Friday 29th of March 2024

have you all lost your senses over there?... yes we have...

putin&trump

Pressed by Megyn Kelly on his ties to President Trump, an exasperated Vladimir Putin blurted out, “We had no relationship at all. … I never met him. … Have you all lost your senses over there?”

Yes, Vlad, we have.

Consider the questions that have convulsed this city since the Trump triumph, and raised talk of impeachment.

Did Trump collude with Russians to hack the DNC emails and move the goods to WikiLeaks, thus revealing the state secret that DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz was putting the screws to poor Bernie Sanders?

If not Trump himself, did campaign aides collude with the KGB?

Now, given that our NSA and CIA seemingly intercept everything Russians say to Americans, why is our fabled FBI, having investigated for a year, unable to give us a definitive yes or no?

The snail’s pace of the FBI investigation explains Trump’s frustration. What explains the FBI’s torpor? If J. Edgar Hoover had moved at this pace, John Dillinger would have died of old age.

We hear daily on cable TV of the “Trump-Russia” scandal. Yet, no one has been charged with collusion, and every intelligence official, past or prevent, who has spoken out has echoed ex-acting CIA Director Mike Morrell:

“On the question of the Trump campaign conspiring with the Russians here, there is smoke, but there is no fire, at all. … There’s no little campfire, there’s no little candle, there’s no spark.”

Where are the criminals? Where is the crime?

As for the meetings between Gen. Mike Flynn, Jared Kushner, Sen. Jeff Sessions and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, it appears that Trump wanted a “back channel” to Putin so he could honor his commitment to seek better relations with Russia.

Given the Russophobia rampant here, that makes sense. And while it appears amateurish that Flynn would use Russian channels of communication, what is criminal about this?

Putin is not Stalin. Soviet divisions are not sitting on the Elbe. The Cold War is over. And many presidents have used back channels. Woodrow Wilson sent Col. Edward House to talk to the Kaiser and the Brits. FDR ran messages to Churchill through Harry Hopkins.

As for Trump asking Director James Comey to cut some slack for Flynn, it is understandable in human terms. Flynn had been a loyal aide and friend and Trump had to feel rotten about having to fire the man.

So, what is really going on here?

All the synthetic shock over what Kushner or Sessions said to Kislyak aside, this city’s hatred for President Trump, and its fanatic determination to bring him down in disgrace, predates his presidency.

For Trump ran in 2016 not simply as the Republican alternative. He presented his candidacy as a rejection, a repudiation of the failed elites, political and media, of both parties. Americans voted in 2016 not just for a change in leaders but for a revolution to overthrow a ruling regime.

Thus this city has never reconciled itself to Trump’s victory, and the president daily rubs their noses in their defeat with his tweets.

Seeking a rationale for its rejection, this city has seized upon that old standby. We didn’t lose! The election was stolen in a vast conspiracy, an “act of war” against America, an assault upon “our democracy,” criminal collusion between the Kremlin and the Trumpites.

Hence, Trump is an illegitimate president, and it is the duty of brave citizens of both parties to work to remove the usurper.

The city seized upon a similar argument in 1968, when Richard Nixon won, because it was said he had colluded to have South Vietnam’s president abort Lyndon Johnson’s new plan to bring peace to Southeast Asia in the final hours of that election.

Then, as now, the “t” word, treason, was trotted out.

Attempts to overturn elections where elites are repudiated are not uncommon in U.S. history. Both Nixon and Reagan, after 49-state landslides, were faced with attempts to overturn the election results.

With Nixon in Watergate, the elites succeeded. With Reagan in Iran-Contra, they almost succeeded in destroying that great president as he was ending the Cold War in a bloodless victory for the West.

After Lincoln’s assassination, President Andrew Johnson sought to prevent Radical Republicans from imposing a ruthless Reconstruction on a defeated and devastated South.

