(AMERICAN SPECTATOR)
By George Parry
According to NBC News, Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team recently began asking witnesses “pointed questions” about whether Donald Trump was aware that the Democratic National Committee’s emails had been stolen before that was publicly known, and whether he was involved in their “strategic release” during the presidential campaign. NBC states that the “line of questioning suggests the special counsel, who is tasked with examining whether there was collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia during the 2016 election, is looking into possible coordination between WikiLeaks and Trump associates in disseminating the emails, which U.S. intelligence officials say were stolen by Russia.”
Assuming NBC’s report is true, then it would appear that Team Mueller has put the cart before the horse. Before chasing after Trump-Russia collusion in the hacking of the DNC’s email server, they need to first establish whether a hack even happened.
Consider the following:
On June 15, 2016, CrowdStrike, a private computer security company working for the Democratic National Committee, announced that it had detected Russian malware on the DNC’s computer server. The next day, a self-described Romanian hacker, Guccifer 2.0, claimed he was a WikiLeaks source and had hacked the DNC’s server. He then posted online DNC computer files that contained metadata that indicated Russian involvement in the hack.
On July 22, 2016, just days before the Democratic National Convention, WikiLeaks published approximately 20,000 DNC emails.
Much to the embarrassment of Hillary Clinton, the released files showed that the DNC had secretly collaborated with her campaign to promote her candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination over that of Bernie Sanders. This caused the Clinton campaign serious political damage at the Democratic convention.
Well after the convention, Jennifer Palmieri, Clinton’s public relations chief, said in a March 2017 Washington Post essay that she worked assiduously during the nominating convention to “get the press to focus on… the prospect that Russia had not only hacked and stolen emails from the DNC, but that it had done so to help Donald Trump and hurt Hillary.”
We now know that at about the same time that WikiLeaks made its announcement, the DNC and the Clinton campaign were funding efforts by Fusion GPS and its hireling, former British spy Christopher Steele, to dredge up anti-Trump dirt purportedly from Russian sources.
Ultimately Steele produced a dossier which former FBI Director James Comey has publicly characterized as “salacious” and “unverified.” Nevertheless, for reasons yet to be disclosed, Comey’s FBI saw fit to use that same dossier as a basis for obtaining a FISA warrant to spy on the Trump campaign and administration in its quest to uncover Russian ties to Trump.
Despite these revelations, the mainstream media have stubbornly clung to the Trump-Russia collusion narrative. And central to that the narrative is that the Trump campaign colluded with the Russians to hack the DNC email server.
But, in their coverage, the mainstream media have downplayed the very odd behavior of the DNC, the putative target of the alleged hack. For, when the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI learned of the hacking claim, they asked to examine the server.
And the DNC refused.
Why would the purported victim of a crime refuse to cooperate with law enforcement in solving that crime? Is it hiding something? Is it afraid the server’s contents will discredit the Russia-hacking story?
