TEL AVIV — President Donald Trump on Saturday continued to hammer the Obama administration on Twitter regarding its role in claims that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election.
Trump tweeted the following on Saturday:
And on Friday, Trump tweeted:
Trump seems to be referring to a Washington Post article published Friday reporting that President Obama was aware as early as August of U.S. intelligence indicating, as the newspaper characterized it, “Russian President Vladimir Putin’s direct involvement in a cyber campaign to disrupt and discredit the U.S. presidential race.”
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.”
According to the Post, one reason Obama held back was fear of “potentially contaminating the expected Clinton triumph,” the newspaper reported.
Last December, NBC News was first to report 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 the presidential election.
Trump’s latest tweets mark the second time in recent days the president has gone on the offensive by raising questions about the Obama administration and Democrats’ involvement in the Russia story.
On Thursday, Trump used his Twitter platform to raise questions about why the Democratic National Committee (DNC) turned down FBI requests to inspect its hacked servers.
He further questioned why the DNC was uninterested in assistance from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to secure DNC servers.
The DNC did not return numerous Breitbart News requests to its top officials seeking comment on why the DNC rebuffed FBI and DHS requests regarding its servers.
In his 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.
Regarding the DHS requests to assist the DNC in cybersecurity, in his prepared remarks before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, former Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson revealed that the Democratic National Committee “did not feel it needed” DHS assistance in investigating 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.
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.
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