The Radicals enacted the Tenure of Office Act, stripping Johnson of his authority to remove any member of the Cabinet without Senate permission. Johnson defied the Radicals and fired their agent in the Cabinet, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton.

“Tennessee” Johnson was impeached, and missed conviction by one vote. John F. Kennedy, in his 1956 book, called the senator who had voted to save Johnson a “Profile in Courage.”

If Trump is brought down on the basis of what Putin correctly labels “nonsense,” this city will have executed a nonviolent coup against a constitutionally elected president. Such an act would drop us into the company of those Third World nations where such means are the customary ways that corrupt elites retain their hold on power.

Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of a new book, Nixon’s White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever.

read more:

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/buchanan/the-impeach-trump-conspi...


 

the art of lying...

If the Clintons were not so down-market, they would have fit perfectly into 15th century Florence, the city that gave us Botticelli, Cellini, the Medici, and of course Machiavelli. Renaissance Florence was not confined to painting and literature; in fact, double speak, or lying, was as prevalent in as art and making money, and the greatest exponent of lying was the flattering favorite son of the city, Niccolo himself. 

I know I sound a bit of a flatterer by mentioning the Clintons in the same breath as those great—if blood-soaked—Florentines, but it is for a purpose. When the Clintons lied they lied always with a goal in mind: power. They were not the first, nor the last, to prefer lying when the truth was more beneficial. Invention, the withholding of information, fabrication of fact, or whatever one chooses to call it, makes the object of that deceit more comfortable. Words, after all, were invented to veil one’s true thoughts, or so the cynics say. Which brings me to the 45th American president.

I began this column with a Clinton reference in order to compel a gasp of outrage from any member of the mainstream media who reads it. The media minions are in a very irritable state right now, outraged at what they see as egregious lies by The Donald. And, as usual, they’re wrong. The Donald is an embellisher par excellence, a man who became the consummate exaggerator in order to advance his business. He flourished by hyperbole, which is a totally different thing than the outright lies of the Clintons. (I did not have sexual relations with that woman; the Benghazi massacre was due to a video; I neither received nor sent any classified material through my private email server; etc.)

Lying, needless to say, has been hogging the news since Trump declared his candidacy, dominating the headlines in newspapers that have been known to lie consistently via false data and by suggestion, notably the New York Times andWashington Post, which view whites, heterosexuals, Christians, and the police as the country’s main dangers.

Take this Russian nonsense. To suggest false rumors picked up in the internet cesspool are real represents a truly big a lie. Stories of “Americans fleeing to Canada” to escape Trump may seem obvious exaggerations, but in reality they are whoppers. (Few if any have gone through with it though many have threatened, especially in show business.) Times report that transgender women “walk with fear” because of Trump (the Times mentioned two women who had complained that cops who helped them after a harassment did not speak Spanish) is simply Machiavellian. By producing data by one Charles Blow, a Times columnist who produced his own, the lie turns into scientific proof.

Nietzsche famously declared that there are no truths, only interpretations. (Where Trump is concerned, the media considers only strict truth, hence he’s a liar. The same can be said about me where the Clintons are concerned.) This led to a lot of charlatans called deconstructionists and post-modernists who delighted in the idea that there is no truth. Communist ideology considered truth a bourgeois construct. Our universities are no better. They advertise that they stand for free speech, but only as long as free speech does not involve anything approaching conservatism. How that differs from communist oppression of free speech is a mystery to me. Yet try and find a conservative speaker who is not violently evicted from the podium in places such as Harvard, Yale, or Middlebury. You can’t.

read more:

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/everyone-is-a-liar/

 

Please read also: "The Age of Deceit"

Eleven years ago, in the age of deceit, I state: 

To a great extent, three major philosophical thoughts have influenced our twentieth century nation building — philosophical thoughts, some used since Greek and Roman times, which, from the nineteenth century onwards due to the accelerating development of technology, needed variegation in formulations in order to give out enough slack and still maintain enough controls not to appear despotic or totally anarchistic in a "more democratically enlightened" world.

