It’s the Server, Stupid; Do All Roads Lead Back to the DNC and CrowdStrike?
Image created by Brandon Morse for RedState.com
Campaign strategist James Carville has been considered a political genius for pointing out a simple truth, that people vote with their wallets.
As impeachment mania swept through Washington last fall, Democrats trumpeted the message that ‘Trump threatened to withhold aid from Ukraine unless the country would agree to investigate the Bidens. He tried to force a foreign power to dig up dirt on his political opponent. Trump is unhinged. He’s vulgar. He’s doing tremendous damage to the country.’ Their rhetoric, however, conspicuously ignored the great white elephant in the room.
None of them mentioned the “favor” Trump had requested early in his call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. After Trump had congratulated Zelensky for his party’s victory in the parliamentary elections, Trump noted that member countries of the EU, especially Germany, were not doing enough to help Ukraine and suggested that Zelensky speak with them about it.
Then Trump abruptly changed the subject. He asked Zelensky for a favor, the only “favor” he asked for on the call. President Trump said:
I would like you to do us a favor though because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it. I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say CrowdStrike...I guess you have one of your wealthy people…The server, they say Ukraine has it. There are a lot of things that went on, the whole situation. I think you’re surrounding yourself with some of the same people. I would like to have the Attorney General call you or your people and I would like you to get to the bottom of it. As you saw yesterday, that whole nonsense ended with a very poor performance by a man named Robert Mueller, an incompetent performance, but they say a lot of it started with Ukraine. Whatever you can do, it’s very important that you do it if that’s possible.
One of the most intriguing parts of the Democrats’ reaction to this call was that they ignored Trump’s request for a favor to learn more about CrowdStrike, the American computer security company that performed a forensic examination on the DNC’s server after they claimed they’d been hacked. CrowdStrike determined that the server had been hacked by the Russians and issued a report stating their conclusions.
Oddly, the DNC had refused to allow the FBI or the Department of Homeland Security to conduct their own analysis of the server. The FBI was forced to accept the report from CrowdStrike.
I’ve just read a piece written by American Greatness’ Michael Thau in which he focuses on the Democrats’ refusal to give oxygen to any discussion of the hacking of the DNC server prior to the 2016 presidential election which he sees as the most “crucial” question we should be asking. “Why did the DNC repeatedly reject FBI and Department of Homeland Security requests to examine their supposedly hacked machines?”
Whenever this issue is raised, Democrats assert that this issue has been settled. The Russians hacked the DNC’s servers to help Trump win the election. Case closed. Anyone who questions this conclusion is labeled as a conspiracy theorist. And they quickly pivot back to accusing Trump of whatever the charge du jour happens to be. Thau says this is “all misdirection and blatant lies.”
The American Spectator’s George Parry writes that this may be “the seminal lie” in the Democrats’ storyline.
Thau believes that Democrats’ efforts to avoid scrutiny of this episode is at the root of the whole Russian collusion narrative and that it is essential to find the truth.
Both FBI Director James Comey and Homeland Security chief Jeh Johnson testified before Congress about the DNC’s refusal to allow their forensic teams anywhere near their server. Yet Thau points out that Democrats repeatedly treat their stated conclusion, that Russians hacked their server, as if it’s a proven fact.
At that time, a senior FBI official told The Hill: “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 . . . This left the FBI no choice but to rely upon a third party for information.”
The third party he mentions is CrowdStrike.
But the establishment press spent a couple of days bullying the American reading and viewing audience into thinking any concerns about CrowdStrike were nuts. Then Democrats started shouting hysterically their patent nonsense that Trump’s remarks about Biden were an impeachable offense. The unrelenting media coverage of their obviously hopeless quest to oust him kicked in.Within just a few days of hearing their name, everyone had forgotten all about CrowdStrike. And a public discussion of the very questionable role the company played in the Democrats’ efforts to destroy the president was, thus, forestalled.
By blaming Russia for the hacking, and putting out the story that they had done so to help Trump win the election, Democrats were able to deflect criticism for the damaging and embarrassing content of the emails.
The DNC and the Clinton campaign were assisted by The New York Times who published an article entitled, “Democrats Allege D.N.C. Hack Is Part of Russian Effort to Elect Donald Trump.” The Times, rather than naming “CrowdStrike,” wrote that “researchers” determined that “the DNC’s server had been breached by Russian intelligence agencies.”
Thau writes that the FBI got in on the act.
Anonymous FBI officials just happened to leak information to the New York Times for a follow-up story with the incredibly useful headline: “Spy Agency Consensus Grows That Russia Hacked D.N.C.”According to the Times, a “federal investigation, involving the F.B.I. and [other] intelligence agencies” had concluded that “the Russian government was behind the theft” of the emails WikiLeaks had just published. So certain was Russia’s guilt that senior intelligence agency officials had even informed President Obama.It sure was lucky that CrowdStrike’s conclusions turned out to be so useful for Hillary Clinton. The DNC’s tech firm couldn’t have come up with something better suited to transform WikiLeaks’ disturbing revelations about her into suspicions about her opponent if they’d concocted it out of thin air just for that purpose.
Just to recap:
1. The DNC’s server was hacked.
2. WikiLeaks announced they had obtained and planned to release emails that were damaging to Clinton.
3. The DNC hired a private contractor, CrowdStrike, to examine their server. They concluded that the Russians were responsible.
4. The DNC refused to allow the FBI or Homeland Security anywhere near their server. The FBI accepted CrowdStrike’s unverified and redacted report, even passing it on to the Mueller team.
5. The New York Times wrote an article supporting the DNC’s version of the story. The FBI leaked information to bolster this narrative and the Times ran a second story.
6. The DNC version of events was repeated so frequently and with such conviction that ultimately, it became accepted as the truth.
7. The DNC not only deflected criticism of the content of the emails, but they managed to put out the narrative that the Russians were trying to help Trump win the election. This planted the first seeds of the Trump/Russian collusion narrative. The DNC had turned a negative into a positive.
Noteworthy Facts:
1. CrowdStrike’s Chief Technology Officer, Dmitri Alperovitch, is a nonresident senior fellow in cybersecurity at The Atlantic Council, a pro-Clinton, anti-Russian, Washington-based think tank.
2. Ukrainian billionaire and longtime contributor to the Clinton Foundation Victor Pinchuk serves on the International Advisory Board of The Atlantic Council along with James Clapper, who served as Obama’s Director of National Intelligence.
3. Thau notes that Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, and Roger Stone “were the only establishment figures known to have pushed the idea that CrowdStrike’s story about Russia having hacked the DNC was complete nonsense. Flynn and Manafort were even trying to convince Trump.”
4. Additionally, Thau points out that “the other CrowdStrike executive in charge of investigating the alleged DNC breach along with Dmitri Alperovitch was Shawn Henry, who was in charge of the FBI’s cyber operations before joining the firm. Henry was promoted to the position by Robert Mueller.”
The DNC’s claim that their server was hacked by the Russians to sway the election to Donald Trump is the root from which their entire narrative sprung.
Note: Thau goes into detail about Comey’s testimony before Congress (January, March and June 2017) and discusses the specific malware CrowdStrike claimed they found on the DNC’s server. Read the whole article here.
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