The Russia-Trump story has dominated the news for months, so far producing many headlines but little evidence. Reality Winner contributed the latest chapter, leaking a secret NSA report. Here is analysis by two reliable sources about this story, insights about the story that you will not see in the major media.
The odd story of Reality Winner and her leak of an NSA report are the next volleys in the propaganda campaign to start a new cold war — and bring down President Trump. The story makes little sense. But we are undemanding consumers of propaganda. Like manufacturers of dog food and Hollywood blockbusters, they need not put much effort into the quality of the product.
When propaganda dominates the major media, insights are found on the fringes. Here are excerpts from two articles by informed analysts showing some of the many flaws in the story. Read them both in full!
(1) Why the excitement about the leaked NSA document?
“Hey Intercept, Something is Very Wrong with Reality Winner and the NSA Leak”
by retired foreign service officer Peter Van Buren, at his website.
“An NSA document purporting to show Russian military hacker attempts to access a Florida company which makes voter registration software is sent anonymously to The Intercept. A low-level NSA contractor, Reality Winner, is arrested almost immediately. What’s wrong with this picture? A lot. …
“NSA very publicly confirms the veracity of the document (unusual in itself, officially the Snowden and Manning documents remain unconfirmed) and then makes sure open-court the document filed is not sealed and includes the information on how the spooks know the leaked doc was printed inside the NSA facility. Winner went on to make a full confession to the FBI.
“The upshot? This document is not a plant. The NSA wants you to very much know it is real. The Russians certainly are messing with our election.
“But funny thing. While the leaked NSA document seems to be a big deal, at least to the general public, it sort of isn’t. It shows one piece of analysis suggesting but not confirming the GRU, Russian military intelligence, tried to steal some credentials and gain access to a private company. No U.S. sources and methods, or raw technical intel, are revealed, the crown jewel stuff.
“There is no evidence the hack accomplished anything at all, never mind anything nefarious. The hack took place months ago and ran its course, meaning the Russian operation was already dead. The Russians were running a run-of-the-mill spearfishing attack, potentially effective, but nothing especially sophisticated. You get similar stuff all the time trying to harvest your credit card information. The leaked document looks like a big deal but isn’t. …
“At this very early stage I’m going to say there are too many coincidences and too many mistakes to simple shrug it all off. Too many of the benefits in this have accrued on the side of the IC than is typical when a real whistleblower shares classified documents with a journalist. …”
About the author.
Peter Van Buren (bio) is a retired US Foreign Service Officer. Based on his experience in Iraq, he wrote the important history We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People
He also wrote the WWII novel Hooper’s War
(2) More about the leaked NSA report
“Leaked NSA Report Short on Facts, Proves Little in ‘Russiagate’ Case”
by former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter, at TruthDig.
This is a devastating demolition of US intel agency claims of Russian cyberattacks on the election.
“…The release of the document has invigorated the Russian hacking hysteria before former FBI Director James Comey’s much-ballyhooed testimony before Congress. The issue of Russian meddling is expected to be a prominent focus of the Comey hearing, with significant attention placed on the role of the GRU in orchestrating the events detailed in the report. But upon closer scrutiny, the NSA document allegedly leaked by Winner reinforces assertions made by President Trump that the Russia story is fake news. …
“The opening paragraph of the leaked NSA document states…
‘Russian General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate actors …executed cyber espionage operations against a named U.S. company in August 2016, evidently to obtain information on elections-related software and hardware solutions. …The actors likely used data obtained from that operation to …launch a voter registration-themed spear-phishing campaign targeting U.S. local government organizations.’
“…The strength of this assertion, however, collapses when one examines the colored chart that accompanied the text of the report detailing the “Spear-Phishing Campaign TTPs used Against U.S. and Foreign Government Entities” (TTPs are tactics, techniques and procedures). While the document, as released by The Intercept, shows only the first page of what is described as a two-page chart, the material it contains is clear and concise regarding what it is illustrating. The activity flow chart, which details the sequencing and relationships involved in the execution of the spear-phishing campaign … {He provides a detailed analysis of the chart.}
The chart from the NSA document that allegedly was leaked by Reality Winner.
“Nothing in the document’s confirmed information links it to the GRU. The GRU attribution is presented for contextual purposes only. It is an inferred command relationship to a redacted cyberoperations management capability that is linked to the confirmed cyberoperators only through analysis (i.e., best guess), not fact.
“The NSA document, both in its title and text, is therefore misleading in the extreme. There is simply no fact-based information provided in the report that confirms that the events reported on were being organized and managed by the Russian GRU, despite the document’s assertions otherwise.
“This lack of confirmation of any fact-based linkage between the GRU and the cyberattacks on the 2016 election in the NSA document is striking in another regard. The NSA has always been assumed to be the agency that possessed “smoking gun” evidence when it came to Russian attribution in the cyberattacks on the American electoral process. …
“Contrary to repeated assertions by well-compensated talking heads on cable news, there is no unified consensus by “all 17 agencies” of the U.S. intelligence community on Russian “meddling” with the 2016 election. Only three agencies weighed in on the Russian assessment—the CIA, the FBI and the NSA.
“The CIA’s contribution appears to be purely speculative. It is limited to recycling a 2012 open-source assessment of Russian media-based propaganda to sustain the 2016 allegations of Russian meddling in the 2016 election.