Some nations failed miserably: Nazi Germany within 20 years, but the USSR took more than 60 years to bite the dust, and it’s still sitting on edge. Reconstruction is usually painful and needs to dig deep into these core philosophical understandings.

Strangely so far, the most successful country on earth is the one that lied the most about its construct — the USA.

I will develop this interesting premise of porkie-building later on.

 

read on...

comey is deluded...

 

WASHINGTON — Lost in the showdown between President Trump and James B. Comey that played out this past week was a chilling threat to the United States. Mr. Comey, the former director of the F.B.I., testified that the Russians had not only intervened in last year’s election, but would try to do it again.

“It’s not a Republican thing or Democratic thing — it really is an American thing,” Mr. Comey told the Senate Intelligence Committee. “They’re going to come for whatever party they choose to try and work on behalf of. And they’re not devoted to either, in my experience. They’re just about their own advantage. And they will be back.”

What started out as a counterintelligence investigation to guard the United States against a hostile foreign power has morphed into a political scandal about what Mr. Trump did, what he said and what he meant by it. Lawmakers have focused mainly on the gripping conflict between the president and the F.B.I. director he fired with cascading requests for documents, recordings and hearings.

But from the headquarters of the National Security Agency to state capitals that have discovered that the Russians were inside their voter-registration systems, the worry is that attention will be diverted from figuring out how Russia disrupted American democracy last year and how to prevent it from happening again. Russian hackers did not just breach Democratic email accounts; according to Mr. Comey, they orchestrated a “massive effort” targeting hundreds of — and possibly more than 1,000 — American government and private organizations since 2015.

“It’s important for us in the West to understand that we’re facing an adversary who wishes for his own reasons to do us harm,” said Daniel Fried, a career diplomat who oversaw sanctions imposed on Russia before retiring this year. “Whatever the domestic politics of this, Comey was spot-on right that Russia is coming after us, but not just the U.S., but the free world in general. And we need to take this seriously.

Read more:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/10/us/politics/trump-comey-russia-fbi.html

 

This would be funny if the media was not trying to make this issue so serious. Over the past seven decades, the USA have been fiddling with the internal affairs of the USSR and for the last 30 years have been interfering in Russia's internal affairs. The fall of the Berlin Wall, the disintegration of the Warsaw pact, the invasion of US sponsored NGOs in Russia, the attempt of the West to control the Russian economy through various subterfuges including banks that were front shops of the CIA and MI6, the management of the "oligarchs" to prepare for the rape of Russian resources and the "deal" between Reagan and Gorbachev -- a deal that the US never had the intention to honour in regard to NATO.

Believe it or not Russia has been on the receiving end of crap from the US empire (it is an empire, isn't it?) since the days of President Harry S. Truman. Despite Dwight D. Eisenhower warning about antagonising the Russians by the US military complex, the US military complex carried on to imagine a Russian threat to the point that the US installed ballistic missiles in Europe close to the USSR borders. 

The USSR responded in kind by sending missiles to Cuba. At that stage, the USA got really pissed off about the temerity of the USSR. They demanded the Cuban missiles be removed. A deal was struck between Kennedy (USA) and Krutchev (USSR). All the missiles were withdrawn. Kennedy was assassinated and the saga continued in Vietnam, in Afghanistan, in Panama and Nicaragua. Any country showing socialistic tendencies were to be destroyed. Case of Syria presently, with variation on the theme.

The Americans have revived NATO, infiltrated and infected ALL the former USSR satellite nations including Ukraine. They have played European countries for fools, discreetly pitting France against Germany and others. The USA have created the "refugee" crisis in Europe by destroying countries like Iraq and Libya, now Syria. 

And all of this under the banner of "freedom"... 

