Free Republic

Does Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s indictment of 12 Russian military intelligence officers for allegedly hacking Hillary’s emails and interfering in the US election have any purpose other than to throw a monkey wrench in President Trump’s upcoming summit with Putin? Don’t forget that Rosenstein is implicated in the orchestration of Russiagate as a weapon against Trump, a weapon that serves the interests of the Democratic Party and the military/security complex about which President Eisenhower warned us 56 years ago to no avail. Rosenstein’s indictment of 12 Russians for allegedly hacking computers is a political indictment aimed at President Trump....

In the simplest and potentially most effective clapback tweet of all time, Hillary Clinton blasted Trump for his Putin presser in Helsinki with four simple words: "well, now we know." The tweet was a followup to one she had posted about Trump the day before his trip to the summit, saying, "Great World Cup. Question for President Trump as he meets Putin: Do you know which team you play for?" Clinton's response to her own tweet (that we all now "know" which team Trump plays for) was a clearly barbed acknowledgement of Trump's now infamous behavior at the summit, in...

Roger Stone, a former Trump campaign ally, responded to the Democratic National Committee’s Russia collusion lawsuit Monday, telling it to preserve its databases, records and servers for inspection. “[We] intend to test the basic underlying claims that ‘Russians’ hacked, stole, and disseminated DNC data, rather than the various other plausible scenarios, including internal theft,” wrote Robert Buschel, an attorney representing Mr. Stone, in a letter to the DNC’s lawyers. Mr. Stone is one of the more than a dozen defendants listed in the suit filed Friday, which says Russian intelligence officials, WikiLeaks and allies of Donald J. Trump worked together...

This April, Harper will publish Chasing Hillary, a new political memoir from New York Times writer-at-large Amy Chozick, EW can confirm exclusively. The book will provide a remarkably intimate and deeply personal portrait of Hillary Clinton as she withstood two dramatic losses for the presidency. Chozick’s book is the result of a decade’s worth of reporting on the former U.S. Secretary of State. Chozick’s front-row seat to Clinton’s presidential campaign implosion in 2008 led to her getting assigned the “Hillary Beat” through to 2016, when she’d once again face a painful defeat, this time in the general election to Donald...

About two dozen NYPD offficers and investigators from the Manhattan district attorney’s office raided the offices of Newsweek and its parent company, IBT Media, on Thursday. IBT Media was co-founded by Jonathan Davis and Etienne Uzac. The IRS placed a $1.2 million federal tax lien against Uzac in December 2017. The agents were said to be photographing servers in the offices, but not downloading any files at the offices on 7 Hanover Square, according to sources. They appeared to be photographing the serial numbers on the machines, said a source.

House investigators concluded that Democratic IT aides made unauthorized access to congressional servers in 2016, allegedly accessing the data of members for whom they did not work, logging in as members of Congress themselves, and covering their tracks, according to a presentation summarizing the findings of a four-month internal probe. Their behavior mirrored a “classic method for insiders to exfiltrate data from an organization,” and they continued even after orders to stop, the briefing materials allege. There are indications that numerous members’ data may have been secretly residing not on their designated servers, but instead aggregated onto one server, according...

Clinton's private email issue is often vastly oversimplified, and the two situations just aren't analogous at this point. ... As the Times's Matt Apuzzo and Maggie Haberman noted in their story, her private emails were problematic 1) because she set up her own server and used private email exclusively, and 2) because she was discussing potentially sensitive national security matters on that private server. That latter one was the big one — and the focus of the FBI investigation — because it meant classified information could potentially have been jeopardized. Here's what FBI Director James B. Comey said in recommending...

What's up with FR?

there is still a cloud of doubt hanging over the DNC’s Russia narrative on the breach of the DNC servers. The analysis that alleged that Russia was behind the DNC server breach was carried out not by the U.S. government, but by the private security group CrowdStrike. CrowdStrike is the sole source of this claim, with their June 2016 report, “Bears in the Midst: Intrusion into the Democratic National Committee” being the basis of the DNC’s Russian hacking allegations. Here are five key points about CrowdStrike that the mainstream media is ignoring:

President Donald Trump continued to cast doubt on the investigation into whether he or his campaign colluded with the Russians to interfere with the election, focusing on the Democratic National Committee’s refusal to provide their computer servers to law enforcement. The president highlighted testimony from Obama’s Homeland Security Advisor Jeh Johnson as the latest sign that there was no evidence that he colluded with Russia during the election. “Former Homeland Security Advisor Jeh Johnson is latest top intelligence official to state there was no grand scheme between Trump & Russia,” Trump wrote on Twitter.

