The death of Trumprussia

A couple weeks ago, leftie rag The Nation basically told lefties to start getting over Trumprussia because the DNC, at least, just wasn’t hacked.

Former NSA experts say it wasn’t a hack at all, but a leak—an inside job by someone with access to the DNC’s system.

…[with the Russia narrative], we are urged to accept the word of institutions and senior officials with long records of deception. These officials profess “high confidence” in their “assessment” as to what happened in the spring and summer of last year…[but] an assessment is an opinion, nothing more, and to express high confidence is an upside-down way of admitting the absence of certain knowledge.

[On the other side,] Forensic investigators, intelligence analysts, system designers, program architects, and computer scientists of long experience and strongly credentialed are now producing evidence disproving the official version of key events last year…

The Nation quotes a report from Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS):

Hard science now demonstrates it was a leak—a download executed locally with a memory key or a similarly portable data-storage device. In short, it was an inside job…

Forensic investigations of documents made public two weeks prior to the July 5 leak by the person or entity known as Guccifer 2.0 show that they were fraudulent: Before Guccifer posted them they were adulterated by cutting and pasting them into a blank template that had Russian as its default language[, a setting that anyone can do]…

VIPS used the work of several investigators such as Disobedient Media, The Forensicator, Adam Carter (I mentioned them in my post explaining Guccifer 2.0 from five weeks ago), and others also. The Nation continues:

Under no circumstance can it be acceptable that the relevant authorities—the National Security Agency, the Justice Department (via the Federal Bureau of Investigation), and the Central Intelligence Agency—leave these new findings without reply.

[…]

The Intelligence Community Assessment [of Russian hacking], the supposedly definitive report featuring the “high confidence” dodge, was greeted as farcically flimsy when issued January 6. Ray McGovern calls it a disgrace to the intelligence profession. It is spotlessly free of evidence, front to back, pertaining to any events in which Russia is implicated. James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence, admitted in May that “hand-picked” analysts from three agencies (not the 17 previously reported) drafted the ICA. There is a way to understand “hand-picked” that is less obvious than meets the eye: The report was sequestered from rigorous agency-wide reviews…

Behind the ICA lie other indefensible realities. The FBI has never examined the DNC’s computer servers—an omission that is beyond preposterous. It has instead relied on the reports produced by Crowdstrike, a firm that drips with conflicting interests well beyond the fact that it is in the DNC’s employ. Dmitri Alperovitch, its co-founder and chief technology officer, is on the record as vigorously anti-Russian…

I’ve been blogging on the above points, for months. It’s nice to see a left-wing publication grapple with them, at last.