They even let their "financial sector" destroy the world economy with the GFC, which obviously would hurt Europe and the rest of the world, to bring it underfoot. It's all magic trick, illusions of purpose and results.

So because Russia has not been willing to play the game, it has been antagonised. Russia has responded in kind. It has rebuild its armies and weaponry to an equivalent US standard for only a fraction of the cost. Russia DOES NOT WANT  to invade anything, but it wants to be independent of the US crap. The Crimea situation is like that of Scotland and England. The Crimeans, 90 per cent Russians, voted to rejoin Russia. NOTHING ELSE.  Meanwhile the USA fomented a revolution in Ukraine using the Nazi and the ultra-right elements from within that country to overthrow a legitimate government. Disinformation was rife. 

A few years ago, Russia modernised its "information" services. There is disinformation galore like in the western media, but through Sputnik and RT it has cleverly promoted the counter arguments of the US empire, often using the "truth" about the US empire to make it eat its own tail. 

And the USA obliged... The process was even less of a butterfly in the Amazon jungle that created a hurricane in US politics. Just the fear of Russia without any intervention of Russia in the US political system has been enough to spin the US heads. 

All along, Trump has said he wanted the USA to have a more mature relationship with Russia. This would have been anathema to all the hot-head and the military hawks in the US who want to maintain the idea that Russia is the devil. All Russia wants is to be "accepted for what it is" and be friend with the US as much as France and Germany are to be "friends" forever, under the Adenauer/de Gaulle handshake in the 1960s.

A friendship between the USA and Russia would be more economically profitable for the planet and far more peaceful overall. But the US hawks don't want this. Losing their "bete noire" (Russia), they would become second irrelevant. For them, making friends with Russia would be like loosing the war -- another war in their own mind which has been going on since the end of WWII. A Russian victory in this game of psychological warfare is unthinkable in the US minds... What!   

Russia did not have to do anything in the US presidential elections -- and they did not. They let the US own internal conversation (I hate this word) to do the self-destruction. 

Peace will have to be no matter what. So far, the only hindrance to world peace is the USA and its vassals, Saudi Arabia and Israel.  Not Russia. Russia wants peace.

 

Note: The Trump victory was due to Rupert Murdoch, far more than the Russian illusion of intervention in the Presidential elections. Comey is deluded. HE STILL HAS NO PROOFS OF RUSSIAN INTERVENTION. I have plenty of proofs on how Rupert Murdoch swung the elections in favour of Trump.

no he won't...

according to the ABC (Australia), Trump will be haunted by his Comey 'tapes' tweet

 

One can say with certainty: "NO, He won't..." 

Trump does not care about this or that... He is like a tank, crushing whatever is in its path, without a rear view mirror. This is the strength of the man (monkey, beast, idiot, bully, inspired fool). I believe The Donald sleeps like a baby every night. No nightmares, no haunted house. A job well-done daily. Ruins are invigorating to the conqueror. Deflector shields of guilt are essential. It's always someone else's fault. Simple logic. Victory is around the corner. You can't travel back on burned bridges. Forward! forward! The muck is getting thicker -- making a man stronger. He did it, does it and will do it, his way. Improv is a skill of the last standing comedian. He's been doing the same shit for more than 50 years... And of all things, he's having all the fun, while we plod...

the CIA gets the Pullmylegg first prize for fiction...

 

Early last August, an envelope with extraordinary handling restrictions arrived at the White House. Sent by courier from the CIA, it carried “eyes only” instructions that its contents be shown to just four people: President Barack Obama and three senior aides.

Inside was an intelligence bombshell, a report drawn from sourcing deep inside the Russian government that detailed Russian President Vladimir Putin’s direct involvement in a cyber campaign to disrupt and discredit the U.S. presidential race.

But it went further. The intelligence captured Putin’s specific instructions on the operation’s audacious objectives — defeat or at least damage the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, and help elect her opponent, Donald Trump.

