Secret CIA assessment says Russia was trying to help Trump win White House

[Aquila]

Food for thought. It's worth noting that Kaspersky Labs, a highly respected cybersecurity company based in Russia, said themselves that they believed that the Russian government was behind the attack.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/obama-orders-review-of-russian-hacking-during-presidential-campaign/2016/12/09/31d6b300-be2a-11e6-94ac-3d324840106c_story.html

The CIA has concluded in a secret assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win the presidency, rather than just to undermine confidence in the U.S. electoral system, according to officials briefed on the matter.

Intelligence agencies have identified individuals with connections to the Russian government who provided WikiLeaks with thousands of hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee and others, including Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, according to U.S. officials. Those officials described the individuals as actors known to the intelligence community and part of a wider Russian operation to boost Trump and hurt Clinton’s chances.

“It is the assessment of the intelligence community that Russia’s goal here was to favor one candidate over the other, to help Trump get elected,” said a senior U.S. official briefed on an intelligence presentation made to U.S. senators. “That’s the consensus view.”

The Obama administration has been debating for months how to respond to the alleged Russian intrusions, with White House officials concerned about escalating tensions with Moscow and being accused of trying to boost Clinton’s campaign.

[U.S. government officially accuses Russia of hacking campaign to interfere with elections]

In September, during a secret briefing for congressional leaders, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) voiced doubts about the veracity of the intelligence, according to officials present.

The Trump transition team dismissed the findings in a short statement issued Friday evening. “These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. The election ended a long time ago in one of the biggest Electoral College victories in history. It’s now time to move on and ‘Make America Great Again,’ ” the statement read.

Trump has consistently dismissed the intelligence community’s findings about Russian hacking.

“I don’t believe they interfered” in the election, he told Time magazine this week. The hacking, he said, “could be Russia. And it could be China. And it could be some guy in his home in New Jersey.”

The CIA shared its latest assessment with key senators in a closed-door briefing on Capitol Hill last week, in which agency officials cited a growing body of intelligence from multiple sources. Agency briefers told the senators it was now “quite clear” that electing Trump was Russia’s goal, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters.

The CIA presentation to senators about Russia’s intentions fell short of a formal U.S. assessment produced by all 17 intelligence agencies. A senior U.S. official said there were minor disagreements among intelligence officials about the agency’s assessment, in part because some questions remain unanswered.

For example, intelligence agencies do not have specific intelligence showing officials in the Kremlin “directing” the identified individuals to pass the Democratic emails to WikiLeaks, a second senior U.S. official said. Those actors, according to the official, were “one step” removed from the Russian government, rather than government employees. Moscow has in the past used middlemen to participate in sensitive intelligence operations so it has plausible deniability.

Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, has said in a television interview that the “Russian government is not the source.”

The White House and CIA officials declined to comment.

On Friday, the White House said President Obama had ordered a “full review” of Russian hacking during the election campaign, as pressure from Congress has grown for greater public understanding of exactly what Moscow did to influence the electoral process.

“We may have crossed into a new threshold, and it is incumbent upon us to take stock of that, to review, to conduct some after-action, to understand what has happened and to impart some lessons learned,” Obama’s counterterrorism and homeland security adviser, Lisa Monaco, told reporters at a breakfast hosted by the Christian Science Monitor.

Obama wants the report before he leaves office Jan. 20, Monaco said. The review will be led by James Clapper, the outgoing director of national intelligence, officials said.

During her remarks, Monaco didn’t address the latest CIA assessment, which hasn’t been previously disclosed.

Seven Democratic senators last week asked Obama to declassify details about the intrusions and why officials believe that the Kremlin was behind the operation. Officials said Friday that the senators specifically were asking the White House to release portions of the CIA’s presentation.

This week, top Democratic lawmakers in the House also sent a letter to Obama, asking for briefings on Russian interference in the election.

U.S. intelligence agencies have been cautious for months in characterizing Russia’s motivations, reflecting the United States’ long-standing struggle to collect reliable intelligence on President Vladi­mir Putin and those closest to him.

In previous assessments, the CIA and other intelligence agencies told the White House and congressional leaders that they believed Moscow’s aim was to undermine confidence in the U.S. electoral system. The assessments stopped short of saying the goal was to help elect Trump.

On Oct. 7, the intelligence community officially accused Moscow of seeking to interfere in the election through the hacking of “political organizations.” Though the statement never specified which party, it was clear that officials were referring to cyber-intrusions into the computers of the DNC and other Democratic groups and individuals.

