The investigation into Russia’s alleged meddling in the 2016 election continues to take shocking twists.
Media outlets continue to report sensationalized stories about Russian hacking and alleged collusion with the Trump campaign.
Now one new bombshell just took the whole story on a turn for the worse.
Recently, the Washington Post published a 7,700-word article on the Obama administration’s response to the alleged Russia cyber attacks.
The story was portrayed as a bombshell.
And many political observers focused on the fact that the story detailed the pathetic response by the Obama administration – which amounted to nothing more than Obama asking Russian President Vladimir Putin to “cut it out.”
But Breitbart’s Aaron Klein picked up on one detail everyone missed.
The intelligence used to back-up the claims that Russia had been behind the cyber attacks was questionable.
A section inside the article contains this revelation:
“Some of the most critical technical intelligence on Russia came from another country, officials said. Because of the source of the material, the NSA was reluctant to view it with high confidence.
The Post article seems to be the first public explanation for why the NSA only assessed with “moderate confidence” the conclusion of a January 6, 2017 U.S. Intelligence Community report alleging the Russian government sought to aid Donald Trump’s “election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to him.”
The CIA and FBI, by contrast, affirmed that judgement with “high confidence” in the intelligence report.”
But the FBI’s conclusion that Russia was behind the hacks was also based on dubious information.
The Bureau never examined the servers at the Democrat National Committee.
Instead, they used the work of a third party vendor – CrowdStrike – to report that the Russians had hacked the DNC.
But CrowdStrike has a history of falsifying data to accuse the Russians of wrongdoing.
Voice of America News reports:
“An influential British think tank and Ukraine’s military are disputing a report that the U.S. cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike has used to buttress its claims of Russian hacking in the presidential election.
The CrowdStrike report, released in December, asserted that Russians hacked into a Ukrainian artillery app, resulting in heavy losses of howitzers in Ukraine’s war with Russian-backed separatists.
But the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) told VOA that CrowdStrike erroneously used IISS data as proof of the intrusion. IISS disavowed any connection to the CrowdStrike report. Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense also has claimed combat losses and hacking never happened.
A CrowdStrike spokesperson told VOA that it stands by its findings, which, they say, “have been confirmed by others in the cybersecurity community.”
The challenges to CrowdStrike’s credibility are significant because the firm was the first to link last year’s hacks of Democratic Party computers to Russian actors, and because CrowdStrike co-founder Dimiti Alperovitch has trumpeted its Ukraine report as more evidence of Russian election tampering.”
The Obama administration released a report that an assessment of all 17 intelligence agencies found Russia was behind the cyber attacks.
But the report was really only the work of the CIA, FBI, and NSA.
And two of the three agencies used questionable intelligence.
Critics also questioned why the public report contained no evidence to support the claim.