At that point, the outlines of the Russian assault on the U.S. election were increasingly apparent. Hackers with ties to Russian intelligence services had been rummaging through Democratic Party computer networks, as well as some Republican systems, for more than a year. In July, the FBI had opened an investigation of contacts between Russian officials and Trump associates. And on July 22, nearly 20,000 emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee were dumped online by WikiLeaks.

Read more: 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/world/national-security/oba...

 

With this fiction, the Washington Post sinks to new low. You are allowed to believe this WP crap, mind you in the same manner as you believe that everything in the bible is true. And we know the music: we can't -- the government can't -- reveal the sources because this would lead to loosing contacts "deep within Russian Government, including someone who may have been Putin's personal boot polisher" who could say with certainty that Putin ordered the destruction of La Woman and promote Trump. 

We all know of course that La Woman Hillary won the popular vote by a whopping margin, more than 3 million geezers with voting rights (the Collegial voting system in the US is totally undemocratic but used by The Donald to perfection). We all know also that the CIA is a hub where fiction of mass destruction has been, is and will be concocted. Every year the CIA wins the Pullmylegg Institute first prize for fiction. Not only that, the MMMM (MSM -- the mediocre mass media de mierda) indulges in publishing top secret innuendoes without any proof whatsoever, but with great penmanship skills, except that a secret source at the porkie factory told them in confidence.

And of course we know that "the DNC did not try to damage Bernie's chances to win the Democratic nomination". Just kidding. The DNC did everything it could to sabotage Sanders and his supporters. One did not have to go to Russia to know that this was the case. DemocracyNow.org (one of Bernie supporters investigative journos at the time) was on the ball to show from clear observation on the ground that this was happening. Bernie supporters did not have to get evidence from the Kremlin that Hillary's mob was playing dirty. They had their own inside information and knew the extend of the damage. 

We all know that Uncle Rupe did not present La Woman Hillary in a good light on all its network, from FOX TV to the New York Post. We all know (we should if we don't) that Uncle Rupe supported Trump in various ways, without making him appear like Jesus Christ, but a flawed character ready to destroy the "establishment" and clean the swamp...

We all know that despite not liking him, the evangelicals voted in drove for The Donald. No Russian Hack there. Were they influenced by the "Russian Propaganda"? NO. Because there was no such thing as "Russian Interference". That Wikileaks published La Clinton's email had nothing to do with Russia. Here one has to contemplate the personal war between Assange and Hillary Clinton, the warrior woman. The fact that Obama revealed that the war on Libya was "his biggest mistake" did not helped Clinton either considering she had been the instigator. Clinton had stated again and again that "Wikileaks was finished" did not help her either. Red rag to a bull stuff. Her flippancy about the death of Gaddafi was unforgivable and her mention of the "deplorables" did not win her any points. Should the CIA have known that the DNC was being hacked by the Russians, the CIA's duty would have been to alert the DNC that their security was crook. The CIA did nothing because there was "nothing".

A lot of the CIA information has been fabricated after the fact, in order to heap crap on the Russians, while not even looking at the US own's malaise, which was to invite a racist, nasty, hypocritical, grubby pussy-grabber Russian-lover (we knew that and he did not hide it) idiot to win the Republican nomination by whatever means, defeating cleverer and more wholesome characters who would have got nowhere against Hillary's lies -- and war plans. There is no two ways about it that had Hillary won the gig, Damascus would have been bombed by the USA and WWIII was on the cards. To a great extend, we should be grateful that "Russia interfered in the US Presidential elections" (it did not but hey). 

read from top...

The Post also reports that

The Post also reports that the Obama administration considered retaliatory options against Moscow including the release of intelligence that might embarrass Putin and planting “cyber weapons” in Russia’s infrastructure, but eventually settled on something less ambitious.

read more:

 

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jun/23/obama-cia-warning-russia...

