On June 22, President Donald Trump raised three unanswered questions about the Democratic Party and the Obama administration’s role in claims that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election.
All three questions are backed by legitimate data and should be at the top of the list for news media outlets to investigate if the goal is to get to the bottom of the alleged Russia hacking story.
Here are Trump’s three queries together with background information raising further questions on the subjects.
1 – Why did the Democratic National Committee (DNC) turn down FBI requests to inspect its hacked servers?
The DNC did not immediately return a Breitbart News request seeking comment on why it rebuffed FBI requests to inspect the Committee’s servers.
In January testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee, then-FBI Director James Comey confirmed that the FBI registered “multiple requests at different levels,” to review the DNC’s hacked servers. Ultimately, the DNC and FBI came to an agreement in which a “highly respected private company” would carry out forensics on the servers and share any information that it discovered with the FBI, Comey testified.
A senior law enforcement official stressed the importance of the FBI gaining direct access to the servers, a request that was denied by the DNC.
“The FBI repeatedly stressed to DNC officials the necessity of obtaining direct access to servers and data, only to be rebuffed until well after the initial compromise had been mitigated,” the official was quoted by the news media as saying.
“This left the FBI no choice but to rely upon a third party for information. These actions caused significant delays and inhibited the FBI from addressing the intrusion earlier.”
Comey’s statement about a “highly respected private company” gaining access to the DNC servers was a reference to CrowdStrike, the third-party company ultimately relied upon by the FBI to make its assessment about alleged Russian hacking into the DNC.
As this reporter documented, CrowdStrike was financed to the tune of $100 million from a funding drive last year led by Google Capital.
Google Capital, which now goes by the name of CapitalG, is an arm of Alphabet Inc., Google’s parent company. Eric Schmidt, the chairman of Alphabet, has been a staunch and active supporter of Hillary Clinton and is a longtime donor to the Democratic Party.
CrowdStrike is a California-based cybersecurity technology company co-founded by experts George Kurtz and Dmitri Alperovitch.
Alperovitch is a nonresident senior fellow of the Cyber Statecraft Initiative at the Atlantic Council. The Council takes a hawkish approach toward Russia and has released numerous reports and briefs about Russian aggression.
The Council is funded by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Inc, the U.S. State Department, and NATO ACT.
Another Council funder is the Ploughshares Fund, which in turn has received financing from billionaire George Soros’ Open Society Foundations.
2 – Why was the DNC uninterested in assistance from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to secure DNC servers?
The DNC further did not immediately reply to a Breitbart News request seeking clarity on this issue.
In his prepared remarks before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, former Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Jeh Johnson revealed that the Democratic National Committee “did not feel it needed” DHS assistance into hacks of the Committee’s systems.
This means that the DNC, faced with hacks later attributed to Russia, turned down the possibility of assistance from at least two federal agencies – the DHS and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
Johnson’s prepared remarks read:
Sometime in 2016 I became aware of a hack into systems of the Democratic National Committee. Fresh from the experience with the Office of Personnel Management, I pressed my staff to know whether DHS was sufficiently proactive, and on the scene helping the DNC identify the intruders and patch vulnerabilities. The answer, to the best of my recollection, was not reassuring: the FBI and the DNC had been in contact with each other months before about the intrusion, and the DNC did not feel it needed DHS’s assistance at that time.
3 – Why did the Obama administration wait until October before going public with claims that Russia was attempting to interfere in the 2016 presidential election?
The Obama administration was reportedly confident that Russia was attempting to hack the election as early as August. Yet the administration waited until October 7 to make an announcement, when the DHS released a statement claiming “the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations.”
Newsweek raised further questions three months ago when the magazine cited “two sources with knowledge of the matter” reporting that Comey wanted to go public with the Russia story in the summer of 2016, but he was rebuffed by top Obama administration officials.
Newsweek reported:
Well before the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) accused the Russian government of tampering with the U.S. election in an October 7 statement, Comey pitched the idea of writing an op-ed about the Russian campaign during a meeting in the White House Situation Room in June or July.
“He had a draft of it or an outline. He held up a piece of paper in a meeting and said, ‘I want to go forward. What do people think of this?’” says a source with knowledge of the meeting, which included Secretary of State John Kerry, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson and National Security Adviser Susan Rice.
… “The White House shut it down,” that source says. “They did their usual—nothing.” Both sources spoke to Newsweek on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak to the press.
Last December, NBC News reported the Obama administration’s thinking about whether to go public with the Russia story was influenced by the belief inside the White House that Hillary Clinton would win.
NBCNews.com reported:
The Obama administration didn’t respond more forcefully to Russian hacking before the presidential election because they didn’t want to appear to be interfering in the election and they thought that Hillary Clinton was going to win and a potential cyber war with Russia wasn’t worth it, multiple high-level government officials told NBC News.
“They thought she was going to win, so they were willing to kick the can down the road,” said one U.S official familiar with the level of Russian hacking.
The administration did take action in response to the hack prior to the election. In September, President Obama privately confronted Vladimir Putin about the hacks at the G-20 summit in China. He warned the Russian President of unspecified consequences if the hacks continued.
In his testimony before the Senate this week, former DHS chief Johnson attempted to explain the Obama administration’s decision to wait until October before announcing the Russia charges.
Stated Johnson:
First, as you know well, we have to carefully consider whether declassifying the information compromises sources and methods.
Second, there was an ongoing election, and many would criticize us for perhaps taking sides in the election. So that had to be carefully considered. One of the candidates, as you’ll recall, was predicting that the election was going to be rigged in some way. And so we were concerned that, by making the statement, we might in and of itself be challenging the integrity of the — of the election process itself.
This was — this was a very difficult decision. But in my personal view, it’s something we had to do. It got careful consideration, a lot of discussion. My view is that we needed to do it, and we needed to do it well before the election, to inform the American voters of what we knew and what we saw, and that it would be unforgivable if we did not, pre-election. And I’m glad we did it.
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.
With research by Joshua Klein.
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