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| FBI Never Saw CrowdStrike Unredacted or Final Report on Alleged Russian Hacking Because None was Produced | |
| 2019-11-20 | |
CrowdStrike, the controversial cybersecurity firm that the Democratic National Committee chose over the FBI in 2016 to examine its compromised computer servers, never produced an un-redacted or final forensic report for the government because the FBI never required it to, the Justice Department has admitted. The revelation came in a court filing by the government in the pre-trial phase of Roger Stone, a long-time Republican operative who had an unofficial role in the campaign of candidate Donald Trump. Stone has been charged with misleading Congress, obstructing justice and intimidating a witness. The filing was in response to a motion by Stone’s lawyers asking for "unredacted reports" from CrowdStrike in an effort to get the government to prove that Russia hacked the DNC server. "The government ... does not possess the information the defandant seeks," the filing says. In his motion, Stone’s lawyers said he had only been given three redacted drafts. In a startling footnote in the government’s response, the DOJ admits the drafts are all that exist. "Although the reports produced to the defendant are marked ’draft,’ counsel for the DNC and DCCC informed the government that they are the last version of the report produced," the footnote says. In other words CrowdStrike, upon which the FBI relied to conclude that Russia hacked the DNC, never completed a final report and only turned over three redacted drafts to the government. These drafts were "voluntarily" given to the FBI by DNC lawyers, the filing says. "No redacted information concerned the attribution of the attack to Russian actors," the filing quotes DNC lawyers as saying. In Stone’s motion his lawyers argued: "If the Russian state did not hack the DNC, DCCC, or [Clinton campaign chairman John] Podesta’s servers, then Roger Stone was prosecuted for obstructing a congressional investigation into an unproven Russian state hacking conspiracy ... The issue of whether or not the DNC was hacked is central to the Defendant’s defense." The DOJ responded: "The government does not need to prove at the defendant’s trial that the Russians hacked the DNC in order to prove the defendant made false statements, tampered with a witness, and obstructed justice into a congressional investigation regarding election interference." Much, much more at the link. Check out the court filing from the Stone case. People ask me why Trump sent Giuliani to investigate Burisma instead of the FBI. I tell them Trump cannot trust the FBI. They look at me like my head is on backwards because they get all their news from MSM. | |
| Posted by:Abu Uluque |
| #5 The transfer speed is a giveaway. No way on earth that a dinky operation like the DNC would have paid for the kind of content delivery speeds that a YouTube or an ecommerce site customer of say Akamai would be paying. IOW the probability that the download made a round-trip to Eastern Europe is about zero. Almost certainly the data was copied to a USB Flash drive, which destroys the CrowdStrike hypothesis and points to an inside job. Several ex-NSA experts arrived at this conclusion. This Russia-hacked-the-DNC notion is yet another absurd act in The Shitshow. |
| Posted by: Lex 2019-11-20 12:02 |
| #4 OTOH Wikileaks say they got their data from a leaker and the timings look like someone with physical access to the server |
| Posted by: Bright Pebbles 2019-11-20 08:40 |
| #3 More telling was earlier questioning by House Intelligence Committee member, Rep. Will Hurd (R-TX), who had been a CIA officer for a decade.On March 20, 2017 while he was still FBI director, Comey evidenced some considerable discomfort as he tried to explain to the committee why the FBI did not insist on getting physical access to the DNC computers and do its own forensics: Few people need permission to walk their own dog. No need to "insist" on anything. They very likely already had the content. |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2019-11-20 06:35 |
| #2 I don't understand cybersecurity very well however there were some other cybersecurity companies that reached the same general conclusion as crowdstrike, that is that the hacking of the DNC was the work of a Russian operation. Other conclusions of the crowdstrike company, e.g., that a Russian operation had hacked a Ukraine artillery unit, were, however, contested by other cybersecurity companies. Ukraine itself rejected crowdstrike's conclusion regarding the artillery unit. |
| Posted by: lord garth 2019-11-20 06:24 |
| #1 Seth Rich is Russian? |
| Posted by: Bright Pebbles 2019-11-20 01:39 |