 

 

Less ambitious? Sure doing nothing is far less ambitious... Read comment above. But because they all thought that Hillary had it in the bag, they did not realise the bag had a hole in it... This WP article is disinformation of the highest calibre. William J. Casey ("We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the US public believes is false".) would be chuffed.

Meanwhile we should know that the US, under Obama and previous tenants of the White House, cyber weapons have been used against Russia...

if you can't convince them, confuse them...

In the span of 72 hours, President Trump described the email hacking that roiled the 2016 campaign as a Democratic “hoax” and as clear aggression by Russia that his predecessor, President Barack Obama, failed to address.

Other times, Mr. Trump has said the hacking might have been done by China.

Or, as he claimed during the first general election debate, the hacking could have been the work of a lone wolf weighing 400 pounds, sitting on his bed at home.

Then there was the time Mr. Trump blamed “some guy in his home in New Jersey.”

Or, as Mr. Trump has also suggested, there might not even have been hacking at all…

On Saturday, Mr. Trump tried again to focus attention on Mr. Obama.

“Since the Obama Administration was told way before the 2016 Election that the Russians were meddling, why no action?” Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter. “Focus on them, not T!”

read more:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/25/us/politics/trumps-deflections-and-denials-on-russia-frustrate-even-his-allies.html?

 

--------------------

And unfortunately, T is correct. All his various "explanations" about the Russian interference in the US Presidential elections could still be valid. Hacking or not, from China, Russia or New Jersey, it DID NOT influence the result of the elections. So Trump is making a joke of the whole things and his Republican mates should not try to "understand" the "depth of the hacking" which is a distraction designed to stop Trump's (who knows?) agenda of resuming "normal" relations with Russia. Russia did not interfere with the US elections. FULL STOP... 

humble pie at CNN...

Following CNN’s speedy retraction of a light-on-the-facts story claiming that an ally of US President Donald Trump had close financial ties to an investment fund managed by a state-run Russian bank, the network moved to tighten up its Russia coverage.


The executive editor of CNNMoney, Rich Barbieri, emailed a statement on Saturday issuing new publishing rules for CNN stories dealing with Russia, after retracting a Russia story one day before, according to The Hill.


According to Buzzfeed, which first reported on the CNN internal email, Barbieri stated that, "No one should publish any content involving Russia without coming to me and Jason [Farkas]."


"This applies to social, video, editorial, and MoneyStream. No exceptions," Barbieri's email added, cited by The Hill.

The new CNN policy is in response to a Friday retraction of a published story that purported to connect Anthony Scaramucci, a Trump ally, to a state-run Russian bank.

"On June 22, 2017, CNN.com published a story connecting Anthony Scaramucci with investigations into the Russian Direct Investment Fund," the media company stated.

"That story did not meet CNN's editorial standards and has been retracted. Links to the story have been disabled. CNN apologizes to Mr. Scaramucci."

CNN's Russian scare story — one of what looks to be a continual stream of lightweight (and profitable) Kremlin fearmongering — inferred that the US Senate was investigating a $10 billion Russian investment fund (RDIF) with regard to Scaramucci, an executive committee member of Trump's transition team, cited by The Hill.

read more:

https://sputniknews.com/us/201706261054966576-CNN-retreats-after-Russia-...

a fat zero for the new york times...

The New York Times prides itself on the motto “All the news that’s fit to print.” This week it must have found extra space, because it printed an expose into alleged Russian interference that was barely fit to wipe your…

Anyway, here's a look at the last seven days or so of Russophobia. 

NYT’s alleged journalism

If you’ve ever wondered whether Russophobia really does sell newspapers, then look no further than the New York Times, which published a massive expose titled ‘A Plot to Subvert an Election: Unravelling the Russia Story So Far’.

The only thing that unravels in this 10,000 word extravaganza is the story itself. Buried deep in the text, so far down that most people will have given up reading the article to play Candy Crush on their phone instead, is the immortal admission of 'no evidence' which can be found in all the best examples of Russophobia posing as journalism: “Mr Trump’s frustration with the Russian investigation is not surprising. He is right no public evidence has emerged that his campaign conspired with Russia.”

