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Friday, December 16, 2016

Speaking Truth To The Media

During the campaign, there were two big Wikileaks publications of emails that came from the Democrats.  The first was the publication of the internal DNC email that revealed that Debbie Wasserman Schultz and the DNC did all they could to rig the primaries so that Hillary Clinton beat Bernie Sanders.  This was the hack that revealed that Wasserman Schultz's successor as head of the DNC, Donna Brazile, actually fed Hillary Clinton questions for an upcoming presidential primary debate a few days ahead of that event.  This Wikileaks release came in the weeks just before the Democrat convention last summer.  The second Wikileaks release came in multiple parts.  Basically, Wikileaks put on line the email account of John Podesta, chairman of Hillary's campaign.  This drip, drip, drip release had daily surprises including things like the text of those secret speeches that Clinton gave to big Wall Street banks and a great many comments by Clintonistas that revealed their disdain for ordinary Americans.  This Wikileaks action came during the fall campaign.

The media has blamed all of this on the Russians.  There's no proof that has been released; all we have seen consists of articles citing unnamed sources at the CIA.  Both the Director of National Intelligence and the FBI, however, do not blame the Russians for the Wikileaks releases.

We now know why this split developed (if, in fact, the reports about the CIA view are correct.)  Podesta's email account was hacked by someone using a simple phishing operation.  In other words, someone sent Podesta and email with a link in it and Podesta clicked on the link.  This is the standard method for someone to hack an email account.  It requires no special skills as a hacker.  In fact, this sort of attack takes place thousands of times each day.  There is no way to connect this to the Russians.  There is no sophisticated methodology used.  It could be anyone.  The DNI and the FBI recognize this and understand there is no way to link this to Russia.  Most likely the CIA has come to the same conclusion and the reports in the media are wrong.

It may be that the hack of the DNC was the work of the Russians; I don't know.  But if that is the case, then those hacks took place last Spring and all the results were released four months before the election.  We heard nothing from the government about that.  Then Hillary lost to Trump.  Only now do we get the fake news account of massive Russian involvement.  But there's no basis for it.

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