The Joint Analysis Report from the FBI contains an appendix that lists hundreds of IP addresses that were supposedly “used by Russian civilian and military intelligence services.” While some of those IP addresses are from Russia, the majority are from all over the world, which means that the hackers constantly faked their location. John McAfee, founder of the security firm McAfee Associates, says ‘I Can Guarantee You, It Was Not the Russians’. ‘I Can Guarantee You, It Was Not the Russians’ In a desperate moment, they’ll use any sucker they can find to get a point across. Not only do governments lie, they won’t hesitate to burn news agencies. We ought to have learned from the Judith Miller episode. We just don’t know, which is the problem. Maybe the Russians did hack the DNC, but the WikiLeaks material actually came from someone else? There is even a published report to that effect, with a former British ambassador as a source, not that it’s any more believable than anything else here. It appears that a large segment of the press is biting hard on the core allegations of electoral interference emanating from the Obama administration.ĭid the Russians do it? Very possibly, in which case it should be reported to the max. Now we have this sanctions story, which presents a new conundrum. Similar reporting about Russian scheming has been based entirely on unnamed security sources. This has led to widespread confusion among news audiences over whether the Russians hacked the DNC emails (a story that has at least been backed by some evidence, even if it hasn’t always been great evidence), or whether Russians hacked vote tallies in critical states (a far more outlandish tale backed by no credible evidence).Īs noted in The Intercept and other outlets, an Economist/YouGov poll conducted this month shows that 50 percent of all Clinton voters believe the Russians hacked vote tallies.Īnd reports by some Democrat-friendly reporters – like Kurt Eichenwald, who has birthed some real head-scratchers this year, including what he admitted was a baseless claim that Trump spent time in an institution in 1990 – have attempted to argue that Trump surrogates may have been liaising with the Russians because they either visited Russia or appeared on the RT network. Democrat-leaning pundits have been unnervingly quick to use phrases like “Russia hacked the election.” John McCain and Lindsey Graham noted the “small price” Russia paid for its “brazen attack.” The Democratic National Committee, meanwhile, said Thursday that taken alone, the Obama response is “ insufficient” as a response to “attacks on the United States by a foreign power.”Īdding to the problem is that in the last months of the campaign, and also in the time since the election, we’ve seen an epidemic of factually loose, clearly politically motivated reporting about Russia. Voices in both parties are saying this now. presidential election and deliver the White House to Trump, then expelling a few dozen diplomats after the election seems like an oddly weak and ill-timed response. If the American security agencies had smoking-gun evidence that the Russians had an organized campaign to derail the U.S. The problem with this story is that, like the Iraq-WMD mess, it takes place in the middle of a highly politicized environment during which the motives of all the relevant actors are suspect. “These data theft and disclosure activities could only have been directed by the highest levels of the Russian government,” he wrote. President Obama issued a terse statement seeming to blame Russia for the hack of the Democratic National Committee emails. Thirty-five Russian nationals will be expelled from the country. In an extraordinary development Thursday, the Obama administration announced a series of sanctions against Russia. The Rolling Stone comments Something About This Russia Story Stinks Yet, once again the American press is again asked to co-sign a dubious intelligence assessment. Is there any evidence those expelled are “intelligence operatives”? Any hard evidence Russia was behind the Hillary hacks? Any credible evidence that Putin himself is to blame?
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