The whole piece is a fine example of how to present allegations as fact. The entire text uses the words ‘alleged’ and ‘allegation’ just twice – which is pretty amazing when you realize Robert Mueller’s inquiry into Russia being the root of all evil still hasn’t reported back. 

NYT can take or leave internet freedom

The New York Times has had a big week in Russophobia. It also emerged the paper is suing the Federal Communications Commission in the US, alleging the government department won’t admit that Russian hackers targeted a public commenting system on a proposed change to Net Neutrality laws.  

READ MORE: New York Times seeks evidence Russian hackers are fighting for internet freedom in US

Around 23 million comments were submitted in the public discussion on the law change which essentially would end freedom of the internet, and give power to huge corporations to control it. One analytical report suggested that half a million of the submissions, the vast majority calling for the internet to remain free, came from Russia. The report also admitted there’s no evidence it was Russians, and that just as many came from Germany.

 

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/news/439774-russophobia-digest-part-11-nyt/

 

Read from top.

makes a good legend for the western media though...

 

U.S. States: We Weren’t Hacked by Russians in 2016


Shocker: the media ignores the fact there is no real evidence of election systems tampering.


By GARETH PORTER • August 16, 2019


A “bombshell” Senate Intelligence Committee report released in July repeated the familiar claim that Russia targeted the electoral websites of at least 21 states—but statements from the states themselves effectively undermine that narrative.

It turns out the reality is dramatically different from the headlines.

The states’ own summary responses contained in the report show that, with one exception, they found either no effort to penetrate any of their election-related sites or merely found scanning and probing associated with an IP address that the FBI had warned about ahead of the 2016 election. Hardly a slam dunk.

Federal authorities, including Independent Counsel Robert Mueller, later claimed that the Russians used that IP address to hack into the Illinois state election systems and access some 200,000 voter records, though Mueller provided no additional evidence for that in his report. Nor was there any evidence that any data was tampered with, or a single vote changed.

About the same time, in August 2016, it was reported that Arizona state election systems were also breached, and it was widely speculated afterward that the Russians were behind it. But the Senate committee itself acknowledged that it was a criminal matter, and didn’t involve the Russians. 

The “Russian” hack on the Illinois website, however, eventually became part of conventional wisdom, mainly because of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s indictment of 12 GRU (Russia’s foreign intelligence agency) officers for allegedly carrying it out. 

But the overarching reality here is that there was no real penetration anywhere else. As for outside “probing” and “testing of vulnerabilities” (which, when closely read, makes up the vast majority of the “targeting” cited in the Senate report), that is something that states contend with every day at the hands of an untold number of potential hackers, including, but not limited to, foreign actors.

As Lisa Vasa, Oregon’s chief information security officer, explained to The Washington Post, the state blocks “upwards of 14 million attempts to access our network every day.” And Colorado Secretary of State Wayne Williams told the Postthat the kind of scanning that was discussed by DHS “happens hundreds, if not thousands, of times per day.”  

Furthermore, not all federal officials buy into the theory that the Illinois intrusion was political—rather than criminal—in nature. In fact, DHS Assistant Secretary for Cyber Security and Communications Andy Ozment testified in late September 2016 that the aim of the hackers in the Illinois case was “possibly for the purpose of selling personal information,” since they had stolen the data but made no effort to alter it online.

The Senate Intelligence Committee, DHS, and the intelligence community nevertheless chose to omit that reality from consideration, presumably because it would have interfered with their desired conclusion regarding the Russian cyber attacks on the 2016 election.

How the states refute DHS claims

The report says, “Russian government-affiliated cyber actors conducted an unprecedented level of activity against state election infrastructure in the run-up to the 2016 U.S. election.” 