Some key Republican lawmakers have continued to question the quality of evidence supporting Russian involvement.

“I’ll be the first one to come out and point at Russia if there’s clear evidence, but there is no clear evidence — even now,” said Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and a member of the Trump transition team. “There’s a lot of innuendo, lots of circumstantial evidence, that’s it.”

[U.S. investigating potential covert Russian plan to disrupt elections]

Though Russia has long conducted cyberspying on U.S. agencies, companies and organizations, this presidential campaign marks the first time Moscow has attempted through cyber-means to interfere in, if not actively influence, the outcome of an election, the officials said.

The reluctance of the Obama White House to respond to the alleged Russian intrusions before Election Day upset Democrats on the Hill as well as members of the Clinton campaign.

Within the administration, top officials from different agencies sparred over whether and how to respond. White House officials were concerned that covert retaliatory measures might risk an escalation in which Russia, with sophisticated cyber-capabilities, might have less to lose than the United States, with its vast and vulnerable digital infrastructure.

The White House’s reluctance to take that risk left Washington weighing more-limited measures, including the “naming and shaming” approach of publicly blaming Moscow.

By mid-September, White House officials had decided it was time to take that step, but they worried that doing so unilaterally and without bipartisan congressional backing just weeks before the election would make Obama vulnerable to charges that he was using intelligence for political purposes.

Instead, officials devised a plan to seek bipartisan support from top lawmakers and set up a secret meeting with the Gang of 12 — a group that includes House and Senate leaders, as well as the chairmen and ranking members of both chambers’ committees on intelligence and homeland security.

Obama dispatched Monaco, FBI Director James B. Comey and Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson to make the pitch for a “show of solidarity and bipartisan unity” against Russian interference in the election, according to a senior administration official.

Specifically, the White House wanted congressional leaders to sign off on a bipartisan statement urging state and local officials to take federal help in protecting their voting-registration and balloting machines from Russian cyber-intrusions.

Though U.S. intelligence agencies were skeptical that hackers would be able to manipulate the election results in a systematic way, the White House feared that Russia would attempt to do so, sowing doubt about the fundamental mechanisms of democracy and potentially forcing a more dangerous confrontation between Washington and Moscow.

[Putin denies that Russia hacked the DNC but says it was for the public good]

In a secure room in the Capitol used for briefings involving classified information, administration officials broadly laid out the evidence U.S. spy agencies had collected, showing Russia’s role in cyber-intrusions in at least two states and in hacking the emails of the Democratic organizations and individuals.

And they made a case for a united, bipartisan front in response to what one official described as “the threat posed by unprecedented meddling by a foreign power in our election process.”

The Democratic leaders in the room unanimously agreed on the need to take the threat seriously. Republicans, however, were divided, with at least two GOP lawmakers reluctant to accede to the White House requests.

According to several officials, McConnell raised doubts about the underlying intelligence and made clear to the administration that he would consider any effort by the White House to challenge the Russians publicly an act of partisan politics.

Some of the Republicans in the briefing also seemed opposed to the idea of going public with such explosive allegations in the final stages of an election, a move that they argued would only rattle public confidence and play into Moscow’s hands.

McConnell’s office did not respond to a request for comment. After the election, Trump chose McConnell’s wife, Elaine Chao, as his nominee for transportation secretary.

Some Clinton supporters saw the White House’s reluctance to act without bipartisan support as further evidence of an excessive caution in facing adversaries.

“The lack of an administration response on the Russian hacking cannot be attributed to Congress,” said Rep. Adam B. Schiff (Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, who was at the September meeting. “The administration has all the tools it needs to respond. They have the ability to impose sanctions. They have the ability to take clandestine means. The administration has decided not to utilize them in a way that would deter the Russians, and I think that’s a problem.”

[Prayerful]

I think the Washington Post should keep quiet. It and others are the #fakenews, falsely claiming that Russia had edited or salted the Wikileaks emails and more besides.

[Aquila]

I think the Washington Post should keep quiet. It and others are the #fakenews, falsely claiming that Russia had edited or salted the Wikileaks emails and more besides.

