Free Republic

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein announced on Friday that 12 Russian intelligence officers was indicted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller in the ongoing Trump-Russia investigation. The officers are members of the GRU, and are all named as having allegedly hacked the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Democratic National Committee, and the Hillary Clinton campaign. CNN reported that prosecutors from Mueller's office and the Justice Department's National Security Division gave a grand jury indictment to a D.C. federal magistrate judge on Thursday morning. The indictment comes just one day before President Trump is set to meet Russian president Vladimir Putin in Helsinki...

A district judge on Tuesday evening tossed out a lawsuit alleging the Trump campaign conspired with the Russians and WikiLeaks to publish hacked Democratic National Committee (DNC) emails during the 2016 presidential race. Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia dismissed the suit largely on the basis of jurisdiction, arguing the plaintiffs did not successfully tie the Trump campaign's actions to D.C. "Campaign meetings, canvassing voters, and other regular business activities of a political campaign do not constitute activities related to the conspiracies alleged in the complaint," Huvelle wrote. "The same is true...

In the year since the start of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, one thing has been notably absent: a public indictment of any Russians for the hacking of the Democratic National Committee (DNC). Mueller has charged President Trump’s former campaign chief, secured guilty pleas from several individuals in Trump’s orbit and indicted 13 Russians for an elaborate plot to leverage social media to influence the American electorate. But the special counsel has yet to announce charges for the hacking of the DNC, even though the intelligence community and private cybersecurity experts linked the attack to the Russian government more than...

When 27-year-old Democratic National Committee (DNC) staffer Seth Rich was shot dead in Washington, D.C., on July 8, 2016, the news had just broken that WikiLeaks was publishing a trove of embarrassing and damning DNC e-mails. And while the official story is that the leaked e-mails had nothing to do with Rich’s murder, that story falls apart under scrutiny.That official story is that Rich was killed during a robbery in an area of the city with escalating levels of crime, including armed robbery. But when Rich — who was shot twice in the back at close range — was found,...

Justice Department boss Bruce Ohr rose from obscurity when it became known that in 2016 he was embedded with Fusion GPS, compiler of the dossier on Donald Trump. Bruce’s wife Nellie H. Ohr also worked for Fusion GPS during the 2016 election, and quite possibly played a strategic role. *snip* In the spring of 2016, Nellie came to work for Fusion GPS, and as former Naval intelligence officer J.E. Dyer notes, “she looks like an ideal hire for what Fusion GPS needed in 2016: plugged directly into the DOJ, and with a language facility in Russian.” And of course, Nellie...

Two Dutch intelligence services uncovered substantial evidence detailing how a Russian-backed hacking group infiltrated the Barack Obama White House, the U.S. Department of State, and the Democratic National Committee, according to a ground breaking report from broadcaster NOS and newspaper Volkskrant. The evidence was uncovered by a Dutch cyber defense team gained access to the "Cozy Bear" hacker group's systems, including a hallway security camera that allowed the Dutch team to maintain visual surveillance of the hackers.

Dutch intelligence services had eyes and ears for years on the Russian outfit that hacked the Democratic National Committee, even infiltrating a surveillance camera at the Cozy Bear headquarters and recording hackers' faces, Dutch media reported. That trove of intelligence gathered by the Netherlands since 2014 has been crucial to the U.S. investigation into the Russian campaign influence operation, the reports from Nieuwsuur and Volkskrant said. Cybersecurity company CrowdStrike reportedly first noticed the DNC hack by two Russian intelligence groups on June 14, 2016; CrowdStrike CTO Dmitri Alperovitch wrote in a blog post at the time that they were called...

Donna Brazile said in an interview Tuesday that Russian hackers destroyed “critical data” when they breached the Democratic National Committee (DNC) ahead of the 2016 presidential election. Brazile, who served as interim DNC chair for a portion of last year, made the comments during an interview with Joe Madison on Sirius XM. “We had so much sh*t in … our entire technology ecosystem that we couldn’t clean it up. Oh man, [those] Russians were on us like white on rice. I mean, they were, Joe, they were destroying data, critical data, Joe,” Brazile, who is promoting her new book “Hacks,”...

....On April 29, 2016, when the DNC became aware its servers had been penetrated, an emergency meeting was held between the Chairwoman of the DNC, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, DNC’s Chief Executive, Amy Dacey, the DNC’s Technology Director, Andrew Brown, and Michael Sussman, a lawyer for Perkins Coie, a Washington, DC law firm that represented the DNC. Sussman took control of the meeting, setting out the DNC’s agenda when it came to dealing with the cyber attack on its server. The three most important questions, Sussman declared, were what data was accessed, how was it done, and how can it be stopped?...

CIA Director Mike Pompeo still believes Russia was responsible for hacking the Democratic National Committee, the agency said Tuesday amid reports that Pompeo met a skeptic at President Trump’s urging. William Binney, who worked more than three decades at the National Security Agency before stepping down as technical director in 2001, met with Pompeo on Oct. 24 to discuss a July report he co-authored suggesting DNC emails were leaked, rather than hacked. “I thought it was a pretty good hourlong meeting,” Binney told the Washington Examiner.