**************************************************************************** Intel has a near-monopoly in the server industry, with its own ads proclaiming that “98 percent of the cloud runs on Intel.” That’s why Microsoft’s pledge to use ARM chips in its severs — hinted at for a while and outlined more fully at the Open Compute Summit this week — is such a big deal. Microsoft is the second biggest cloud company in the US after Amazon, and if it moves even a small bit of its business away from Intel’s products, it threatens the veteran chipmaker’s most lucrative revenue stream, responsible for $7.5 billion in operating...

The 4th and final of the Presidential and Vice Presidential debates have come and gone for 2012. Here are the three things we can walk away with. - Romney can't lose a debate coin toss, going 3 for 3. Which of course means nothing. - Obama gets more moderated debate time, going 3 for 3 in the time column. Which of course means nothing. - Free Republic crashes before any debate and doesn't get back to normal until dawn the next day. I would like to state that I have been here since the 2004 election season. I can't lay...

Apple is seeking permission to conduct "high-tech manufacturing" and to build data-center server gear in a Mesa, Arizona, facility, according to a notice published Monday by the US federal government. A notification published in the Federal Register on Monday said Apple was looking for approval from the Foreign-Trade Zones Board to produce "finished products" in a special zone that exempts it from customs duty payments. "Apple Inc has repurposed the site as a global data command center that will conduct high-tech manufacturing of finished data center cabinets for other data centers," according to a document filed by Mesa on behalf...

Never? Not once? The FBI has consistently asserted that the hack of the Democratic National Committee was an operation linked to the Russian government, even if they were less convinced that the Russians wanted to elect Donald Trump as a result. Last night, however, BuzzFeed’s Ali Watkins reported that the DNC has told her that the FBI never requested access to their servers, nor has any other government agency. Instead, they relied on a report from a private vendor: The FBI did not examine the servers of the Democratic National Committee before issuing a report attributing the sweeping cyberintrusion...

Comey's response is Clintonian: "I don't remember." Kim Strassel’s always-excellent Potomac Watch column is especially good in today’s Wall Street Journal, as it breaks down and exposes clearly how the FBI caught Hillary crony Cheryl Mills in a gigantic lie - and then let her completely off the hook for it. Mills told FBI investigators that she never even heard of Hillary’s schlock, homebrew e-mail server until after both she and Hillary had left the State Department, and that in fact during the time she worked at State she wasn’t even sure she knew what a server was. If that...

Paul Combetta may have sought advice from Reddit on how to back fill a bunch of Hillary Clinton’s old emails with someone else’s name. On the Friday, September 2nd, late in the afternoon before Labor Day weekend, the FBI released a huge trove of Clinton emails discovered during their investigation of the former Secretary of State’s use of a private email server.

Hackers may have gained access to Hillary Clinton’s and Sidney Blumenthal’s unsecured files by initially hacking Marcel Lazar Lehel, aka Guccifer, sources told PJ Media. At least one or more American whistleblowers told House and Senate Intelligence Committees the unsecured files stolen by the unidentified hackers can be found at specific locations in the Deep Web and are known as the “Russian files.” According to a PJ Media source, attaining the files did not require hacking Russians or any other computer, but instead locating the images of the files that remain when the hackers move the files around the Deep...

Microsoft has revealed its forthcoming Azure Stack won't run on the hardware of customers' choosing, an about-face on its earlier position that the hybrid cloud product would be vendor-agnostic. The company's senior director of cloud platform marketing Mark Jewett today said Azure Stack would only be initially available with hardware from Microsoft partners Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, Dell and Lenovo. Jewett said Microsoft would "prioritise" Azure Stack delivery via "turnkey integrated systems" in the initial general availability release. "We’ve been working with systems vendors on integrated systems for a while now and see this as the best approach to bring Azure innovation...

Even as the FBI said Tuesday that it would not recommend charging Hillary Clinton for putting her work email on a private server when she was secretary of state, a federal court may have just opened the door to more scrutiny of the Democratic presidential candidate. The facts of the court ruling -- in the case of another government official -- have little to do with Clinton herself. But the decision from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit appears to hold significant implications for the presumptive Democratic nominee as she seeks to deflect attention away from her...

MIAMI (Reuters) - Guantanamo war crimes prosecutions of five prisoners charged with plotting the September 11 hijacked planes attacks will be delayed by two months because of lost files caused by Pentagon computer problems, U.S. military officials said on Wednesday. A weeklong pretrial hearing had been set to begin on Monday in the death penalty case against Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the accused mastermind of the attacks, and four alleged co-conspirators. The judge overseeing the case postponed the hearing until June 17 at the request of defense lawyers who said three to four weeks' worth of their confidential work files had...