My rule is this: when you see a pattern of new accusations that serve to replace old and unproven ones then you should doubt the whole thing.
Hence, each time I read an article like this, I become more convinced that Russiagate is a nothing.
This particular article is chock full of innuendo and verbal ploys and that is standard fare for Russiagate at present.
My opinion is that Trump is a narcissistic bully and a loose cannon who was "elected" on a fluke but I'm pretty convinced now that Russiagate is a witch hunt. A combination of WMD, McCarthyism and Room Temperature Nuclear Fusion.
Let me dissect that article a bit to show you what I mean.
The first paragraph talks about an email where someone talks about something. That is called hearsay. But even worse, the "allegation" in that paragraph is a nothing. The allegation is that someone from Russia wanted to make a "first contact" with the Trump campaign at ans NRA meeting in May of 2016. OK..so what. At that time Trump had just emerged as the presumptive GOP nominee and hence making a "first contact" would be an entirely appropriate thing to do. I'm sure nations like Israel, Korea, China, Germany etc. etc. were all starting to "reach out" in various ways to Trump at about that time. I'm sure this is standard practice in every modern US campaign. As to Hillary she was a known commodity and already had contacts with such places.
The targeting here of the NRA reminds me of the targeting of labor unions during McCarthyism. Labor unions were big and some had worldwide reach. Some tried very hard to influence elections. It was trivially easy to find some "link" to the Soviet Union from almost any major US labor union - and most of those "links" were innocuous.
Personally I don't agree with much of what the NRA does or stands for but I will acknowledge it is a big organization, it is powerful politically and has outreach all over the world. The author of this article seems to really want us to believe that maybe "the Russians" have been instrumental in funding/bolstering the NRA - or plan to "use" the NRA in the future. Sounds like McCarthyism. I am also reminded of room temperature nuclear fusion. People so wanted to believe that and it looks like some on the left in the US so want to believe that either a) the NRA was bolstered in the past by "the Russians" or b) they plan on using the NRA in the future and hence the NRA might be guilty of some great crime that would merit it's shackling (or even dismantlement). Drool to the floor at the prospect of one of the most powerful conservative groups in America being neutered.
Next point. The first sentence of the second paragraph:
We don't have an avalanche of evidence at all, we have an avalanche of accusations. With each subsequent accusation not holding up under scrutiny it becomes more likely that this whole thing is a nothing.
The heart of the Russiagate story is a) the "Trump Dossier", b) the hacking of the DNC c) the "Podesta" hack. None of those held up under scrutiny! The "Trump Dossier" has been exposed as political opposition research paid for by Hillary Clinton, the majority view in the computer security field is that the DNC hack was the result of an insider who was upset about the shafting of Sanders, and that the data was delivered via a USB drive. Julian Assange of Wikileaks has denied from the beginning that it came from Russia. More on this in a bit but first, the Podesta hack. The Podesta hack was the result of "phishing." An email was sent to him that said "Your email account has been compromised, click here to change your password" and a staffer reading it clicked on the link and changed the password. It does not take the Russians to do that kind of hacking. We all get those kinds of emails.
I became convinced that this whole thing was a witch hunt when the "Intelligence Community Assessment" was released in Jan 2017. Problem was they gave no technical evidence but instead said essentially "because we say so". I think the verbiage they used was "the hacks bear the signature of a state sponsored actor" and then made a case that Russia was the only plausible state that could have done it. They pretty much parroted what the Clinton campaign was saying, and what the "Never Trump" people were saying (Mitt Romney et. al)
The Intelligence Community Assessment of January 2017 was fundamentally a political document.
The Intelligence Community Assessment of January 2017 was fundamentally a political document.
Common sense tells you that it does not take a "state sponsor" to do a phishing hack. Many in the computer security business have noted this - the most vocal being McAfee. Not a scintilla of real technical evidence has ever been presented to support the notion that this phishing thing was done by the Russians.
The computer security industry also has a dubious view of the allegation that the DNC hack was necessarily perpetrated by the Russians. Time stamps on files indicate that the key transfer must have been from a USB drive and could not have been accomplished via a remote hack. This bolsters the notion that the hack was done by a DNC insider - which is exactly what Julian Assange alleges.
The only supposed technical details were provided by the DNC's private in house security company "Crowdstrike" and it is they who claim to have found hacking tools and it is they who "linked" those tools to "the Russians".
Most damning of all is the fact that the DNC refused to hand over their servers to the FBI so that means all we have to go on is what their own in house security people (Crowdstrike) tell us.
What would the DNC rather the public believe a) one or more insiders who were disgruntled about the treatment of Bernie Sanders leaked data on that subject to the media (Wikileaks, ect.) or b) "the Russians" hacked the DNC and leaked information designed to help Donald J. Trump and undermine democracy in the US.
Obviously b) is the preferred narrative for the DNC!
Also consider that NSA hacking tools which include include a facility to spoof "Russian hacking" have been released -to the public.
One piece of "evidence" that Crowdstrike released was something with Cyrillic text. Several top American computer security guys (including McAffee) quickly replied that a real state sponsor would not leave behind such obvious footprints and that this smacked of a frame-up. There was even the name of a notorious Soviet spy in the Cyrillic writing released by Crowdstrike as evidence.. McAffee and others observed that only someone not actually familiar with Russian history and language would put such a name in there.
Here is an excellent artice from over a year ago on the subject:
Note: this article was written prior to the "Intelligence Community Assessment" of Jan 2017 which shed nothing new on the subject but just essentially parroted what Crowdstrike said and ignored the subsequent contrary evidence.
The Intelligence Community Assessment of January 2017 was fundamentally a political document.
Subsequent to that time the focus has moved off of the the original hacking allegations/dossier and onto new and unrelated allegations of Russian meddling. This is the pattern we saw in the Weapons of Mass Destruction saga. When the Yellowcake story broke down they moved onto "Bio weapons trailers", and when that proved nothing but speculation they released "damning intercepted messages" which supposedly revealed Saddam's aides were talking about the subject. We know what happened in that case.
My rule is this: when you see a pattern of new accusations that serve to replace old and unproven ones (IE change the subject), then you should doubt the whole thing.
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