The stunning admission came from an unexpected place: the pre-trial motions of Roger Stone’s case, for which Stone’s lawyers sought original documents related to the DNC server hack in the spring of 2016. Stone, a former political adviser for Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, claimed to have spoken with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to try and get insider information about when the emails stolen in the server hack would be published by the website.
Stone’s lawyers sought unredacted reports from the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, which was hired by the DNC to forensically examine the servers. Their investigation purportedly found telltale evidence that the Russian military intelligence service, the GRU, hacked into the server.
“The government … does not possess the information the defendant seeks,” the May 31 filing reads. Stone’s lawyers only received three redacted drafts, Ray McGovern noted in a Monday article for Consortium News, which broke the story.
“Although the reports produced to the defendant are marked ‘draft,’ counsel for the DNC and DCCC [Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee] informed the government that they are the last version of the report produced,” a footnote in the filing says.
“They would never go along with this in any other case, unless they were getting the information that they wanted to get and they didn’t want to go any further and get the full, unredacted version, because there might be information there that they don’t want to have,” Jim Kavanagh, editor of The Polemicist, told Radio Sputnik’s Loud and Clear Tuesday.
The leaked emails, which WikiLeaks published throughout the autumn of 2016 immediately before the presidential election, presented a damning insider’s view of the Democratic Party leadership and Hilliary Clinton’s campaign. However, because the FBI operated on CrowdStrike’s conclusions that Russians stole the emails, that would mean Russia supplied WikiLeaks with the stolen information, which would implicate Assange in the efforts of a foreign power to influence a US election. Or so the story goes.
CrowdStrike, too, is no impartial actor. Headed by Dmitri Alperovitch, who is also a "senior fellow" at hawkish foreign policy think tank the Atlantic Council, is funded by a who’s-who of Gulf monarchies, defense contractors and NATO itself, Sputnik has reported. Moreover, the private company has a history of drawing hasty - and ultimately faulty - conclusions placing blame on Russia.
However, it’s unclear why then-FBI Director James Comey was unable to get the servers for the bureau to examine itself, especially when he admitted in a March 2017 testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee that “best practice is always to get access to the machines themselves.”
“My folks tell me was an appropriate substitute,” Comey stated.
Kavanagh told Sputnik that if any regular citizen did what CrowdStrike did, they would be charged with felony obstruction of justice.
“There was no Russiagate investigation,” Kavanagh asserted. “They had eyewitnesses to the crime, the only principals, who said ... ‘I know who leaked this.’ It was Julian Assange and Craig Murray. They didn’t talk to them. If you were investigating a crime in my house, and there were two eyewitnesses, and you never went to talk to them, then you wouldn’t really be investigating the crime.”
“This does profoundly undermine the whole Russiagate narrative,” he told hosts Brian Becker and John Kiriakou. “They say, ‘according to counsel’ - that is, the DNC counsel; this is the FBI, the DOJ, saying, ‘Oh, what we know is what they told us, and what the DNC counsel told us is that no redacted information concerned the attribution of the attack to Russian actors.’”
“So, what was it about?”
Comey “was not very interested in finding out what was going on,” Kavanagh said, noting that Comey also “scuttled” an arrangement whereby Assange would have given the bureau evidence about the source of the leaked DNC emails. “They already had the conclusion they wanted, and they didn’t want to mess that up.”
