CrowdStrike and Russiagate: Another Case of ‘Enormous Evidence’?
Documents from the House Intelligence Committee released on Thursday reveal that there was never any direct evidence that Russia actually stole any files from the DNC.
This destroys a primary claim of the Russiagate fairy tale— that Russian agents stole material that reflected poorly on Hillary Clinton from the DNC and released it to WikiLeaks to secure the election of Donald Trump, supposedly a pawn of the Russian president.
The House Intelligence Committee learned of this lack of evidence way back in December 2017, when it interviewed Shawn Henry, the President of CrowdStrike, the internet security firm that oversaw the investigation of the purported Russian DNC hack. Henry responded to the committee’s questioning: “We did not have concrete evidence that data was exfiltrated from the DNC.”
The Intelligence Committee knew this the whole time. Mueller knew this the whole time. But it was kept secret from the public until Thursday’s release of declassified versions of 53 interviews conducted by that committee.
This revelation is a devastating blow against Russiagate, and it takes place shortly after the government filed a motion to dismiss the case against Michael Flynn.
Who is CrowdStrike’s president, Shawn Henry?
He worked at the FBI for over 24 years, and received his last promotion, to executive assistant director of the Criminal, Cyber, Response, and Services Branch, from Robert Mueller in 2010. He was hired by CrowdStrike Services the same month that he retired from the FBI in 2012. According to his CrowdStrike bio, Henry “oversaw half of the FBI’s investigative operations, including all FBI criminal and cyber investigations worldwide, international operations, and the FBI’s critical incident response to major investigations and disasters.”
CrowdStrike was hired by the DNC’s law firm Perkins Coie to investigate a purported hack of the DNC’s computer network. Following their peculiar investigation, CrowdStrike concluded that it had high confidence that Russian adversaries had infiltrated the DNC’s computer system. To connect the emails released by WikiLeaks to a Russian hack of the DNC, Team Mueller pointed to Guccifer 2.0, an internet persona that posted certain DNC documents and claimed to have hacked them from the DNC’s computers. Serendipitously for Mueller, Guccifer 2.0 left (read: planted) Russian “clues” just waiting to be discovered in the released files, clues akin to finding Vladimir Putin’s handkerchief at the scene.
Julian Assange — still held in barbaric conditions in a British jail — has stated repeatedly that the files he released were not provided by Russia, or by any state actor. Assange acknowledged that it was certainly possible that Russia (and others) had attempted to or succeeded in hacking the DNC network, but such a hack had nothing to do with the material he released.
NSA whistleblower Bill Binney reviewed publicly available forensic data and concluded that Guccifer 2.0 was a fake, and that the files released by WikiLeaks contain metadata that points to their being gathered by a leak rather than a hack. Binney has given numerous interviews to explain his views.
What Did CrowdStrike Find?
With the declassification of the transcript, we can know read for ourselves what CrowdStrike had to say about whether Russia “exfiltrated” (transferred) material from the DNC computer network:
CrowdStrike President Shawn Henry: “We did not have concrete evidence that data was exfiltrated from the DNC, but we have indicators that it was exfiltrated…. But in this case, it appears it was set up to be exfiltrated, but we just don’t have the evidence that says it actually left.”
Congressman Chris Stewart: “You said, I believe, talking about the DNC computer, you had indications that data was prepared to be exfiltrated, but no evidence it actually left. Did I write that down correctly?”
Shawn Henry: “Yes.”
Congressman Stewart: “What about the emails that everyone is so, you know, knowledgeable of? Were there also indicators that they were prepared but not evidence that they were actually exfiltrated?”
Shawn Henry: “There’s not evidence that they were actually exfiltrated. There’s circumstantial evidence — but no evidence that they were actually exfiltrated.”
There you have it. There is no direct evidence that Russia exfiltrated emails from the DNC server. And Mueller knew all along.
As President Trump said on Thursday afternoon: “The Russia hoax made it very hard for Russia and the United States to deal with each other. They’re a very important nation. We’re the most powerful nation; they’re a very powerful nation. Why would we not be dealing with each other?”
If President Trump fully pursues the investigation into the coup against him, will he discover who doesn’t want the U.S. and Russia to collaborate? The trail leads to the highest levels of the FBI, the intelligence services, the Obama Administration, and the British, who were instrumental in creating the Russiagate myth.