Actually there is metadata evidence that shows that Russian hackers did edit at least some of the emails

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/all-signs-point-to-russia-being-behind-the-dnc-hack

The metadata in the leaked documents are perhaps most revealing: one dumped document was modified using Russian language settings, by a user named “Феликс Эдмундович,” a code name referring to the founder of the Soviet Secret Police, the Cheka, memorialised in a 15-ton iron statue in front of the old KGB headquarters during Soviet times. The original intruders made other errors: one leaked document included hyperlink error messages in Cyrillic, the result of editing the file on a computer with Russian language settings. After this mistake became public, the intruders removed the Cyrillic information from the metadata in the next dump and carefully used made-up user names from different world regions, thereby confirming they had made a mistake in the first round.

Then again, you can simply dismiss any inconvenient facts as "fake news". Much easier than thinking. Let your god-emperor Trump do all of your thinking for you!

[Elizabeth]

My understanding is that the Secretary of State, a traitor, illegally used her own non-secure servers and laptops to share classified info. 

In other words, in typical psychopath fashion, the criminals are simply trying to establish plausible deniability, as well as blaming others for exactly what they have done.

[Elizabeth]

More to the point: Julian Assange is infinitely more trustworthy than WaPo.

[mikemac]

This is getting interesting Aquila.  From that motherboard link that you posted it gives a link to the hacker's WordPress blog, https://guccifer2.wordpress.com/page/2/

On the June 30, 2016 entry the hacker Guccifer 2.0 answers some questions that journalists and other people have been asking.
https://guccifer2.wordpress.com/2016/06/30/faq/

...
1. A glimpse of me

Many people ask me where I’m from, where I live and other personal information.

You see, I can’t show you my IDs, it would be stupid of me.

I can only tell you that I was born in Eastern Europe. I won’t answer where I am now. In fact, it’s better for me to change my location as often as possible. I have to hide.

But generally, it’s not that important for where I live. I can work wherever there’s an Internet connection. So I feel free in any free country.

A lot of people are concerned if I have any links to special services and Russia?

I’ll tell you that everything I do I do at my own risk. This is my personal project and I’m proud of it. Yes, I risk my life. But I know it’s worth it. No one knew about me several weeks ago. Nowadays the whole world’s talking about me. It’s really cool!

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.

Almost all recent famous hacker attacks have been attributed to Russia. The researchers supposed that the same instruments were implemented during the attacks. But I’d like to reveal a secret to all those cool IT-specialists: all the hackers in the world use almost the same tools. You can buy them or simply find on the web.

And btw, it was the Russian company Kaspersky Lab that was the first to start a myth about the almighty Russian hackers. It’s a fucking awesome advertisement. They mean that only the Russian antivirus company is able to cope with Russian hackers! Bingo!

I’m often asked if I’m afraid of being prosecuted by the FBI. My answer is No! I’ve expected it and that’s why I’m ready. They certainly have great possibilities. But it won’t be that easy to catch me. I took all precautions. Yes, there’s still a risk. But I hope they won’t find me.

You asked me several times if I’m a man or a woman. I’m a man. I’ve never met a female hacker of the highest level. Girls, don’t get offended, I love you.

2. About my activities and publications.

How do you estimate your hacking abilities? How much time does it take to acquire such skills?

Well… Actually, it’s up to you to estimate the one who is so widely spoken about. Personally I think that I’m among the best hackers in the world. And I don’t really think it could be easy to become a hacker of such a level. You can spend much time reading and learning but there’s absolutely no guarantee you’ll ever reach the top. You should be chosen, talented or something like that, I don’t know.

Who inspires me? Not the guys like Rambo or Terminator or any other like them. The world has changed. Assange, Snowden, and Manning are the heroes of the computer age. They struggle for truth and justice; they struggle to make our world better, more honest and clear. People like them make us hope for tomorrow. They are the modern heroes, they make history right now.

Marcel Lazar is another hero of mine. He inspired me and showed me the way. He proved that even the powers that be have weak points.

Anyway it seems that IT-companies and special services can’t realize that people like me act just following their ideas but not for money. They missed the bus with Assange and Snowden, they are not ready to live in the modern world. They are not ready to meet people who are smart and brave, who are eager to fight for their ideals, who can sacrifice themselves for the better future. Working for a boss makes them slow I suppose.
...

Apparently Marcel Lazăr Lehel was the original Guccifer, a Romanian hacker, who was arrested and convicted in Romania on January 22, 2014, extradited to the U.S. in March 2016 and on September 1, 2016, U.S. District Judge James C. Cacheris sentenced Lazar to 52 months in prison.

