manipulate voters, we have to respond to that and make sure it doesn’t happen in the future. But the evidence for that conclusion had better be based on more evidence than what we’re seeing so far — evidence so weak that even the ODNI isn’t buying it from their own CIA.

[G M]

More Intelligence Officials Are Disputing CIA’s Claims About Russian Hacking

CHUCK ROSS
Reporter
10:30 PM 12/12/2016

The CIA’s assessment that Russian hackers intervened during the presidential election specifically to help Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton relies on a “thin reed” of evidence, an official with the U.S. intelligence community says.

The official, who is with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), is one of three sources who told Reuters that the CIA’s assessment, which was reported over the weekend, is flawed.

The DNI sources told Reuters that the intelligence community does not quibble with the CIA’s conclusion that Russia engaged in a major cyber attack operation against the U.S. But they say that there is not enough evidence to say that the attacks were specifically designed to help elect Trump president rather than to merely insert chaos into the election.

“ODNI is not arguing that the agency (CIA) is wrong, only that they can’t prove intent,” one of the three officials told Reuters. “Of course they can’t, absent agents in on the decision-making in Moscow.”

Federal authorities have said for months that they believe Russia is behind cyber attacks that have largely been directed at Democrats and the Clinton campaign. Many of the hacked documents, including those from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, were provided to and published by WikiLeaks.

The CIA arrived at its conclusion “based on the fact that Russian entities hacked both Democrats and Republicans and only the Democratic information was leaked,” one of the officials told Reuters.

“(It was) a thin reed upon which to base an analytical judgment,” the official added.

The DNI officials aren’t the first to question the CIA determination.

On Sunday, The Washington Post reported that an FBI counterintelligence official disagreed with the CIA’s conclusions during a briefing with Republican and Democratic members of the House Select Committee on Intelligence last week.

Despite the FBI’s refusal to accept the CIA theory, Podesta issued a statement on Monday calling on DNI director James Clapper to provide an intelligence briefing to a group of Electoral College electors before their Dec. 19 vote for president.

“We now know that the CIA has determined Russia’s interference in our elections was for the purpose of electing Donald Trump. This should distress every American,” wrote Podesta.

The move was sparked by a letter sent by 10 electors, led by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s daughter, calling on Clapper to provide the briefing.



Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2016/12/12/more-intelligence-officials-are-disputing-cias-claims-about-russian-hacking/

[Crafty_Dog]

A post I made on my FB page this morning:

 Arlan Sanford

Thanks for the update. As you work on it, this may help: I am NOT "supporting the Russians in this"!!!

As best as I can tell what is in play here is that someone got access to John Podesta's personal email and thus those of his associates on the campaign through a basic phishing scam and that someone got into the DNC computer through some idiot that had a password of , , , drumroll , , , "password".

Do I have this right?

Was this the Russians?

FBI Director Comey formally stated that there was a "high degree of probability" (or some words to that effect) that foreign state actors had accessed Hillary's emails (including presumably the 30,000 that she illegally destroyed after they had been subpoenaed) AND THAT THEY HAD DONE SO WITHOUT LEAVING ANY TRACKS.

And so now we are to believe that, as Ambassador Bolton has pointed out, the Russians did what an anonymous source in the CIA is alleging but decided to leave tracks?!? I am a VERY low tech person, but this leaves considerable room for doubt, yes?

I am also pointing out that far more serious cyber invasions have been going on for quite some time, apparently with near zero response from the US (Obama) The North Koreans devastated an American Hollywood Studio (Sony?). The Chinese (IIRC) seized several million records of people who had applied for security clearances. There are many more examples, but these three come to mind.

That Obama has not bestirred himself on behalf of our nation until his preferred successor lost leaves me disgusted, but I confess, not surprised.

Hillary (yep-- here she comes ) conducted our nation's diplomatic correspondence on her private server (with the back up system literally in a bathroom closet somewhere in Colorado!!!) in a CRIMINAL conspiracy with a corrupt "pay to play" scheme for personal enrichment at its core to evade our government's laws regarding keeping records of its employees' acts and the related FOIA laws.

(Not to mention her hiring Debbie Wasserman Schulz after she lost her gig at DNC for cheating and dirty tricking Bernie Sanders!)

It takes a truly psychopathic level of chutzpah for this woman to now attempt to besmirch the results of the election-- and even today I hear that the same John Podesta is trying for an electoral coup via the electoral college!!!.

I am hoping for much better from Trump-- precisely because our cyber security is as important as it appear to be exposed-- but Podesta getting phished and the DNC having "password" as its password are not really examples of this, are they now?.

His selection of Gen. Mike Flynn for National Security Advisor seems quite promising in this regard in that he was the head of the DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency) , , , until his discontents with Obama's weakness came to a head. Having been head of the DIA would seem to be an ideal background for rectifying the incredible vulnerability of our systems (private sector, public sector, military)

Also, I see that Trump met yesterday with Carly Fiorina, who would be a very good pick for improving our cyber security. This would be the second time that she has been called upon to do this.

Indeed the first time she did this was one of the reasons I actually donated to her campaign early in the primaries-- so yes I have been following the cyber-security issue for quite some time now see e.g. on my forum:
http://dogbrothers.com/phpBB2/index.php?topic=1586.0
Please note that the thread began in 2008, so I quite a bit less than impressed at the situational ethics of Hillary (and Obama) in this regard.

Anyway, just a few things for you to consider as you compose your response.

[Crafty_Dog]

An Electoral College Coup
The Clinton campaign now suggests the election was rigged.
Dec. 12, 2016 7:49 p.m. ET

Only a few weeks ago Hillary Clinton’s campaign was denouncing Donald Trump as un-American for saying the election might be “rigged.” We criticized Mr. Trump at the time. But now that Mrs. Clinton has lost, her campaign is claiming the election really was rigged, albeit for Mr. Trump by Russian meddling, and it wants the Electoral College to stage what amounts to a coup.

That’s the only way to interpret the extraordinary statement Monday by Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta endorsing a special intelligence briefing for electors a week before they cast their ballots for President on Dec. 19. He released the statement hours after 10 members of the Electoral College sent a letter to Director of National Intelligence James Clapper seeking information on foreign interference in the election to judge if Mr. Trump “is fit to serve.” One of those electors is House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s daughter.

“The bipartisan electors’ letter raises very grave issues involving our national security. Electors have a solemn responsibility under the Constitution and we support their efforts to have their questions addressed,” Mr. Podesta said. “We now know that the CIA has determined Russia’s interference in our elections was for the purpose of electing Donald Trump. This should distress every American.”

What should really distress Americans is that the losers are trying to overturn the election results based on little more than anonymous leaks and innuendo. Whatever Russia’s hacking motives, there is no evidence that the emails it turned up were decisive to the election result. Mr. Podesta is citing a CIA judgment that Americans have never seen and whose findings are vaguely public only because one or more unidentified officials chose to relate them to a few reporters last week.

Much of the press is reporting these as the gospel truth, though it isn’t clear that the CIA’s judgment is even shared across the intelligence community. The FBI doesn’t share the CIA’s confidence about Russia’s hacking motive, and our sources say the evidence is thin for the CIA’s conclusion.

Yet Mr. Podesta’s demand is that those same unidentified leakers now give a secret briefing to the 538 electors, most of whom lack any experience in judging the nuances of intelligence. Those electors are then supposed to decide based on information Americans won’t have seen whether they should invalidate the results of an election in which more than 128 million voted. Even Vladimir Putin at his most devious couldn’t have imagined his cyber-spooks would provoke this much anti-democratic nonsense.

This effort is all the more pernicious because it poisons with partisanship the serious issue of foreign intelligence hacking, not least by the Russians. Foreign cyber-attacks have proliferated during the Obama years, but the President has never held any national government accountable. Even when officials fingered the Russians this summer for the hacks on the Democratic National Committee, Mr. Obama did nothing but wag a finger.

Yet now, at the end of his term, he has ordered a secret report on the election-related hacking to be on his desk before he leaves office on Jan. 20. Then the news of this report coincidentally leaks, along with the CIA’s new conclusion about Russia’s motive, a mere 11 days before the Electoral College votes. Did those leakers—probably including CIA Director and Obama confidant John Brennan—act with White House assent?

This political farce is compounded by a press corps that spent Monday demanding that GOP leaders in Congress say if they too support investigations into the Russian hacking. Never mind that the Senate and House intelligence committees, both led by Republicans, have been looking into the election-related hacking for months, often with far too little cooperation from the Obama Administration.

Then the press reports as major news the non-story that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has endorsed an intelligence probe that has long been underway. Talk about fake news.

