Posted by James the Russian Analyst
Setting aside the unsolved Seth Rich murder, there is a separate bombshell threatening to blow apart the mainstream media and the largely accepted by Congress ‘slam dunk’ case that the Russian government ‘hacked the election’. And unlike the Rich case, it doesn’t revolve around any lost or covered up forensic evidence, or a cooperative but terrified witness having to come forward.
The Crowdstrike Cookie Crumbles:
Trying and Failing to Explain Why FBI Didn’t Get the DNC Server
The credibility of the U.S. Intelligence Community (US IC) assessment produced by the politicized by the Obama Administration directors of four agencies (CIA/FBI/NSA and ODNI), rather than the long (and falsely) repeated claim of unanimity among 17 rests on two foundations: alleged NSA or 5Eyes partner ‘trunk’ data which (sorry Reality Winner) will likely remain forever classified to ‘protect sources and methods’, and IT forensics conducted by a single company: Crowdstrike. Sure, ThreatConnect a separate cyber security firm claimed to have authenticated Crowdstrike’s findings that the DNC ‘hackers’ left behind traces consistent with an alleged state sponsored Russian hacking group dubbed ‘Fancy Bear’. But the connections between Crowdstrike’s USSR-born CEO Dmitry Alperovich, the military industrial complex/foreign government funded NATO think tank the Atlantic Council, and Alperovich’s wife at the Obama Department of Homeland Security have raised questions about the firm since last year.
Crowdstrike’s Ukrainian Army Artilleryists ‘Hacked by GRU’ Story:
A Bad Screw Up of Cyber-Attribution or a Flagrant Falsehood?
More important than suspected partisan political allegiances or Cold War 2.0 axes to grind with Moscow, two serious problems have developed since last summer for Alperovitch and his company’s credibility. The first is the company’s identification of the GRU FancyBear hackers it says were behind the DNC breach and data dump as having also hacked iPads and other personal devices of Ukrainian Army artilleryists from late 2014 to 2016. The Russian military sponsored or directed FancyBear hackers goal, according to the Crowdstrike report released in December, was to identify the positions of Ukrainian self-propelled and towed artillery on the Donbass battlefield to facilitate Russian proxies destroying them. Crowdstrike erroneously cited a report by the UK based think tank the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) claiming that the Ukrainian military had suffered losses of up to 80% of its prewar stocks of its deployable, 1980s Soviet Army vintage D-30 howitzers.
However, in a major embarrassment for a cyber security firm so closely tied to the pro-Kiev Atlantic Council, the Ukrainians denied the level of losses and that the Russian military had hacked any app used by artillery officers to improve their battlefield accuracy. After looking at the story, the Russia Analyst determined the most likely explanation for heavy losses of Ukrainian artillery pieces was a combination of several factors, and likely had little to do with any hacking of UAF officers’ iPads or tablets. While GRU signals intelligence officers based in Donetsk likely did hack into Ukraine’s cellphone towers network to better triangulate UAF positions from the Kiev forces cellular signals (a technique likely beyond the capabilities of formerly Ukrainian citizen hackers native to the breakaway republics), this has nothing to do with the specific exploit that Crowdstrike alleged had been used by FancyBear.
A screenshot of the Ukrainian Defense Ministry’s denial of Crowdstrike’s claim that its artilleryists personal tablets or iPads were hacked by the Russian security services for purposes of battlefield geolocation and counterbattery fire.
Skeptics like Jeffrey Carr documented within days of the original Crowdstrike report that the exploits cited in it were available ‘in the wild’ to Russian and Ukrainian hackers alike, without being necessarily attributable to Russian state sponsored actors. One explanation for Ukrainian artillery losses, however falsified by Kiev’s (thousands of UAF casualties hiding) Ministry of Defense, likely had to do with cannons shipped off to Syrian jihadists ‘moderate’ and otherwise via Odessa and Turkey. These were probably being counted by enterprising and corrupt UAF officers as ‘destroyed in the ATO’, since many artillery pieces were cannibalized for spare parts or lost in the heaviest fighting around the so-called ‘Southern Cauldron’ south of Ilovaisk and at Debaltsevo between July 2014 and February 2015. Another explanation, and one that has considerable evidence to support it, is crushing counter-battery fire from the so-called ‘vacationers’ visiting Donbass — or Russian Army artillery based near the border during the pivotal battles of mid-to-late summer 2014.
POTUS Tweets: Why Didn’t FBI Ever Obtain the DNC Server and Rely on Crowdstrike Instead?