None of the 21 states in question except for Illinois are identified by the heavily redacted report. Instead they are identified by number (State 1, State 2, etc.), which the Committee explains was at the request of DHS and “some states.” Their responses to the Committee’s query on what they experienced in 2016 are summarized in a single sentence and expounded on at greater length in the report. 

Six of those states told the Committee that they had seen no cyber threat whatsoever to their government websites. Thirteen reported some level of “probing or scanning” (one lasting all of one second) that involved one of the cyber tools or IP addresses that DHS/FBI viewed as possibly Russia-related (but otherwise there is no concrete evidence that the activity was related to election tampering). 

Arizona (“State 4,” based on the widely reported circumstances of the case) also contradicted the DHS position. The report acknowledges that there were two “rounds of cyber activity” on Arizona systems. But one was a successful phishing attack that was later attributed to criminals, not Russians.

In the second, the DHS account states, “Russian actors engaged in the same scanning activity as seen in other states, but directed at a domain affiliated with a public library.” (The spokesman for the Arizona Secretary of State, Michele Regan, told this writer that DHS had admitted only under grilling by state officials that the only thing “targeted” ahead of the 2016 election had been the Phoenix Public Library.) However, the report admits that DHS “has low confidence that this cyber activity is attributable to the Russian intelligence services because the target was unusual and not directly involved in elections.” 

Nevertheless DHS continues to include Arizona—along with the six other states that clearly rejected the DHS claims, and the rest that merely acknowledge evidence of scanning or probing—as being among the 21 states victimized by Russia. 

Were cyber tools real evidence of Russia’s role?

The role of those cyber tools and IP addresses underlines the political nature of the DHS position. The FBI had sent a “FLASH” message to state election officials on August 18, 2016 alerting them to the use of Acunetix and SQLMAP technologies and eight IP addresses during the successful hack into the Illinois state voter registration website. Although the FBI did not suggest that these were indicators of Russian involvement, they and DHS began treating them as such. 

In fact, however, Acunetix is a commonly available and widely used tool for identifying website vulnerabilities, and SQLMAP is a widely used “open source” technology for detecting and exploiting database vulnerabilities.

Thus DHS was pushing the use of these tools as indicators of Russian hacking, even though such technology is common to virtually all criminal hackers. 

DHS and FBI had linked the eight IP addresses with Russia, because six of the eight were traced to King Servers, a hosting service owned by a young Russian living in Siberia, and one had briefly hosted a Russian criminal market during 2015. But the fact that the web hosting service was Russian-owned doesn’t necessarily mean that his clients were Russian government-related, and IP addresses change hands frequently. 

The owner of the six IP addresses, Vladimir Fomenko, told the New York Timesthat he could provide specific data on the IP address used in the Illinois intrusion that could help the FBI investigation. The FBI, whose counterinsurgency branch was providing input to Mueller’s Russia investigation, might have been expected to follow up on that lead. But Fomenko told me in a July 24, 2018 email that the FBI still had made no effort to contact him. 

Lastly the Senate report itself seems to leave some question about whether these IP addresses and hacking tools were a solid indication of Russian election tampering. “IP addresses associated with the August 18, FLASH,” the report says, “provided some indications the activity might be attributable to the Russian government, particularly the GRU [emphasis added].” 

States haven’t been quiet about how DHS is misreporting this story. After Wisconsin election officials protested the claim in September 2017 that its election website had been targeted, DHS was forced to acknowledge that it had in fact been another non-election state website that had been scanned. The same happened in California.

Contrary to every mainstream media story about it, the Senate Committee report actually shows that DHS created a spectacular story without any solid evidence to back it up. The Committee should have been investigating the misleading political tactics of DHS, instead of being a cheerleader for it.

Gareth Porter is an investigative reporter and regular contributor to The American Conservative. He is also the author of Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare.

 

Read more:

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/u-s-states-deny-they-we...

 

 

Read from top.