The entire spectacle looks more like a Democratic attempt to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the election than it does serious concern about cyber-spying. Democrats must figure they can’t lose. They know the Electoral College isn’t likely to throw the election to Hillary Clinton, but the headlines can help undermine public support for Mr. Trump’s Presidency even before he takes office. And these folks blame Donald Trump for violating democratic “norms.”
 

[ccp]

"Only a few weeks ago Hillary Clinton’s campaign was denouncing Donald Trump as un-American for saying the election might be “rigged.”

As was every single jurnolister and the entire MSM and Obama.

"This political farce is compounded by a press corps that spent Monday demanding that GOP leaders in Congress say if they too support investigations into the Russian hacking"

and of course they find Lindsey Graham and John McCain merrily obliging and I see McConnell now doing so but for him at least,  I expect he is doing this more for show then for real.

"The entire spectacle looks more like a Democratic attempt to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the election than it does serious concern about cyber-spying. Democrats must figure they can’t lose. They know the Electoral College isn’t likely to throw the election to Hillary Clinton, but the headlines can help undermine public support for Mr. Trump’s Presidency even before he takes office. And these folks blame Donald Trump for violating democratic “norms.”

I would also specify that the Democrat attempt includes not only the eternal suspects such as Charley Schumer and Nancy Pelosi , but the same jurnolist and MSM and Obama frantically doing everything to de legitimize Trump. 

And now the soon to be ex CIC going off on racism , slavery, colonialism saying he could care less about what was in the emails because what is important only the Russia released them.

I predict he will be the biggest mouth ex Pres in history .  The LEFT will go to him day and night asking for the ON'es critiques of Trump.

[Crafty_Dog]

http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/the-administration/310140-if-russian-claws-dug-into-us-politics-obama-not-trump

[Crafty_Dog]

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/13/us/politics/russia-hack-election-dnc.html?emc=edit_ta_20161213&nlid=49641193&ref=cta&_r=0

The Perfect Weapon: How Russian Cyberpower Invaded the U.S.

By ERIC LIPTON, DAVID E. SANGER and SCOTT SHANEDEC. 13, 2016


WASHINGTON — When Special Agent Adrian Hawkins of the Federal Bureau of Investigation called the Democratic National Committee in September 2015 to pass along some troubling news about its computer network, he was transferred, naturally, to the help desk.

His message was brief, if alarming. At least one computer system belonging to the D.N.C. had been compromised by hackers federal investigators had named “the Dukes,” a cyberespionage team linked to the Russian government.

The F.B.I. knew it well: The bureau had spent the last few years trying to kick the Dukes out of the unclassified email systems of the White House, the State Department and even the Joint Chiefs of Staff, one of the government’s best-protected networks.

Yared Tamene, the tech-support contractor at the D.N.C. who fielded the call, was no expert in cyberattacks. His first moves were to check Google for “the Dukes” and conduct a cursory search of the D.N.C. computer system logs to look for hints of such a cyberintrusion. By his own account, he did not look too hard even after Special Agent Hawkins called back repeatedly over the next several weeks — in part because he wasn’t certain the caller was a real F.B.I. agent and not an impostor.


“I had no way of differentiating the call I just received from a prank call,” Mr. Tamene wrote in an internal memo, obtained by The New York Times, that detailed his contact with the F.B.I.

It was the cryptic first sign of a cyberespionage and information-warfare campaign devised to disrupt the 2016 presidential election, the first such attempt by a foreign power in American history. What started as an information-gathering operation, intelligence officials believe, ultimately morphed into an effort to harm one candidate, Hillary Clinton, and tip the election to her opponent, Donald J. Trump.

Like another famous American election scandal, it started with a break-in at the D.N.C. The first time, 44 years ago at the committee’s old offices in the Watergate complex, the burglars planted listening devices and jimmied a filing cabinet. This time, the burglary was conducted from afar, directed by the Kremlin, with spear-phishing emails and zeros and ones.
What is phishing?

Phishing uses an innocent-looking email to entice unwary recipients to click on a deceptive link, giving hackers access to their information or a network. In “spear-phishing,” the email is tailored to fool a specific person.

An examination by The Times of the Russian operation — based on interviews with dozens of players targeted in the attack, intelligence officials who investigated it and Obama administration officials who deliberated over the best response — reveals a series of missed signals, slow responses and a continuing underestimation of the seriousness of the cyberattack.

The D.N.C.’s fumbling encounter with the F.B.I. meant the best chance to halt the Russian intrusion was lost. The failure to grasp the scope of the attacks undercut efforts to minimize their impact. And the White House’s reluctance to respond forcefully meant the Russians have not paid a heavy price for their actions, a decision that could prove critical in deterring future cyberattacks.

The low-key approach of the F.B.I. meant that Russian hackers could roam freely through the committee’s network for nearly seven months before top D.N.C. officials were alerted to the attack and hired cyberexperts to protect their systems. In the meantime, the hackers moved on to targets outside the D.N.C., including Mrs. Clinton’s campaign chairman, John D. Podesta, whose private email account was hacked months later.

Even Mr. Podesta, a savvy Washington insider who had written a 2014 report on cyberprivacy for President Obama, did not truly understand the gravity of the hacking.
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Charles Delavan, a Clinton campaign aide, incorrectly legitimized a phishing email sent to the personal account of John D. Podesta, the campaign chairman.

By last summer, Democrats watched in helpless fury as their private emails and confidential documents appeared online day after day — procured by Russian intelligence agents, posted on WikiLeaks and other websites, then eagerly reported on by the American media, including The Times. Mr. Trump gleefully cited many of the purloined emails on the campaign trail.

The fallout included the resignations of Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, the chairwoman of the D.N.C., and most of her top party aides. Leading Democrats were sidelined at the height of the campaign, silenced by revelations of embarrassing emails or consumed by the scramble to deal with the hacking. Though little-noticed by the public, confidential documents taken by the Russian hackers from the D.N.C.’s sister organization, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, turned up in congressional races in a dozen states, tainting some of them with accusations of scandal.
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President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia during a reception last week at the Kremlin in Moscow. Credit Pool photo by Alexei Nikolsky

In recent days, a skeptical president-elect, the nation’s intelligence agencies and the two major parties have become embroiled in an extraordinary public dispute over what evidence exists that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia moved beyond mere espionage to deliberately try to subvert American democracy and pick the winner of the presidential election.

Many of Mrs. Clinton’s closest aides believe that the Russian assault had a profound impact on the election, while conceding that other factors — from Mrs. Clinton’s weaknesses as a candidate, to her private email server, to the public statements of the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, about her handling of classified information — were also important.

While there’s no way to be certain of the ultimate impact of the hack, this much is clear: A low-cost, high-impact weapon that Russia had test-fired in elections from Ukraine to Europe was trained on the United States, with devastating effectiveness. For Russia, with an enfeebled economy and a nuclear arsenal it cannot use short of all-out war, cyberpower proved the perfect weapon: cheap, hard to see coming, hard to trace.
Graphic
Following the Links From Russian Hackers to the U.S. Election

The Central Intelligence Agency concluded that the Russian government deployed computer hackers to help elect Donald J. Trump.
OPEN Graphic

“There shouldn’t be any doubt in anybody’s mind,” Adm. Michael S. Rogers, the director of the National Security Agency and commander of United States Cyber Command said at a postelection conference. “This was not something that was done casually, this was not something that was done by chance, this was not a target that was selected purely arbitrarily,” he said. “This was a conscious effort by a nation-state to attempt to achieve a specific effect.”

For the people whose emails were stolen, this new form of political sabotage has left a trail of shock and professional damage. Neera Tanden, president of the Center for American Progress and a key Clinton supporter, recalls walking into the busy Clinton transition offices, humiliated to see her face on television screens as pundits discussed a leaked email in which she had called Mrs. Clinton’s instincts “suboptimal.”

“It was just a sucker punch to the gut every day,” Ms. Tanden said. “It was the worst professional experience of my life.”

The United States, too, has carried out cyberattacks, and in decades past the C.I.A. tried to subvert foreign elections. But the Russian attack is increasingly understood across the political spectrum as an ominous historic landmark — with one notable exception: Mr. Trump has rejected the findings of the intelligence agencies he will soon oversee as “ridiculous,” insisting that the hacker may be American, or Chinese, but that “they have no idea.”

Mr. Trump cited the reported disagreements between the agencies about whether Mr. Putin intended to help elect him. On Tuesday, a Russian government spokesman echoed Mr. Trump’s scorn.

“This tale of ‘hacks’ resembles a banal brawl between American security officials over spheres of influence,” Maria Zakharova, the spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, wrote on Facebook.

Over the weekend, four prominent senators, two Republicans and two Democrats, joined forces to pledge an investigation while pointedly ignoring Mr. Trump’s skeptical claims.

“Democrats and Republicans must work together, and across the jurisdictional lines of the Congress, to examine these recent incidents thoroughly and devise comprehensive solutions to deter and defend against further cyberattacks,” said Senators John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Chuck Schumer and Jack Reed.