The majority of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) emails released by Wikileaks were not even written until after the DNC knew it had been hacked, raising questions about the effectiveness of Democrats’ decision to turn to a private firm instead of the FBI. DNC CEO Amy Dacey learned of the breach in late April, but of the 27,500 DNC emails published by Wikileaks, fewer than 7,000 pre-date April 29. A Daily Caller News Foundation analysis of the published emails shows that the majority were written between May 5 and May 25 — after cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike was brought in to...

That's consistent enough. We know Obama didn't care. Hillary even attacks him over it. But her own DNC operation, which she controlled, didn't care either. The hacks only became significant retroactively when A. Some actual damage was inflicted on the DNC by the release of emails.   ...and more importantly... B. Hillary lost. And that led to a frantic search for someone other than Hillary and her people to blame. Had Hillary won, this would mostly be a non-issue. Donna Brazile, the former DNC head, who is a casualty of both A and B, and is pushing back against Hillary...

Donna Brazile's newly released 2016 campaign tell-all accuses the FBI and the Democratic National Committee she used to lead of a bungled response to the email hacks that threw the party into turmoil last summer. In “Hacks,” Brazile writes that she only learned of the breach in early June 2016 when then-DNC Chairwoman Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz informed her and other party officials that The Washington Post was set to publish a story on the matter. Brazile describes Wasserman Schultz' tone as "so casual." “On June 14, Debbie invited the Democratic Party officers to a conference call to alert us...

Twitter buried significant portions of tweets related to hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign chair John Podesta in the last two months of the 2016 presidential campaign. Twitter’s systems hid 48 percent of tweets using the #DNCLeak hashtag and 25 percent of tweets using #PodestaEmails, Twitter general counsel Sean Edgett said in his written testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday. “Approximately one quarter (25%) of [#PodestaEmails tweets] received internal tags from our automation detection systems that hid them from searches,” Edgett said. He added that “our systems detected and hid just under half (48%)...

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) met with White House Chief of Staff John Kelly this week about a potential deal with Julian Assange on the Wikileaks Podesta documents. Assange has repeatedly said Russia is not linked to the leak of thousands of John Podesta emails before the election. Julian Assange reportedly told Rohrabacher he is ready to provide information that Russia did not hack the DNC. Last month Rep. Rohrabacher told Sean Hannity he was 99% certain that the Russian collusion narrative is a total lie. Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller – who is investigating whether President Trump colluded with Russia during...

On June 12, 2016, WikiLeaks announced that it would soon release stolen computer files that pertained to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. Two days later, CrowdStrike, a computer security company working for the Democratic National Committee, announced that it had detected Russian malware on the DNC’s computer server. The next day, a self-described Romanian hacker, Guccifer 2.0, claimed he was a WikiLeaks source and had hacked the DNC’s server. He then posted online DNC computer files that contained metadata that indicated Russian involvement in the hack. Much to the embarrassment of Hillary Clinton, the released files showed that the DNC had...

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.) told Sean Hannity on Monday in remarks first reported by CNN that a "rendezvous" between himself and Trump was being set up by "other parties" interested in the meeting. Assange says the DNC hack was an "inside job" and not the work of hackers linked to Russia, as the U.S. intelligence community believes. Rohrabacher said the information Assange provided him, if made public, would "outrage" Americans.

RUSH: Folks, get this, there are, today, three separate, huge exposes/stories on the entire Russia/Trump collusion bit. One of them is in The Nation. The Nation is effectively a world communist organization publication. It’s not enough to call The Nation a journal of liberal opinion. These people are extreme leftists. There is a piece at Bloomberg. There are three of them. I’ve got the stack right here. Here’s the upshot: The upshot is, . It might run to 25 pages. The upshot is they don’t believe Trump and the Russians colluded on anything. These are leftists, people who vote for...

A bombshell report published Wednesday by avowedly liberal news magazine The Nation may have put the last nail in the coffin of the “Russian hack” narrative that has dominated the mainstream media’s coverage for the last year. Author Patrick Lawrence assembles the findings of months of investigation by forensic computer experts and former NSA officials to conclude, quite categorically, what Breitbart News and other independent media outlets have suggested for nearly a year: there was no hack of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) by the Russian government or anyone else last summer. An internal leaker is a much more likely...

Research into the DNC case took a fateful turn in early July, when forensic investigators who had been working independently began to share findings and form loose collaborations wherein each could build on the work of others. In this a small, new website called www.disobedientmedia.com proved an important catalyst. Two independent researchers selected it, Snowden-like, as the medium through which to disclose their findings. One of these is known as Forensicator and the other as Adam Carter. On July 9, Adam Carter sent Elizabeth Vos, a co-founder of Disobedient Media, a paper by the Forensicator that split the DNC case...