“The FBI’s contribution to the report was supposedly more forensically based, derived from data attributed to the server used by the Democratic National Committee and as such deemed particularly damning when it came to attribution to APT 28, the GRU. The main problem with the FBI’s assertion, however, is that it was not based upon an independent forensic examination of the DNC server by FBI agents, but rather the independent assessments of a private cybersecurity company, CrowdStrike, contracted by the DNC to investigate the March 2016 cyberintrusion into its servers.
“…a similar CrowdStrike assessment linking APT 28 and the GRU to cyberactivity in the Ukraine has been discredited, significantly diluting the credibility of this company’s analysis).
“The DNC mysteriously denied the FBI direct access to its servers, leaving the agency no option but to limit its investigation to the data provided by CrowdStrike. The CrowdStrike data, however, provides no conclusive forensic link to Russia or the GRU with regard to the cyberattack on the DNC server. …
“The consequences of the dearth of fact-based intelligence linking the GRU to meddling in the 2016 election are many. It exposes the decision by President Obama to single out the GRU for sanctions last December as fraudulent in nature and politically motivated, since it sustained an attribution by CrowdStrike that was not founded in hard fact, but rather paid for by DNC dollars.
“It also reveals the CIA-FBI-NSA joint assessment as being fundamentally flawed …
“The perpetrators of the ‘Russia did it’ line of attack — including the Democratic members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, who are in a position to know better due to their exposure to raw NSA intelligence of the sort used to underpin the analysis in the NSA document leaked by Winner — have hidden behind a veil of secrecy when it comes to protecting the sources used to sustain their assertions that the Russian government and Russian intelligence services (in particular, the GRU) were involved in meddling in the domestic political affairs of the United States.
“These assertions have been repeated without attribution and reinforced by well-timed leaks of unverified information by anonymous sources to an unquestioning media until they have been endorsed as unquestioned fact.
“By allegedly leaking a highly classified NSA document, Winner has provided the American public with its first unvarnished look at what the true state of affairs is regarding the specific intelligence underpinning one of the foundational accusations that have been leveled against Russia today. In short, there is no quality intelligence that implicates the GRU as being behind the APT 28-“Cozy Bear” cyberattacks on the DNC and American electoral system. The Russian threat has been exposed as a phantom menace.
“It can now be clearly shown that any such attribution is purely speculative in nature, derived from the politically motivated and fundamentally flawed analysis conducted by a private company, CrowdStrike, which was subsequently adopted by the FBI before becoming a part of a national narrative that has been placed out of bounds when it comes to serious inquiry by a media that seems to have forgotten its responsibility to report fact-based truth, regardless of consequence. …
“After putting so much capital into accusing Russia and the GRU in meddling in American domestic political affairs—and, by extension, accusing the president of colluding with the Russians in this endeavor—the Democrats had better be able to back up their claims with unassailable, fact-based information. Based upon a close examination of the NSA’s latest analysis, courtesy of the document being linked to Winner, this intelligence does not exist.”
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See the next post in this series: The verdict on stories of Russian hacking in the 2016 election.
For More Information
See Bowman’s devastating analysis of the major news media’s coverage of Reality Winner’s story. This is why only 20% of Americans have much confidence in newspapers — a record low (going back to 1973).
If you liked this post, like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. See all posts about cyberattacks and cybersecurity, about Campaign 2016, about the Trump years in America, about ways to reform America, and especially these…
- Is Trump a tool of Putin? See the story & the debunking.
- Here are the facts so far about the Trump-Russia file.
- Deciphering the scandalous rumors about Trump in Russia.
- Exposing the farcical claims about Russian hacking of the election.
- What Trump told Russia, why it matters, and why journalists ignore the smartest man in Washington.
- Important: The GOP might impeach Trump, changing our politics forever – for the better.
- Trump and the Democrats stumble into a ‘Wilderness of Mirrors’.
Books about impeachment in America – and the case against Trump.
One of the best introductions to impeachment in modern American politics is The Age of Impeachment: American Constitutional Culture since 1960
The latest and most provocative book on this subject is Allan Lichtman’s The Case for Impeachment
“In the fall of 2016, Lichtman made headlines when he predicted that Trump would defeat the heavily favored Democrat, Hillary Clinton. Now, in clear, nonpartisan terms, Lichtman lays out the reasons Congress could remove Trump from the Oval Office: his ties to Russia before and after the election, the complicated financial conflicts of interest at home and abroad, and his abuse of executive authority.
“The Case for Impeachment also offers a fascinating look at presidential impeachments throughout American history, including the often-overlooked story of Andrew Johnson’s impeachment, details about Richard Nixon’s resignation, and Bill Clinton’s hearings. Lichtman shows how Trump exhibits many of the flaws (and more) that have doomed past presidents. As the Nixon Administration dismissed the reporting of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein as “character assassination” and “a vicious abuse of the journalistic process,” Trump has attacked the “dishonest media,” claiming, “the press should be ashamed of themselves.”
“Historians, legal scholars, and politicians alike agree: we are in politically uncharted waters—the durability of our institutions is being undermined and the public’s confidence in them is eroding, threatening American democracy itself. Most citizens—politics aside—want to know where the country is headed. Lichtman argues, with clarity and power, that for Donald Trump’s presidency, smoke has become fire.”