“This cannot become a partisan issue,” they said. “The stakes are too high for our country.”
A Target for Break-Ins

============================
Recent Comments
Dave 2 minutes ago

As someone who does some work in computer security, I couldn't help but laugh at this.1. The DNC and the Clinton campaign were done in with...
Michael S 9 minutes ago

The hacking of Hillary Clinton's, Podesta's and the DNC's email only had an impact as their emails did not bear scrutiny. To that extent the...
a guy named Joe 10 minutes ago

And here I was thinking that WE had the best and the brightest in all facets of warfare - be it military, cyber, or intelligence.Turns out...

    See All Comments Write a comment
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The break-in at the D.N.C. 44 years ago involved burglars who planted listening devices and jimmied this filing cabinet. In 2016, the burglary was conducted from afar, directed by the Kremlin, with spear-phishing emails and zeros and ones. Credit Justin T. Gellerson for The New York Times

Sitting in the basement of the Democratic National Committee headquarters, below a wall-size 2012 portrait of a smiling Barack Obama, is a 1960s-era filing cabinet missing the handle on the bottom drawer. Only a framed newspaper story hanging on the wall hints at the importance of this aged piece of office furniture.

“GOP Security Aide Among 5 Arrested in Bugging Affair,” reads the headline from the front page of The Washington Post on June 19, 1972, with the bylines of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.

Andrew Brown, 37, the technology director at the D.N.C., was born after that famous break-in. But as he began to plan for this year’s election cycle, he was well aware that the D.N.C. could become a break-in target again.

There were aspirations to ensure that the D.N.C. was well protected against cyberintruders — and then there was the reality, Mr. Brown and his bosses at the organization acknowledged: The D.N.C. was a nonprofit group, dependent on donations, with a fraction of the security budget that a corporation its size would have.

“There was never enough money to do everything we needed to do,” Mr. Brown said.

The D.N.C. had a standard email spam-filtering service, intended to block phishing attacks and malware created to resemble legitimate email. But when Russian hackers started in on the D.N.C., the committee did not have the most advanced systems in place to track suspicious traffic, internal D.N.C. memos show.

Mr. Tamene, who reports to Mr. Brown and fielded the call from the F.B.I. agent, was not a full-time D.N.C. employee; he works for a Chicago-based contracting firm called The MIS Department. He was left to figure out, largely on his own, how to respond — and even whether the man who had called in to the D.N.C. switchboard was really an F.B.I. agent.

“The F.B.I. thinks the D.N.C. has at least one compromised computer on its network and the F.B.I. wanted to know if the D.N.C. is aware, and if so, what the D.N.C. is doing about it,” Mr. Tamene wrote in an internal memo about his contacts with the F.B.I. He added that “the Special Agent told me to look for a specific type of malware dubbed ‘Dukes’ by the U.S. intelligence community and in cybersecurity circles.”

Part of the problem was that Special Agent Hawkins did not show up in person at the D.N.C. Nor could he email anyone there, as that risked alerting the hackers that the F.B.I. knew they were in the system.
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An internal memo by Yared Tamene, a tech-support contractor at the D.N.C., expressed uncertainty about the identity of Special Agent Adrian Hawkins of the F.B.I., who called to inform him of the breach.

Mr. Tamene’s initial scan of the D.N.C. system — using his less-than-optimal tools and incomplete targeting information from the F.B.I. — found nothing. So when Special Agent Hawkins called repeatedly in October, leaving voice mail messages for Mr. Tamene, urging him to call back, “I did not return his calls, as I had nothing to report,” Mr. Tamene explained in his memo.

In November, Special Agent Hawkins called with more ominous news. A D.N.C. computer was “calling home, where home meant Russia,” Mr. Tamene’s memo says, referring to software sending information to Moscow. “SA Hawkins added that the F.B.I. thinks that this calling home behavior could be the result of a state-sponsored attack.”

Mr. Brown knew that Mr. Tamene, who declined to comment, was fielding calls from the F.B.I. But he was tied up on a different problem: evidence suggesting that the campaign of Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, Mrs. Clinton’s main Democratic opponent, had improperly gained access to her campaign data.

Ms. Wasserman Schultz, then the D.N.C.’s chairwoman, and Amy Dacey, then its chief executive, said in interviews that neither of them was notified about the early reports that the committee’s system had likely been compromised.

Shawn Henry, who once led the F.B.I.’s cyber division and is now president of CrowdStrike Services, the cybersecurity firm retained by the D.N.C. in April, said he was baffled that the F.B.I. did not call a more senior official at the D.N.C. or send an agent in person to the party headquarters to try to force a more vigorous response.

“We are not talking about an office that is in the middle of the woods of Montana,” Mr. Henry said. “We are talking about an office that is half a mile from the F.B.I. office that is getting the notification.”

“This is not a mom-and-pop delicatessen or a local library. This a critical piece of the U.S. infrastructure because it relates to our electoral process, our elected officials, our legislative process, our executive process,” he added. “To me it is a high-level, serious issue, and if after a couple of months you don’t see any results, somebody ought to raise that to a higher level.”

The F.B.I. declined to comment on the agency’s handling of the hack. “The F.B.I. takes very seriously any compromise of public and private sector systems,” it said in a statement, adding that agents “will continue to share information” to help targets “safeguard their systems against the actions of persistent cybercriminals.”

By March, Mr. Tamene and his team had met at least twice in person with the F.B.I. and concluded that Agent Hawkins was really a federal employee. But then the situation took a dire turn.

A second team of Russian-affiliated hackers began to target the D.N.C. and other players in the political world, particularly Democrats. Billy Rinehart, a former D.N.C. regional field director who was then working for Mrs. Clinton’s campaign, got an odd email warning from Google.

“Someone just used your password to try to sign into your Google account,” the March 22 email said, adding that the sign-in attempt had occurred in Ukraine. “Google stopped this sign-in attempt. You should change your password immediately.”

Mr. Rinehart was in Hawaii at the time. He remembers checking his email at 4 a.m. for messages from East Coast associates. Without thinking much about the notification, he clicked on the “change password” button and half asleep, as best he can remember, he typed in a new password.
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A screenshot of the phishing email that Billy Rinehart clicked on, unknowingly giving Russian hackers access to his account. The New York Times has redacted Mr. Rinehart’s email address.

What he did not know until months later is that he had just given the Russian hackers access to his email account.

Hundreds of similar phishing emails were being sent to American political targets, including an identical email sent on March 19 to Mr. Podesta, chairman of the Clinton campaign. Given how many emails Mr. Podesta received through this personal email account, several aides also had access to it, and one of them noticed the warning email, sending it to a computer technician to make sure it was legitimate before anyone clicked on the “change password” button.

“This is a legitimate email,” Charles Delavan, a Clinton campaign aide, replied to another of Mr. Podesta’s aides, who had noticed the alert. “John needs to change his password immediately.”

With another click, a decade of emails that Mr. Podesta maintained in his Gmail account — a total of about 60,000 — were unlocked for the Russian hackers. Mr. Delavan, in an interview, said that his bad advice was a result of a typo: He knew this was a phishing attack, as the campaign was getting dozens of them. He said he had meant to type that it was an “illegitimate” email, an error that he said has plagued him ever since.
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Mr. Podesta, center, with Huma Abedin, Hillary Clinton’s closest aide, in Brooklyn the day after the election. Hackers gained access to tens of thousands of Mr. Podesta’s emails. Credit Dave Sanders for The New York Times

During this second wave, the hackers also gained access to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and then, through a virtual private network connection, to the main computer network of the D.N.C.

The F.B.I. observed this surge of activity as well, again reaching out to Mr. Tamene to warn him. Yet Mr. Tamene still saw no reason to be alarmed: He found copies of the phishing emails in the D.N.C.’s spam filter. But he had no reason, he said, to believe that the computer systems had been infiltrated.

One bit of progress had finally been made by the middle of April: The D.N.C., seven months after it had first been warned, finally installed a “robust set of monitoring tools,” Mr. Tamene’s internal memo says.
Honing Stealthy Tactics
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The headquarters of the Russian F.S.B., the main successor to the Soviet-era K.G.B., in Moscow. Credit Pavel Golovkin/Associated Press

The United States had two decades of warning that Russia’s intelligence agencies were trying to break into America’s most sensitive computer networks. But the Russians have always managed to stay a step ahead.

Their first major attack was detected on Oct. 7, 1996, when a computer operator at the Colorado School of Mines discovered some nighttime computer activity he could not explain. The school had a major contract with the Navy, and the operator warned his contacts there. But as happened two decades later at the D.N.C., at first “everyone was unable to connect the dots,” said Thomas Rid, a scholar at King’s College in London who has studied the attack.

