How can I prove this is true? I really don’t know. It seems the guys from CrowdStrike and the DNC would say I’m a Russian bear even if I were a catholic nun in fact. At first I was annoyed and disappointed. But now I realize they have nothing else to say. There’s no other way to justify their incompetence and failure. It’s much easier for them to accuse powerful foreign special services.
They just fucked up! They can prove nothing! All I hear is blah-blah-blah, unfounded theories and somebody’s estimates.
Specialists from Eastern Europe, Russia, China, India work for the leading IT-companies such as Google, IBM, Microsoft, Apple. There’s no surprise that many hackers are descendants from these regions.”
Guccifer 2.0, who claimed to be a Romanian lone wolf, was clearly a cover-up for the CYBER BEARS. Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, a staff writer at VICE Motherboard who covers hacking and information security, writes, “[C]onsidering a long trail of breadcrumbs pointing back to Russia left by the hacker, as well as other circumstantial evidence, it appears more likely that Guccifer 2.0 is nothing but a disinformation or deception campaign by Russian state-sponsored hackers to cover up their own hack—and a hasty and sloppy one at that.”12
Franceschi-Bicchierai, who actually chatted with Guccifer 2.0, points to the blogger’s use of certain characters that are popular in Russia and metadata that indicates the blogger might actually be Russian. He also points out other linguistic evidence—such as his seemingly poor Romanian and broken English that wasn’t necessarily consistent with a Romanian speaking English as a second language, but might bear some resemblance to Russian-English syntax—as indicators that Guccifer 2.0 might not be who he claimed to be.13
Regardless of whether or not Guccifer 2.0 really did infiltrate the DNC systems or release the documents to WikiLeaks, CrowdStrike issued an update to its original post in response, reiterating its findings about the presence of the two Russian groups in DNC networks. “Whether or not this posting is part of a Russian Intelligence disinformation campaign, we are exploring the documents’ authenticity and origin,” Alperovitch wrote. “Regardless, these claims do nothing to lessen our findings relating to the Russian government’s involvement, portions of which we have documented for the public and the greater security community.”14
Fomenting Civil War among Democrats
On July 22, 2016 a few days before the opening of the DNC, WikiLeaks published 19,252 emails alleged to be from the DNC hack.15 Operation LUCKY-7 was now fully underway. The emails weren’t spectacular, mostly mundane discussions that would happen between personnel, including their preferred candidate. However, as released by WikiLeaks it fueled suspicions of the most hardcore Bernie Sanders supporters that the Democratic presidential nomination was engineered and stolen.
Team Trump saw the opportunity and they too piled on in a series of tweets that tried to drive a wedge between the Clinton and Sanders camps. On July 23, Trump tweeted “The WikiLeaks e-mail release today was so bad to Sanders that it will make it impossible for him to support her, unless he is a fraud!”16 Assange immediately replied to the Trump tweet and linked to the DNC cache so his followers would find it with a cheery “everyone can see for themselves.”
The emails revealed that DNC chairperson Debbie Wasserman-Shultz, whose role should make her neutral until the nomination process was complete, had been strongly favoring Hillary Clinton throughout the primary process. The DNC did not dispute the content of the emails themselves.
There was an email thread started on May 5, 2016 with the title “No shit” in which Brad Marshall, the CFO for the DNC, allegedly suggests to get someone to ask Sanders what his beliefs are in order to portray him as an atheist. It read “My Southern Baptist peeps would draw a big difference between a Jew and an atheist.”17 Follow up emails suggest that Amy Dacey responded with “Amen.”
In some of the emails for example, senders made recommendations to diminish the Sanders campaign. An email from May 21, 2016 allegedly from committee communications official Mark Paustenbach, made a suggestion to criticize the Sanders campaign as a “mess” that didn’t have its “act together” when it was discovered that they had accessed voter data belonging to the Clinton campaign.18 He also stated “It’s not a DNC conspiracy, it’s because they never had their act together” in one email.19
In a particularly pointed email dated May 17, 2016, soon-to-be-former DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman-Shultz called Jeff Weaver, the Sanders Campaign manager “particularly scummy” and a “damn liar.”20 The Sanders campaign had spent many months calling for the resignation of the DNC Chairwoman, and the emails provided their chance.
The Response to the Hacks
The storm of outrage among Sander’s supporters exploded on the starting day of the Democratic Convention. The revelation of damaging emails happened just in time fr the first news of the morning. It appeared that their release would cause a massive split and tear Sander’s passionate voters away from not only Clinton, but the Democratic party. To quell the danger Chairwoman Debbie Wassermann-Schultz announced her resignation. Senator Sanders had been preparing to endorse Clinton and his supporters were begging him to walk out of the convention and run as a third party candidate. Such an event would split the ticket and catapult a flailing Trump directly into the White House. In the end, common sense prevailed and Clinton did end up receiving Sanders’s endorsement, but he seemed very cold during the convention. Pro-Bernie delegates often interrupting the speeches of prominent Democratic key speakers, chanting his name, including House Democratic Whip, Representative Steny Hoyer, Former Secretary of Defense and CIA Director Leon Panetta, Representative Elijah Cummings, Senator Al Franken and comedian Sara Silverman, and even their own economic heroine Senator Elizabeth Warren.
The outrage was so hot in the convention hall that committee CEO Amy Dacey, Communications Director Luis Miranda, and CFO Brad Marshall and other supporting staffers also left their posts at the DNC in an effort to stem the split.21 Some Sanders delegates staged a walk-out and went directly to the Press tent to complain about how the system was rigged –exactly as Donald Trump kept saying. Outside the venue in the nearby Roosevelt Park more than a thousand Sanders supporters took to the scalding streets of Philadelphia to vent their frustration. Many Sanders supporters shouted against Mrs. Clinton with the same taunting chant from the previous week’s Republican convention: “Lock her up!” Other protesters gathered outside the downtown Ritz-Carlton, where many major donors to Mrs. Clinton’s campaign were staying, and attacked her use of a “super PAC” and her reliance on big fundraising events.22 Some claimed that they were actually planning to vote for Trump. Initial reactions were much less focused on the hack itself, rather they were focused on reiterating the Republican nominee’s claim that the Democratic primaries and the resulting nomination process was illegitimate.
Julian Assange said that WikiLeaks actually timed the release of the leak to coincide with the start of the convention. “That’s when we knew there would be maximum interest by readers, but also, we have a responsibility to,” Assange told CNN’s Anderson Cooper. “If we published after, you can just imagine how outraged the Democratic voting population would have been. It had to had to have been before.”23 The Assange friendly media joined in on the disinformation campaign against Clinton too. News articles abounded such as the Guardian’s headline “WikiLeaks Proves Primary Was Rigged: DNC Undermined Democracy.”24