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Friday, December 20, 2019

Is Guccifer 2.0 A CIA Creation?

We've all heard about the deep interest that Barr/Durham have in the basis for the so-called Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA)--the IC "analytical" product that established the narrative that "the Russians" tried to throw the 2016 election to Trump. Today former CIA analyst Larry Johnson examines the sourcing for the key claim in the ICA, which is that an internet persona and entity called, respectively, Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks were GRU (Russian military intel) operations that relayed DNC materials to Wikileaks.

Johnson's article is long and detailed, yet pretty readable: Did John Brennan's CIA Create Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks? I'll paste in the beginning to give you a flavor for where Johnson is headed, but don't stop there--read it all:




Special Counsel Robert Mueller's report insists that Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks were created by Russia's military intelligence organization, the GRU, as part of a Russian plot to meddle in the U.S. 2016 Presidential Election. But this is a lie. Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks were created by Brennan's CIA and this action by the CIA should be a target of U.S. Attorney John Durham's investigation. Let me explain why.
Let us start with the January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment aka ICA. Only three agencies of the 17 in the U.S. intelligence community contributed to and coordinated on the ICA--the FBI, the CIA and NSA. In the preamble to the ICA, you can read the following explanation about methodology:
When Intelligence Community analysts use words such as “we assess” or “we judge,” they are conveying an analytic assessment or judgment
To be clear, the phrase,“We assess”, is intel community jargon for “opinion”. If there was actual evidence or source material for a judgment the writer of the assessment would state, "According to a reliable source" or "knowledgeable source" or "documentary evidence."
Pay close attention to what the analysts writing the ICA stated about the GRU and Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks: 
We assess with high confidence that the GRU used the Guccifer 2.0 persona, DCLeaks.com, and WikiLeaks to release US victim data obtained in cyber operations publicly and in exclusives to media outlets. 
    • Guccifer 2.0, who claimed to be an independent Romanian hacker, made multiple contradictory statements and false claims about his likely Russian identity throughout the election. Press reporting suggests more than one person claiming to be Guccifer 2.0 interacted with journalists.
    • Content that we assess was taken from e-mail accounts targeted by the GRU in March 2016 appeared on DCLeaks.com starting in June.
We assess with high confidence that the GRU relayed material it acquired from the DNC and senior Democratic officials to WikiLeaks. Moscow most likely chose WikiLeaks because of its self-proclaimed reputation for authenticity. Disclosures through WikiLeaks did not contain any evident forgeries.
Not one piece of corroborating intelligence. It is all based on opinion and strong belief. There was no human source report or electronic intercept pointing to a relationship between the GRU and the two alleged creations of the GRU--Guccifer 2.0 persona and DCLeaks.com.

Now consider the spin that Robert Mueller put on this opinion in his report on possible collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians. Mueller bluffs the unsuspecting reader into believing that it is a proven fact that Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks were Russian assets. But he is relying on a mere opinion from a handpicked group of intel analysts working under the direction of then CIA Director John Brennan.

12 comments:

  1. The entire "Russia hacked the election" and "Russia stole a trove of emails from the DNC and disclosed them through WikiLeaks" is pure Narrative--evidence-free supposition the DNC-MSM keeps running with.

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    1. Much easier than actual journalism.

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    2. For moron this story of unsubstantiated claims reported as facts, we now turn to CNBC's John Harwood...

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  2. "reporting suggests more than one person CLAIMing to be Guccifer".

    So, the MSM didn't know who Guccifer actually was?
    How darling of them! Could I have posed as Guccifer, and gotten them to bite?

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    1. Yes! It's become a sorta internet hobby or cottage industry.

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  3. Remember when a US state stated the US government hacked them and the response was that the US government was just testing.

    I would not be surprised if Guccifer is a creation or supported by the US government.

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  4. "Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks were created by Brennan's CIA ..."

    A desperate act.

    Desperate acts are the product of desperate men.

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  5. "Adam Carter" did extensive forensic-level analysis of this. His conclusions are hard to dispute. He was subsequently attacked by collusion-truthers James Risen and Duncan Campbell as...you guessed it, a Putin puppet.

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  6. That definitely was an excellent article by Larry Page.

    I think its worth mentioning a few more oddities in the DNC hacking narrative that cast doubt on the “conclusions” of the Mueller team and our intelligence agencies.

    First, the Mueller Report asserts that the exfiltration of emails from the DNC servers occurred between May 25th and June 1st. However, Forensicator combed through all of the DNC emails released by Wikileaks and discovered that around 2/3rds of them were exfiltrated on May 23rd.

    See this article for the details: https://theforensicator.wordpress.com/sorting-the-wikileaks-dnc-emails/

    Given how precise the Mueller Report is about many of the dates of the alleged Russian cyberactivity, it is difficult to see how US investigators could have made this mistake in their June 2018 GRU indictment and stood by it in the Mueller Report, unless of course the May 23rd exfiltration went wholly undetected, which is absurd given how many other “GRU” activities were detected; what is far more likely, then, is that the May 23rd exfiltration was a leak via a thumbdrive, as were those DNC emails Wikileaks released that were exfiltrated on May 25th.

    Second, beyond all of Russian fingerprints left by Guccifer 2.0 that Larry mentioned, there are several more aspects to Guccifer 2.0’s behavior that are inconsistent with it being a GRU creation.

    Guccifer 2.0 claimed to be a lone-wolf Romanian hacker, yet butchered his Romanian in an interview with Motherboard. This is sloppy—not the kind of work that one would expect of a competent Russian agent working to deflect blame for the DNC hack away from Russia. However, it is consistent with someone who sought to leave breadcrumbs leading back to the Kremlin, and it worked: it prompted people to further doubt Guccifer 2.0’s claims concerning his identity.

    Guccifer 2.0 also failed to bolster the credibility that he was a hacker living in Romania given that his twitter and blogging activity indicates that he was operating either during standard US working hours, or was a Romanian (or Russian) insomniac. This finding that suggests Guccifer 2.0 was operating in US time zones has been further supported by a host of discoveries independent researchers have gleaned from the metadata of his releases. These findings are strange in that they contradict Guccifer 2.0’s proclivity to leave behind obvious Russian breadcrumbs; on the other hand, they are perfectly consistent with someone pulling Guccifer 2.0’s strings from somewhere within US time zones. Presumably whoever was behind Guccifer 2.0 either didn’t think to alter his blogging and twitter activity to match standard Russian working hours, or decided that such effort was not worth it since there already were plenty of other Russian breadcrumbs planted to bait gullible analysts into identifying Guccifer 2.0 as one of those d*mn Ruskies!

    For anyone interested, the different US timezone indicator discoveries are indexed at this link: http://g-2.space/ustimezones/

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    Replies
    1. All good points. This has all been pretty thoroughly investigated--except, apparently, by the FBI.

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  7. I hope the truth eventually comes out. Good post, and the linked post was eye opening. Plus with the hacking that probably happened to Sharyl Atkinson, I’m becoming a bit disillusioned in the agencies that are supposed to protect us, not the themselves and their allies.

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