Investigators gave it a name — Moonlight Maze — and spent two years, often working day and night, tracing how it hopped from the Navy to the Department of Energy to the Air Force and NASA. In the end, they concluded that the total number of files stolen, if printed and stacked, would be taller than the Washington Monument.

Whole weapons designs were flowing out the door, and it was a first taste of what was to come: an escalating campaign of cyberattacks around the world.

But for years, the Russians stayed largely out of the headlines, thanks to the Chinese — who took bigger risks, and often got caught. They stole the designs for the F-35 fighter jet, corporate secrets for rolling steel, even the blueprints for gas pipelines that supply much of the United States. And during the 2008 presidential election cycle, Chinese intelligence hacked into the campaigns of Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain, making off with internal position papers and communications. But they didn’t publish any of it.

The Russians had not gone away, of course. “They were just a lot more stealthy,” said Kevin Mandia, a former Air Force intelligence officer who spent most of his days fighting off Russian cyberattacks before founding Mandiant, a cybersecurity firm that is now a division of FireEye — and the company the Clinton campaign brought in to secure its own systems.

The Russians were also quicker to turn their attacks to political purposes. A 2007 cyberattack on Estonia, a former Soviet republic that had joined NATO, sent a message that Russia could paralyze the country without invading it. The next year cyber was used during Russia’s war with Georgia.

But American officials did not imagine that the Russians would dare try those techniques inside the United States. They were largely focused on preventing what former Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta warned was an approaching “cyber Pearl Harbor” — a shutdown of the power grid or cellphone networks.

But in 2014 and 2015, a Russian hacking group began systematically targeting the State Department, the White House and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “Each time, they eventually met with some form of success,” Michael Sulmeyer, a former cyberexpert for the secretary of defense, and Ben Buchanan, now both of the Harvard Cyber Security Project, wrote recently in a soon-to-be published paper for the Carnegie Endowment.

The Russians grew stealthier and stealthier, tricking government computers into sending out data while disguising the electronic “command and control” messages that set off alarms for anyone looking for malicious actions. The State Department was so crippled that it repeatedly closed its systems to throw out the intruders. At one point, officials traveling to Vienna with Secretary of State John Kerry for the Iran nuclear negotiations had to set up commercial Gmail accounts just to communicate with one another and with reporters traveling with them.
2016 Election Hacking Coverage

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Mr. Obama was briefed regularly on all this, but he made a decision that many in the White House now regret: He did not name Russians publicly, or issue sanctions. There was always a reason: fear of escalating a cyberwar, and concern that the United States needed Russia’s cooperation in negotiations over Syria.

“We’d have all these circular meetings,” one senior State Department official said, “in which everyone agreed you had to push back at the Russians and push back hard. But it didn’t happen.”

So the Russians escalated again — breaking into systems not just for espionage, but to publish or broadcast what they found, known as “doxing” in the cyberworld.

It was a brazen change in tactics, moving the Russians from espionage to influence operations. In February 2014, they broadcast an intercepted phone call between Victoria Nuland, the assistant secretary of state who handles Russian affairs and has a contentious relationship with Mr. Putin, and Geoffrey Pyatt, the United States ambassador to Ukraine. Ms. Nuland was heard describing a little-known American effort to broker a deal in Ukraine, then in political turmoil.

They were not the only ones on whom the Russians used the steal-and-leak strategy. The Open Society Foundation, run by George Soros, was a major target, and when its documents were released, some turned out to have been altered to make it appear as if the foundation was financing Russian opposition members.

Last year, the attacks became more aggressive. Russia hacked a major French television station, frying critical hardware. Around Christmas, it attacked part of the power grid in Ukraine, dropping a portion of the country into darkness, killing backup generators and taking control of generators. In retrospect, it was a warning shot.

The attacks “were not fully integrated military operations,” Mr. Sulmeyer said. But they showed an increasing boldness.
Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear
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Supporters of President-elect Donald J. Trump at a “thank you” rally last week in Des Moines. Credit Doug Mills/The New York Times

The day before the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in April, Ms. Dacey, the D.N.C.’s chief executive, was preparing for a night of parties when she got an urgent phone call.

With the new monitoring system in place, Mr. Tamene had examined administrative logs of the D.N.C.’s computer system and found something very suspicious: An unauthorized person, with administrator-level security status, had gained access to the D.N.C.’s computers.

“Not sure it is related to what the F.B.I. has been noticing,” said one internal D.N.C. email sent on April 29. “The D.N.C. may have been hacked in a serious way this week, with password theft, etc.”

No one knew just how bad the breach was — but it was clear that a lot more than a single filing cabinet worth of materials might have been taken. A secret committee was immediately created, including Ms. Dacey, Ms. Wasserman Schultz, Mr. Brown and Michael Sussmann, a former cybercrimes prosecutor at the Department of Justice who now works at Perkins Coie, the Washington law firm that handles D.N.C. political matters.

“Three most important questions,” Mr. Sussmann wrote to his clients the night the break-in was confirmed. “1) What data was accessed? 2) How was it done? 3) How do we stop it?”

Mr. Sussmann instructed his clients not to use D.N.C. email because they had just one opportunity to lock the hackers out — an effort that could be foiled if the hackers knew that the D.N.C. was on to them.

“You only get one chance to raise the drawbridge,” Mr. Sussmann said. “If the adversaries know you are aware of their presence, they will take steps to burrow in, or erase the logs that show they were present.”
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Michael Sussmann, a Washington lawyer and former cybercrime prosecutor at the Justice Department, received an email in late April confirming that the D.N.C.’s computer system had been compromised.

The D.N.C. immediately hired CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity firm, to scan its computers, identify the intruders and build a new computer and telephone system from scratch. Within a day, CrowdStrike confirmed that the intrusion had originated in Russia, Mr. Sussmann said.

The work that such companies do is a computer version of old-fashioned crime scene investigation, with fingerprints, bullet casings and DNA swabs replaced by an electronic trail that can be just as incriminating. And just as police detectives learn to identify the telltale methods of a veteran burglar, so CrowdStrike investigators recognized the distinctive handiwork of Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear.

Those are CrowdStrike’s nicknames for the two Russian hacking groups that the firm found at work inside the D.N.C. network. Cozy Bear — the group also known as the Dukes or A.P.T. 29, for “advanced persistent threat” — may or may not be associated with the F.S.B., the main successor to the Soviet-era K.G.B., but it is widely believed to be a Russian government operation. It made its first appearance in 2014, said Dmitri Alperovitch, CrowdStrike’s co-founder and chief technology officer.

It was Cozy Bear, CrowdStrike concluded, that first penetrated the D.N.C. in the summer of 2015, by sending spear-phishing emails to a long list of American government agencies, Washington nonprofits and government contractors. Whenever someone clicked on a phishing message, the Russians would enter the network, “exfiltrate” documents of interest and stockpile them for intelligence purposes.

“Once they got into the D.N.C., they found the data valuable and decided to continue the operation,” said Mr. Alperovitch, who was born in Russia and moved to the United States as a teenager.

Only in March 2016 did Fancy Bear show up — first penetrating the computers of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and then jumping to the D.N.C., investigators believe. Fancy Bear, sometimes called A.P.T. 28 and believed to be directed by the G.R.U., Russia’s military intelligence agency, is an older outfit, tracked by Western investigators for nearly a decade. It was Fancy Bear that got hold of Mr. Podesta’s email.

Attribution, as the skill of identifying a cyberattacker is known, is more art than science. It is often impossible to name an attacker with absolute certainty. But over time, by accumulating a reference library of hacking techniques and targets, it is possible to spot repeat offenders. Fancy Bear, for instance, has gone after military and political targets in Ukraine and Georgia, and at NATO installations.

That largely rules out cybercriminals and most countries, Mr. Alperovitch said. “There’s no plausible actor that has an interest in all those victims other than Russia,” he said. Another clue: The Russian hacking groups tended to be active during working hours in the Moscow time zone.

To their astonishment, Mr. Alperovitch said, CrowdStrike experts found signs that the two Russian hacking groups had not coordinated their attacks. Fancy Bear, apparently not knowing that Cozy Bear had been rummaging in D.N.C. files for months, took many of the same documents.

In the six weeks after CrowdStrike’s arrival, in total secrecy, the computer system at the D.N.C. was replaced. For a weekend, email and phones were shut off; employees were told it was a system upgrade. All laptops were turned in and the hard drives wiped clean, with the uninfected information on them imaged to new drives.

Though D.N.C. officials had learned that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee had been infected, too, they did not notify their sister organization, which was in the same building, because they were afraid that it would leak.

All of this work took place as the bitter contest for the Democratic nomination continued to play out between Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Sanders, and it was already causing a major distraction for Ms. Wasserman Schultz and the D.N.C.’s chief executive.