The second major problem for Crowdstrike’s credibility is far better known than the Ukrainian artilleryists getting hacked by Russian forces that Kiev says didn’t happen. That is, the presidential highlighted failure of the FBI to obtain the actual DNC server, and the agency’s reliance under since fired director James Comey on Crowdstrike for alleged forensics proving Russian government hacking. This supposed non-issue with the entire case against the Russians ‘meddling in the election’ has been persistently challenged by President Trump and his political allies, especially Fox News host Sean Hannity and his regular guest, talk radio host Laura Ingraham:
The response from anti-Trump and especially ex-US IC #NeverTrump ers has been to ignore the oddness of trying to have the cyber equivalent to a murder investigation without a body. Instead, they rely on the unseen and likely to never be released data the NSA may have as well as the supposedly impeccable professional background of Crowdstrike’s management to maintain a weakening Narrative, one that Trump has doubted and the Russians have consistently denied. Russian President Vladimir Putin denied any election meddling to Trump’s face during last week’s G20 meeting in Hamburg, and claimed at the subsequent press conference that Trump accepted his denial — an account disputed by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.
Here for example, is a less partisan source, and one that has been highly critical of Washington’s ‘Borg’ist foreign policy Establishment at retired Army Col. Pat Lang’s Turcopolier blog, trying to explain the FBI’s failure to obtain the server from the DNC. Writer ‘TTG’, who believes that Russia indeed hacked the DNC and/or waged information warfare against the U.S. in 2015-16, had this to say:
You, David Habakkuk and many others seem to rely on the questionable parentage and demeanor of Dimitri Alperovitch to justify your conviction that Russia had nothing to do with the DNC or Podesta hacks or did not attempt to influence our 2016 election. Beyond your reasonable and justifiable skepticism of the IC, I think you’re all trying too hard to exonerate Putin and prevent any besmirchment of the immaculate glory of Trump’s election to the Presidency of the United States.
Alperovitch did not run the team investigating the DNC hack. It was Shawn Henry, a twenty plus year veteran FBI agent. He was assistant director of the FBI’s Cyber Division from 2008 to 2010 and is credited with boosting the FBI’s computer crime and cybersecurity capabilities. I was intimately familiar with the FBI Cyber Division, their robust capabilities and the respect they received from their parent organization. I was envious of their resources and organizational support. While in the FBI, Henry was already tracking the activities of Russian intelligence and criminal hackers. That continued once he retired from the FBI and began working at CrowdStrike. Those in the FBI who took CrowdStrike’s research probably did so because of Henry’s reputation.
And why didn’t the DNC turn their email servers over to the FBI? For one thing, remember that Hillary Clinton was under FBI investigation at the time for her own email troubles. She and the DNC saw no upside to turning over anything that the FBI could use against her in that investigation. That’s just as prudent as Trump not voluntarily handing over detailed records of his business and financial dealings with Russians. This is especially true since Mueller has assembled a team of experienced federal prosecutors, not investigators.
Crowdstrike CEO Dmitry Alperovitch, who sits on the NATO supporting, foreign governments funded Atlantic Council think tank’s advisory board (photo used for U.S. Fair Use purposes of comment or criticism)
Comey’s Reliance on Crowdstrike and Failure to Get a Justice Dept. Subpoena for the DNC Server
TTG’s claim that the Democrats feared there might be incriminating material for the FBI to find on the DNC server seems persuasive, but doesn’t quite wash with Comey’s tendency to absolve Hillary Clinton from prosecution based on her alleged state of mind. That of course, despite the media and his friends campaign to portray him as a non-partisan lawman, spared Attorney General Loretta Lynch from having to take the politically difficult course after her infamous private jet meeting with Bill Clinton last summer of saving candidate Hillary from legal consequences for her home bathroom server storage of highly classified data. Comey’s reopening of the investigation into the Clinton email server, widely blamed by Democrats for Hillary’s loss before the Russian hacking excuse took preeminence in the media, turned out to be little more than a gesture by an FBI director hoping to hedge his bets as the pre-election polling tightened in Trump’s favor.
Comey’s political games and attempts to cover for the Clinton crime family while promoting the Deep State #MuhRussia vendetta against Trump justly cost him his job. Now Comey stands accused of leaking classified data in memos to a friend, who gave them to The New York Times. But this is far from his most serious betrayal of the public trust as FBI Director, if the latest bombshell analysis of the #DNCLeaks data is correct.
Read more ----------------> http://www.roguemoney.net/2017/07/11/crowdstrike-guccifer2-fraud/