"In an interview with the New York Times in November 2014 conducted while Lehel was imprisoned in the Arad Penitentiary, the hacker "read out a lengthy handwritten statement that he said explained the purpose of his hacking," which included "a potpourri of conspiracy theories about the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the 1997 death of Princess Diana and alleged plans for a nuclear attack in Chicago in 2015."[5] Lehel claimed that the world is run by the Illuminati and a cabal of others.[5]"

"In May 2016—one month after being extradited to the U.S., and while jailed in Virginia awaiting trial—Guccifer claimed to have repeatedly hacked Hillary Clinton's email server. This claim occurred in the midst of an ongoing FBI probe of Clinton's use of a private email server while serving as United States Secretary of State. Lehel claimed that the server was "like an open orchid on the Internet"[22] and that "it was easy ... easy for me, for everybody."[12]"
Source - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guccifer


Sounds to me that Guccifer 2.0 is an individual (or a couple) that is trying to follow in the foot steps of his heroes Marcel Lazar (the original Guccifer), Assange, Snowden, and Manning.   

[Antoninus]

The CIA isn't the most trustworthy organization. I take anything they say with a grain of salt.

[mikemac]

You probably already know the Russian operatives who helped lead to Hillary's defeat.

[Prayerful]

I think the Washington Post should keep quiet. It and others are the #fakenews, falsely claiming that Russia had edited or salted the Wikileaks emails and more besides.

Actually there is metadata evidence that shows that Russian hackers did edit at least some of the emails

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/all-signs-point-to-russia-being-behind-the-dnc-hack

The metadata in the leaked documents are perhaps most revealing: one dumped document was modified using Russian language settings, by a user named “Феликс Эдмундович,” a code name referring to the founder of the Soviet Secret Police, the Cheka, memorialised in a 15-ton iron statue in front of the old KGB headquarters during Soviet times. The original intruders made other errors: one leaked document included hyperlink error messages in Cyrillic, the result of editing the file on a computer with Russian language settings. After this mistake became public, the intruders removed the Cyrillic information from the metadata in the next dump and carefully used made-up user names from different world regions, thereby confirming they had made a mistake in the first round.

Then again, you can simply dismiss any inconvenient facts as "fake news". Much easier than thinking. Let your god-emperor Trump do all of your thinking for you!

Vice? Cmon. There is no media outlet so utterly biased. Next you'll cite Democratic Underground if they still exist.

Frank Luntz mocks this false claim.

At about 9.33, Stephen Molyneux goes the evidence which shows that there is no evidence of a Russian hack. Some leftist politicised former intelligence officers claimed there was, on exactly no evidence.

[Angelorum]

I'm indifferent to the whole "Russia hacked us" plotline (as I voted for a third party candidate and didn't give a damn about either Trump or Hillary), I'm just saying that the CIA doesn't have a good track record with intel considering the fact that they actually thought Saddam has WMDs.

I'm just amused at the bozos who still think Trump is the "defender of the working class" after appointing a bunch of Goldman Sachs people to his cabinet while just today appointing some oil tycoon to be our chief diplomat. 

[james03]

It is important to distinguish the cracks (not hacks).

1.  Guccifer 2 hacked the DNC.  He is the source and is Eastern European, maybe Russian.  I doubt he is working for Russian intelligent, but it is not impossible.  The great majority of Eastern Europeans speak Russian.  When I worked in Lithuania, my Lithuanian interpretor conversed with the Polish work crew in Russian.  All of our drawings were in Russian also.

2.  The source of the Podesta crack seems to be the DNC insider that was assisinated in Washington DC.  Assange has offered a reward for the capture of the hit men.

Finally, if we find out that Russia WAS involved in some way, I would not be surprised.  It would be more proof that they are sane and didn't want WWIII started with the election of Hillary.  In fact I'm still sweating it out that the Obama elite will try something during the next 40 days.

[Prayerful]

Anyhow it was Donald J Trump or Hillary Rodham Clinton. One or the other. Only those who deal in overfine distinctions or are fixed in their hostility to Russia could think that a bad outcome.

[Akavit]

Anyhow it was Donald J Trump or Hillary Rodham Clinton. One or the other. Only those who deal in overfine distinctions or are fixed in their hostility to Russia could think that a bad outcome.

I agree.  If the worst thing Russia ever does to us is spoiling Hillary's coronation, then they're not a threat to us.  It's not like Americans would have gained anything from another Clinton occupying the White House.

[Elizabeth]

2.  The source of the Podesta crack seems to be the DNC insider that was assisinated in Washington DC.  Assange has offered a reward for the capture of the hit men.

[Prayerful]

Someone who crossed the Clintons and was suicided.