“This was not a bump in the road — bumps in the road happen all the time,” she said in an interview. “Two different Russian spy agencies had hacked into our network and stolen our property. And we did not yet know what they had taken. But we knew they had very broad access to our network. There was a tremendous amount of uncertainty. And it was chilling.”

The D.N.C. executives and their lawyer had their first formal meeting with senior F.B.I. officials in mid-June, nine months after the bureau’s first call to the tech-support contractor. Among the early requests at that meeting, according to participants: that the federal government make a quick “attribution” formally blaming actors with ties to Russian government for the attack to make clear that it was not routine hacking but foreign espionage.

“You have a presidential election underway here and you know that the Russians have hacked into the D.N.C.,” Mr. Sussmann said, recalling the message to the F.B.I. “We need to tell the American public that. And soon.”
The Media’s Role
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Supporters of Senator Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign protested at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia in July. Credit Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

In mid-June, on Mr. Sussmann’s advice, D.N.C. leaders decided to take a bold step. Concerned that word of the hacking might leak, they decided to go public in The Washington Post with the news that the committee had been attacked. That way, they figured, they could get ahead of the story, win a little sympathy from voters for being victimized by Russian hackers and refocus on the campaign.

But the very next day, a new, deeply unsettling shock awaited them. Someone calling himself Guccifer 2.0 appeared on the web, claiming to be the D.N.C. hacker — and he posted a confidential committee document detailing Mr. Trump’s record and half a dozen other documents to prove his bona fides.

“And it’s just a tiny part of all docs I downloaded from the Democrats networks,” he wrote. Then something more ominous: “The main part of the papers, thousands of files and mails, I gave to WikiLeaks. They will publish them soon.”

It was bad enough that Russian hackers had been spying inside the committee’s network for months. Now the public release of documents had turned a conventional espionage operation into something far more menacing: political sabotage, an unpredictable, uncontrollable menace for Democratic campaigns.

Guccifer 2.0 borrowed the moniker of an earlier hacker, a Romanian who called himself Guccifer and was jailed for breaking into the personal computers of former President George W. Bush, former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and other notables. This new attacker seemed intent on showing that the D.N.C.’s cyberexperts at CrowdStrike were wrong to blame Russia. Guccifer 2.0 called himself a “lone hacker” and mocked CrowdStrike for calling the attackers “sophisticated.”

But online investigators quickly undercut his story. On a whim, Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, a writer for Motherboard, the tech and culture site of Vice, tried to contact Guccifer 2.0 by direct message on Twitter.

“Surprisingly, he answered right away,” Mr. Franceschi-Bicchierai said. But whoever was on the other end seemed to be mocking him. “I asked him why he did it, and he said he wanted to expose the Illuminati. He called himself a Gucci lover. And he said he was Romanian.”

That gave Mr. Franceschi-Bicchierai an idea. Using Google Translate, he sent the purported hacker some questions in Romanian. The answers came back in Romanian. But when he was offline, Mr. Franceschi-Bicchierai checked with a couple of native speakers, who told him Guccifer 2.0 had apparently been using Google Translate as well — and was clearly not the Romanian he claimed to be.

Cyberresearchers found other clues pointing to Russia. Microsoft Word documents posted by Guccifer 2.0 had been edited by someone calling himself, in Russian, Felix Edmundovich — an obvious nom de guerre honoring the founder of the Soviet secret police, Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky. Bad links in the texts were marked by warnings in Russian, generated by what was clearly a Russian-language version of Word.

When Mr. Franceschi-Bicchierai managed to engage Guccifer 2.0 over a period of weeks, he found that his interlocutor’s tone and manner changed. “At first he was careless and colloquial. Weeks later, he was curt and more calculating,” he said. “It seemed like a group of people, and a very sloppy attempt to cover up.”

Computer experts drew the same conclusion about DCLeaks.com, a site that sprang up in June, claiming to be the work of “hacktivists” but posting more stolen documents. It, too, seemed to be a clumsy front for the same Russians who had stolen the documents. Notably, the website was registered in April, suggesting that the Russian hacking team planned well in advance to make public what it stole.

In addition to what Guccifer 2.0 published on his site, he provided material directly on request to some bloggers and publications. The steady flow of Guccifer 2.0 documents constantly undercut Democratic messaging efforts. On July 6, 12 days before the Republican National Convention began in Cleveland, Guccifer released the D.N.C.’s battle plan and budget for countering it. For Republican operatives, it was insider gold.

Then WikiLeaks, a far more established outlet, began to publish the hacked material — just as Guccifer 2.0 had promised. On July 22, three days before the start of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, WikiLeaks dumped out 44,053 D.N.C. emails with 17,761 attachments. Some of the messages made clear that some D.N.C. officials favored Mrs. Clinton over her progressive challenger, Mr. Sanders.

That was no shock; Mr. Sanders, after all, had been an independent socialist, not a Democrat, during his long career in Congress, while Mrs. Clinton had been one of the party’s stars for decades. But the emails, some of them crude or insulting, infuriated Sanders delegates as they arrived in Philadelphia. Ms. Wasserman Schultz resigned under pressure on the eve of the convention where she had planned to preside.

Mr. Trump, by now the Republican nominee, expressed delight at the continuing jolts to his opponent, and he began to use Twitter and his stump speeches to highlight the WikiLeaks releases. On July 25, he sent out a lighthearted tweet: “The new joke in town,” he wrote, “is that Russia leaked the disastrous D.N.C. e-mails, which should never have been written (stupid), because Putin likes me.”

But WikiLeaks was far from finished. On Oct. 7, a month before the election, the site began the serial publication of thousands of private emails to and from Mr. Podesta, Mrs. Clinton’s campaign manager.

The same day, the United States formally accused the Russian government of being behind the hackings, in a joint statement by the director of national intelligence and the Department of Homeland Security, and Mr. Trump suffered his worst blow to date, with the release of a recording in which he bragged about sexually assaulting women.

The Podesta emails were nowhere near as sensational as the Trump video. But, released by WikiLeaks day after day over the last month of the campaign, they provided material for countless news reports. They disclosed the contents of Mrs. Clinton’s speeches to large banks, which she had refused to release. They exposed tensions inside the campaign, including disagreements over donations to the Clinton Foundation that staff members thought might look bad for the candidate and Ms. Tanden’s complaint that Mrs. Clinton’s instincts were “suboptimal.”

“I was just mortified,” Ms. Tanden said in an interview. Her emails were released on the eve of one of the presidential debates, she recalled. “I put my hands over my head and said, ‘I can’t believe this is happening to me.’” Though she had regularly appeared on television to support Mrs. Clinton, she canceled her appearances because all the questions were about what she had said in the emails.

Ms. Tanden, like other Democrats whose messages became public, said it was obvious to her that WikiLeaks was trying its best to damage the Clinton campaign. “If you care about transparency, you put all the emails out at once,” she said. “But they wanted to hurt her. So they put them out 1,800 to 3,000 a day.”

The Trump campaign knew in advance about WikiLeaks’ plans. Days before the Podesta email release began, Roger Stone, a Republican operative working with the Trump campaign, sent out an excited tweet about what was coming.

But in an interview, Mr. Stone said he had no role in the leaks; he had just heard from an American with ties to WikiLeaks that damning emails were coming.

Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder and editor, has resisted the conclusion that his site became a pass-through for Russian hackers working for Mr. Putin’s government or that he was deliberately trying to undermine Mrs. Clinton’s candidacy. But the evidence on both counts appears compelling.

In a series of email exchanges, Mr. Assange refused to say anything about WikiLeaks’ source for the hacked material. He denied that he had made his animus toward Mrs. Clinton clear in public statements (“False. But what is this? Junior high?”) or that the site had timed the releases for maximum negative effect on her campaign. “WikiLeaks makes its decisions based on newsworthiness, including for its recent epic scoops,” he wrote.

Mr. Assange disputed the conclusion of the Oct. 7 statement from the intelligence agencies that the leaks were “intended to interfere with the U.S. election process.”

“This is false,” he wrote. “As the disclosing party we know that this was not the intent. Publishers publishing newsworthy information during an election is part of a free election.”
Photo
Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder and editor, disputed intelligence agencies’ conclusion that the email leaks were “intended to interfere with the U.S. election process.” Credit Steffi Loos/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

But asked whether he believed the leaks were one reason for Mr. Trump’s election, Mr. Assange seemed happy to take credit. “Americans extensively engaged with our publications,” he wrote. “According to Facebook statistics WikiLeaks was the most referenced political topic during October.”

Though Mr. Assange did not say so, WikiLeaks’ best defense may be the conduct of the mainstream American media. Every major publication, including The Times, published multiple stories citing the D.N.C. and Podesta emails posted by WikiLeaks, becoming a de facto instrument of Russian intelligence.

Mr. Putin, a student of martial arts, had turned two institutions at the core of American democracy — political campaigns and independent media — to his own ends. The media’s appetite for the hacked material, and its focus on the gossipy content instead of the Russian source, disturbed some of those whose personal emails were being reposted across the web.

“What was really surprising to me?” Ms. Tanden said. “I could not believe that reporters were covering it.”
Devising a Government Response
Continue reading the main story
Photo
The D.N.C. headquarters in Washington. Credit Justin T. Gellerson for The New York Times

Inside the White House, as Mr. Obama’s advisers debated their response, their conversation turned to North Korea.

In late 2014, hackers working for Kim Jong-un, the North’s young and unpredictable leader, had carried out a well-planned attack on Sony Pictures Entertainment intended to stop the Christmastime release of a comedy about a C.I.A. plot to kill Mr. Kim.

In that case, embarrassing emails had also been released. But the real damage was done to Sony’s own systems: More than 70 percent of its computers melted down when a particularly virulent form of malware was released. Within weeks, intelligence agencies traced the attack back to the North and its leadership. Mr. Obama called North Korea out in public, and issued some not-very-effective sanctions. The Chinese even cooperated, briefly cutting off the North’s internet connections.

As the first Situation Room meetings on the Russian hacking began in July, “it was clear that Russia was going to be a much more complicated case,” said one participant. The Russians clearly had a more sophisticated understanding of American politics, and they were masters of “kompromat,” their term for compromising information.

But a formal “attribution report” still had not been forwarded to the president.

“It took forever,” one senior administration official said, complaining about the pace at which the intelligence assessments moved through the system.

In August a group that called itself the “Shadow Brokers” published a set of software tools that looked like what the N.S.A. uses to break into foreign computer networks and install “implants,” malware that can be used for surveillance or attack. The code came from the Tailored Access Operations unit of the N.S.A., a secretive group that mastered the arts of surveillance and cyberwar.

The assumption — still unproved — was that the code was put out in the open by the Russians as a warning: Retaliate for the D.N.C., and there are a lot more secrets, from the hackings of the State Department, the White House and the Pentagon, that might be spilled as well. One senior official compared it to the scene in “The Godfather” where the head of a favorite horse is left in a bed, as a warning.

The N.S.A. said nothing. But by late August, Admiral Rogers, its director, was pressing for a more muscular response to the Russians. In his role as director of the Pentagon’s Cyber Command, he proposed a series of potential counter-cyberstrikes.
Photo
Adm. Michael S. Rogers, the director of the National Security Agency and commander of United States Cyber Command, pressed for a more muscular response to the Russians. Credit Jim Wilson/The New York Times

While officials will not discuss them in detail, the possible counterstrikes reportedly included operations that would turn the tables on Mr. Putin, exposing his financial links to Russia’s oligarchs, and punching holes in the Russian internet to allow dissidents to get their message out. Pentagon officials judged the measures too unsubtle and ordered up their own set of options.

But in the end, none of those were formally presented to the president.

In a series of “deputies meetings” run by Avril Haines, the deputy national security adviser and a former deputy director of the C.I.A., several officials warned that an overreaction by the administration would play into Mr. Putin’s hands.

“If we went to Defcon 4,” one frequent participant in Ms. Haines’s meetings said, using a phrase from the Cold War days of warnings of war, “we would be saying to the public that we didn’t have confidence in the integrity of our voting system.”

Even something seemingly straightforward — using the president’s executive powers, bolstered after the Sony incident, to place economic and travel sanctions on cyberattackers — seemed too risky.

“No one was all that eager to impose costs before Election Day,” said another participant in the classified meeting. “Any retaliatory measures were seen through the prism of what would happen on Election Day.”

Instead, when Mr. Obama’s national security team reconvened after summer vacation, the focus turned to a crash effort to secure the nation’s voting machines and voter-registration rolls from hacking. The scenario they discussed most frequently — one that turned out not to be an issue — was a narrow vote in favor of Mrs. Clinton, followed by a declaration by Mr. Trump that the vote was “rigged” and more leaks intended to undercut her legitimacy.

Donna Brazile, the interim chairwoman of the D.N.C., became increasingly frustrated as the clock continued to run down on the presidential election — and still there was no broad public condemnation by the White House, or Republican Party leaders, of the attack as an act of foreign espionage.

Ms. Brazile even reached out to Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, urging him twice in private conversations and in a letter to join her in condemning the attacks — an offer he declined to take up.

“We just kept hearing the government would respond, the government would respond,” she said. “Once upon a time, if a foreign government interfered with our election we would respond as a nation, not as a political party.”

But Mr. Obama did decide that he would deliver a warning to Mr. Putin in person at a Group of 20 summit meeting in Hangzhou, China, the last time they would be in the same place while Mr. Obama was still in office. When the two men met for a tense pull-aside, in which White House officials — who were not present for the one-on-one meeting — say Mr. Obama explicitly warned Mr. Putin of a strong American response if there was continued effort to influence the election or manipulate the vote.

Later that day, Mr. Obama made a rare reference to America’s own offensive cybercapacity, which he has almost never talked about. “Frankly, both offensively and defensively, we have more capacity,” he told reporters.

But when it came time to make a public assertion of Russia’s role in early October, it was made in a written statement from the director of national intelligence and the secretary of homeland security. It was far less dramatic than the president’s appearance in the press room two years before to directly accuse the North Koreans of attacking Sony.

The reference in the statement to hackings on “political organizations,” officials now say, encompassed a hacking on data stored by the Republicans as well. Two senior officials say the forensic evidence was accompanied by “human and technical” sources in Russia, which appears to mean that the United States’ implants or taps in Russian computer and phone networks helped confirm the country’s role.

But that may not be known for decades, until the secrets are declassified.

A week later Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. was sent out to transmit a public warning to Mr. Putin: The United States will retaliate “at the time of our choosing. And under the circumstances that have the greatest impact.”

Later, after Mr. Biden said he was not concerned that Russia could “fundamentally alter the election,” he was asked whether the American public would know if the message to Mr. Putin had been sent.

“Hope not,” Mr. Biden responded.

Some of his former colleagues think that was the wrong answer. An American counterstrike, said Michael Morell, the former deputy director of the C.I.A. under Mr. Obama, has “got to be overt. It needs to be seen.”

A covert response would significantly limit the deterrence effect, he added. “If you can’t see it, it’s not going to deter the Chinese and North Koreans and Iranians and others.”

The Obama administration says it still has more than 30 days to do exactly that.
The Next Target
Continue reading the main story
Photo
President Obama and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. walked back toward the White House after delivering remarks about the election results last month. Credit Al Drago/The New York Times

As the year draws to a close, it now seems possible that there will be multiple investigations of the Russian hacking — the intelligence review Mr. Obama has ordered completed by Jan. 20, the day he leaves office, and one or more congressional inquiries. They will wrestle with, among other things, Mr. Putin’s motive.

Did he seek to mar the brand of American democracy, to forestall anti-Russian activism for both Russians and their neighbors? Or to weaken the next American president, since presumably Mr. Putin had no reason to doubt American forecasts that Mrs. Clinton would win easily? Or was it, as the C.I.A. concluded last month, a deliberate attempt to elect Mr. Trump?

In fact, the Russian hack-and-dox scheme accomplished all three goals.

What seems clear is that Russian hacking, given its success, is not going to stop. Two weeks ago, the German intelligence chief, Bruno Kahl, warned that Russia might target elections in Germany next year. “The perpetrators have an interest to delegitimize the democratic process as such,” Mr. Kahl said. Now, he added, “Europe is in the focus of these attempts of disturbance, and Germany to a particularly great extent.”

But Russia’s cyberczars have by no means forgotten the American target. On the day after the presidential election, the cybersecurity company Volexity reported five new waves of phishing emails, evidently from Cozy Bear, aimed at think tanks and nonprofits in the United States.

One of them purported to be from Harvard University, attaching a fake paper. Its title: “Why American Elections Are Flawed.”

Kitty Bennett contributed research.

Get politics and Washington news updates via Facebook, Twitter and in the Morning Briefing newsletter.

[G M]

What seems clear is that Russian hacking, given its success, is not going to stop. Two weeks ago, the German intelligence chief, Bruno Kahl, warned that Russia might target elections in Germany next year. “The perpetrators have an interest to delegitimize the democratic process as such,” Mr. Kahl said. Now, he added, “Europe is in the focus of these attempts of disturbance, and Germany to a particularly great extent.”


**What if they were able to get a Chancellor of Germany elected that would import masses of muslims that would rape and pillage the German people? I know, it's a crazy thought, but what if ??**

[G M]

Former Army Intel Officer: CIA Director John Brennan Is Playing Political Games

Jonah Bennett
National Security/Politics Reporter
8:03 PM 12/12/2016


Retired Army intelligence officer Tony Shaffer alleged Monday that CIA Director John Brennan is playing political games via a secret CIA assessment stating Russia interfered with the election to support GOP President-elect Donald Trump.

Speaking to WMAL radio Monday, Shaffer claimed that the secret CIA assessment, obtained by The Washington Post and described in an article last Friday, is a product of Brennan’s loyalty to President Barack Obama, The Washington Examiner reports.

“This is purely political, and I believe that John Brennan is a political animal,” Shaffer said. He added he has been talking with former CIA officials about the report. “Everything they are telling me is Brennan is doing this out of loyalty to President Obama.”

“It’s about undermining Trump, that’s what it is,” Shaffer said. “It’s called information operations, information warfare, and that’s what I believe is going on.”

In an interview Sunday, former CIA Director Michael Morell also backed the secret CIA assessment of Kremlin-backed interference in the election, claiming the Russian plot was the “political equivalent to 9/11.”  The Russians weren’t just involved in the Democratic National Committee hack and the breach of former Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s emails, but have been much more broadly involved in trying to influence the outcome of the election, according to Morell.     

In August, Morell endorsed former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for president and stated that “Donald J. Trump is not only unqualified for the job, but he may well pose a threat to our national security.”

While the FBI has stated the CIA’s assessment could be true, there isn’t enough evidence — at least to satisfy the FBI, which generally has stricter standards, as it’s often involved in gathering evidence later leading to criminal prosecution. A U.S. official told USA Today, however, that there have been some differences in ascribing weight to various motives.

Some sources told NPR that the CIA may not want to share sources or methods used in coming to the conclusions it has, which may be another reason for the disagreements.

Since the picture is still murky, three Senate committees have been tasked with getting to the bottom of foreign meddling claims in a bipartisan manner.

The Obama administration, too, has requested a review of influence attempts. This review must be completed by Jan. 20, before Trump takes over the White House.

Follow Jonah Bennett on Twitter

Send tips to jonah@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2016/12/12/former-army-intel-officer-cia-director-john-brennan-is-playing-political-games/

[G M]

http://libertyhangout.org/2016/12/breaking-cia-confirms-russian-government-killed-harambe/

BREAKING: CIA Confirms Russian Government Killed Harambe
December 12, 2016 Justin Moldow 3 Comments donald trump, Harambe, Russia, Vladimir Putin

The CIA has concluded in a secret assessment that Russia intervened in killing Harambe the gorilla, according to officials briefed on the matter.

Intelligence agencies have identified individuals with connections to the Russian government who provided WikiLeaks with thousands of hacked emails from the Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Garden and others, including Harambe’s own caretaker, according to U.S. officials. Those officials described the individuals as actors known to the intelligence community and part of a wider Russian operation to boost the nearby Columbus Zoo and Aquarium’s profits.

“It is the assessment of the intelligence community that Russia’s goal here was to favor one zoo over the other,” said a senior U.S. official briefed on an intelligence presentation made to U.S. senators. “That’s the consensus view.”

The Obama administration has been debating for months how to respond to the alleged Russian intrusions, with White House officials concerned about escalating tensions with Moscow and being accused of trying to boost Columbus Zoo’s revenues.

The Trump transition team dismissed the findings in a short statement issued Friday evening. “These are the same people that said Cecil the Lion had teeth of mass destruction. It’s now time to move on and ‘Make Columbus Zoo Great Again,’ ” the statement read.

Trump has consistently dismissed the intelligence community’s findings about Russia.

“I don’t believe they interfered” in the killing of Harambe, he told Time magazine this week. The killing, he said, “could be Russia. And it could be China. And it could be some guy in his home in New Jersey.”

[ccp]

"The CIA has concluded in a secret assessment that Russia intervened in killing Harambe the gorilla, according to officials briefed on the matter."

I don't know about this conspiracy theory but one thing is obviously indisputable.

The white zookeepers would never have shot Harumbe if he was white or / and if the child that had fallen into the pit was black.

Just another example of white privilege.   

[Crafty_Dog]

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/443000/russia-election-hack-plan-revealed-hillary-clinton-donald-trump-only-pawns-kremlin?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Daily%20Trending%20Email%20Reoccurring-%20Monday%20to%20Thursday%202016-12-13&utm_term=NR5PM%20Actives

[G M]

http://www.salon.com/2016/07/25/shades_of_the_cold_war_how_the_dnc_fabricated_a_russian_hacker_conspiracy_to_deflect_blame_for_its_email_scandal/

Monday, Jul 25, 2016 03:14 PM PDT
 Shades of the Cold War: How the DNC fabricated a Russian hacker conspiracy to deflect blame for its email scandal
Leaked revelations of the DNC's latest misconduct bear a disturbing resemblance to Cold War red-baiting
Patrick Lawrence

   

Topics: Debbie Wasserman Schultz, DNC 2016, DNC email hack, Donald Trump, Elections 2016, Hillary Clinton, Working Ahead News, Elections News, Politics News
Shades of the Cold War: How the DNC fabricated a Russian hacker conspiracy to deflect blame for its email scandal
Hillary Clinton; Vladimir Putin (Credit: Reuters/Kevin Lamarque/Kirill Kudryavtsev)

Now wait a minute, all you upper-case “D” Democrats. A flood light suddenly shines on your party apparatus, revealing its grossly corrupt machinations to fix the primary process and sink the Sanders campaign, and within a day you are on about the evil Russians having hacked into your computers to sabotage our elections — on behalf of Donald Trump, no less?

Is this a joke? Are you kidding? Is nothing beneath your dignity? Is this how lowly you rate the intelligence of American voters? My answers to these, in order: yes, but the kind one cannot laugh at; no, we’re not kidding; no, we will do anything, and yes, we have no regard whatsoever for Americans so long as we can connive them out of their votes every four years.

Clowns. Subversives. Do you know who you remind me of? I will tell you: Nixon, in his famously red-baiting campaign — a disgusting episode — against the right-thinking Helen Gahagan Douglas during his first run for the Senate, in 1950. Your political tricks are as transparent and anti-democratic as his, it is perfectly fair to say.

I confess to a heated reaction to events since last Friday among the Democrats, specifically in the Democratic National Committee. I should briefly explain these for the benefit of readers who have better things to do than watch the ever more insulting farce foisted upon us as legitimate political procedure.

The Sanders people have long charged that the DNC has had its fingers on the scale, as one of them put it the other day, in favor of Hillary Clinton’s nomination. The prints were everywhere — many those of Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who has repeatedly been accused of anti-Sanders bias. Schultz, do not forget, co-chaired Clinton’s 2008 campaign against Barack Obama. That would be enough to disqualify her as the DNC’s chair in any society that takes ethics seriously, but it is not enough in our great country. Chairwoman she has been for the past five years.

Last Friday WikiLeaks published nearly 20,000 DNC email messages providing abundant proof that Sanders and his staff were right all along. The worst of these, involving senior DNC officers, proposed Nixon-esque smears having to do with everything from ineptitude within the Sanders campaign to Sanders as a Jew in name only and an atheist by conviction.

Wasserman fell from grace on Monday. Other than this, Democrats from President Obama to Clinton and numerous others atop the party’s power structure have had nothing to say, as in nothing, about this unforgivable breach.They have, rather, been full of praise for Wasserman Schultz. Brad Marshall, the D.N.C.’s chief financial officer, now tries to deny that his Jew-baiting remark referred to Sanders. Good luck, Brad: Bernie is the only Jew in the room.

The caker came on Sunday, when Robby Mook, Clinton’s campaign manager, appeared on ABC’s “This Week” and (covering all bases) CNN’s “State of the Union” to assert that the D.N.C.’s mail was hacked “by the Russians for the purpose of helping Donald Trump.” He knows this — knows it in a matter of 24 hours — because “experts” — experts he will never name — have told him so.

Here is Mook on the CNN program. Listen carefully:

    What’s disturbing to us is that experts are telling us that Russian state actors broke into the DNC, stole these emails, and other experts are now saying that Russians are releasing these emails for the purpose of helping Donald Trump.

Is that what disturbs you, Robby? Interesting. Unsubstantiated hocus-pocus, not the implications of these events for the integrity of Democratic nominations and the American political process? The latter is the more pressing topic, Robby. You are far too long on anonymous experts for my taste, Robby. And what kind of expert, now that I think of it, is able to report to you as to the intentions of Russian hackers — assuming for a sec that this concocted narrative has substance?

Making lemonade out of a lemon, the Clinton campaign now goes for a twofer. Watch as it advances the Russians-did-it thesis on the basis of nothing, then shoots the messenger, then associates Trump with its own mess — and, finally, gets to ignore the nature of its transgression (which any paying-attention person must consider grave).

Preposterous, readers. Join me, please, in having absolutely none of it. There is no “Russian actor” at the bottom of this swamp, to put my position bluntly. You will never, ever be offered persuasive evidence otherwise.

Reluctantly, I credit the Clinton campaign and the DNC with reading American paranoia well enough such that they may make this junk stick. In a clear sign the entire crowd-control machine is up and running, The New York Times had a long, unprofessional piece about Russian culprits in its Monday editions. It followed Mook’s lead faithfully: not one properly supported fact, not one identified “expert,” and more conditional verbs than you’ve had hot dinners — everything cast as “could,” “might,” “appears,” “would,” “seems,” “may.” Nothing, once again, as to the very serious implications of this affair for the American political process.


Now comes the law. The FBI just announced that it will investigate — no, not the DNC’s fraudulent practices (which surely breach statutes), but “those who pose a threat in cyberspace.” The House Intelligence Committee simultaneously promised to do (and leave undone) the same. This was announced, please note, by the ranking Democrat on the Republican-controlled committee.

Bearing many memories of the Cold War’s psychological warp — and if you are too young to remember, count your blessings — it is the invocation of the Russians that sends me over the edge. My bones grow weary at the thought of living through a 21st century variant. Halifax, anyone?

Here we come to a weird reversal of roles.

We must take the last few days’ events as a signal of what Clinton’s policy toward Russia will look like should she prevail in November. I warned in this space after the NATO summit in Warsaw earlier this month that Cold War II had just begun. Turning her party’s latest disgrace into an occasion for another round of Russophobia is mere preface, but in it you can read her commitment to the new crusade.

Trump, to make this work, must be blamed for his willingness to negotiate with Moscow. This is now among his sins. Got that? Anyone who says he will talk to the Russians has transgressed the American code. Does this not make Trump the Helen Gahagan Douglas of the piece? Does this not make Hillary Clinton more than a touch Nixonian?

I am developing nitrogen bends from watching the American political spectacle. One can hardly tell up from down. Which way for a breath of air?

Patrick Lawrence is Salon’s foreign affairs columnist. A longtime correspondent abroad, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune and The New Yorker, he is also an essayist, critic and editor. His most recent book is “Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century” (Yale, 2013). Follow him @thefloutist. His web site is patricklawrence.us.

[Crafty_Dog]

TEL AVIV – Mike Morell, the former acting director of the CIA, is generating headlines for claiming that alleged Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election amounts to “the political equivalent of 9/11.”

Morell further suggested that the U.S. should respond in a significant way to the alleged Russian actions and he has given interviews supporting reports that the CIA believes Russia tried to influence the election in favor of President-elect Donald Trump.

Absent from the news media coverage of Morell’s statements is that he is known for his leading role in helping to craft the infamously misleading talking points used by Obama administration officials to blame the September 11, 2012 Benghazi attacks on a YouTube video.

The news media also failed to mention that Morell, who abruptly resigned from the CIA in June 2013, took a job that year at the Beacon Global Strategies firm, where he still works as senior counselor.

Beacon was founded by Phillippe Reines, who served as Communications Adviser to Hillary Clinton while she was secretary of state. From 2009-2013, Reines also served in Clinton’s State Department as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Strategic Communications.  Reines is the managing director of Beacon.

In an interview on Sunday with the Cipher Brief, Morell commented on reports in the Washington Post and New York Times claiming Moscow interfered in the presidential election to help Trump win – a contention the President-elect called “ridiculous” in an interview on Sunday.

“It is an attack on our very democracy,” Morell said. “It’s an attack on who we are as a people. A foreign government messing around in our elections is, I think, an existential threat to our way of life. To me, and this is to me not an overstatement, this is the political equivalent of 9/11. It is huge and the fact that it hasn’t gotten more attention from the Obama administration, Congress, and the mainstream media, is just shocking to me.”

Morell further asserted that the U.S. most respond overtly to the attack:

He stated:

The third implication is we need to respond to the Russian attack. We need to deter the Russians and anyone else who is watching this—and you can bet your bottom dollar that the Chinese, the North Koreans, the Iranians are all watching. We need to deter all of those folks from even thinking about doing something like this in the future.

I think that our response needs to have two key pieces to it. One is it’s got to be overt. It needs to be seen. A covert response would significantly limit the deterrence effect. If you can’t see it, it’s not going to deter the Chinese and North Koreans and Iranians and others, so it’s got to be seen.

The second is that it’s got to be significant from Putin’s perspective. He has to feel some pain, he has to pay a price here or, again, there will be no deterrence, and it has to be seen by the rest of the world as being significant to Mr. Putin so that it can be a deterrent.

The interview with Morell was widely cited by the news media.

“Former Acting CIA Director Calls Russian Interference In Election ‘The Political Equivalent Of 9/11,’” reads a Huffington Post headline.

Business Insider ran a piece similarly titled, “Former acting CIA Director Michael Morell: Russian meddling in US election ‘is the political equivalent of 9/11.’”

“Ex-CIA Director: Obama Should Retaliate To Russian Election Hacks Now,” blasted a Forbes.com headline.

Morell’s quotes were cited by USA Today, the Independent and scores of other publications.

Morell also appeared Monday on “CBS This Morning,” where he supported a CBS News report citing intelligence sources saying the CIA has high confidence that the Russians attempted to influence the presidential election in favor of Trump.

“The C.I.A. doesn’t come to a high-confidence judgment just based on circumstantial evidence. So I think they’ve got more here,” Morell told the news network. “I think they’ve got sources who are actually telling them what the intent was.”

The breathless news media coverage of Morell’s recent remarks, reviewed by this reporter, fails to mention Morell’s employment at the firm tied to Hillary Clinton.

The coverage of Morell’s remarks also fails to take note of his central role in crafting misleading talking points on the Benghazi attacks.

The talking points were used by United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice on Sunday, Sept. 16, 2012, when she appeared on five morning television programs to discuss the White House response to the Benghazi attacks. In nearly identical statements, she asserted that the attacks were a spontaneous protest in response to a “hateful video.”

Morell addressed his role in editing the talking points during Benghazi testimony on April 4, 2014.

The Guardian reported:

In his testimony, Morell said he was deeply troubled by allegations made by lawmakers and some in the media “that I inappropriately altered and influenced CIA’s classified analysis and its unclassified talking points about what happened in Benghazi, Libya in September 2012 and that I covered up those actions.”

“These allegations accuse me of taking these actions for the political benefit of President Obama and then secretary of state Clinton. These allegations are false,” Morell said.

He said he and the agency could have done a better job, but he dismissed suggestions that the CIA “cooked the books” in the assessment of the attack.

In a briefing to senators following the attacks, Morell claimed that references to terrorism and al-Qaeda were removed from the Benghazi talking points to “prevent compromising an ongoing criminal investigation.”

Morell’s assertions were contradicted by a 46-page House Republican report from April 2013 finding the talking points were edited to protect the State Department’s reputation.

“Contrary to administration rhetoric, the talking points were not edited to protect classified information,” states the “Interim Progress Report for the Members of the House Republican Conference on the Events Surrounding the Sept. 11, 2012 Terrorist Attacks in Benghazi.”

“Evidence rebuts administration claims that the talking points were modified to protect classified information or to protect an investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI),” the report states, charging the talking points were “deliberately” edited to “protect the State Department.”

States the report: “To protect the State Department, the administration deliberately removed references to al-Qaeda-linked groups and previous attacks in Benghazi in the talking points used by [United Nations] Ambassador [Susan] Rice, thereby perpetuating the deliberately misleading and incomplete narrative that the attacks evolved from a demonstration caused by a YouTube video.”

Morell resigned from the CIA amid the controversy surrounding the Benghazi attacks, saying he was stepping down to spend more time with his family.

Morell, who was considered a favorite to lead the CIA and spent 33 years with the agency, acknowledged in his resignation statement that the reason for his leaving the agency may seem somewhat difficult to believe, but “when I say that it is time for my family, nothing could be more real than that.”

“I am passionate about two things in this world – the agency and my family,” Morell said in the statement. “And while I have given everything I have to the Central Intelligence Agency and its vital mission for a third of a century, it is now time for me to give everything I have to my family.”

Aaron Klein is Breitbart’s Jerusalem bureau chief and senior investigative reporter. He is a New York Times bestselling author and hosts the popular weekend talk radio program, “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio.” Follow him on Twitter @AaronKleinShow. Follow him on Facebook.

[Crafty_Dog]

http://theantimedia.org/cia-russia-hacking-bluff-called/

[ccp]

WE have heard the Left rail on "McCarthyism" for decades as though suspicion of Russia was just a paranoid delusion though history has proven there were indeed spies throughout the US at that time.

As though Russia hasn't been spying on us forever, since the days of the Csars.

Now just suddenly, because it bothers THEM and their party we are forced to endure this.