Patterico's Pontifications

12/17/2016

An Empire Unrealized for Want of a Spam Filter

Filed under: General — JVW @ 1:51 pm



[guest post by JVW]

The Wall Street Journal has an apparently interesting report today about Russian attempts to hack the Republican National Committee, at the same time that they were successfully hacking the DNC. I write “apparently” because I’m too cheap to have a WSJ online subscription, so I’ll share the summary from New York magazine (bold emphasis added by me):

Russian hackers tried and failed to infiltrate the Republican National Committee earlier this year by sending a series of phishing emails to a single employee, The Wall Street Journal reports.

The hacking attempt failed, in part, because the employee was no longer with the RNC and the emails were caught by a spam filter. The RNC wasn’t even aware of the attempted hacking until after Democratic National Committee leaders announced in June that their information had been compromised. Nervous, the RNC hired a private computer-security company that worked with the FBI and found that the phishing attempt had been blocked.

The revelation that Russian hackers attempted to get their paws on Republican emails has some in the intelligence community believing that Russia’s espionage “started as an information-gathering campaign aimed at both parties.” It only turned into an assault on Hillary Clinton, they believe, when the leaked DNC emails provided more ammunition.

By all means, let’s have full Congressional investigations of the Russian attempts to influence our elections, but only if Republicans demand that John Podesta and DNC employees testify how they were caught up by a low-level phishing scheme that could have originated from any suburban basement by the most novice of hackers. Let the country know that the Hillary Clinton campaign, the most technologically sophisticated campaign anyone had ever seen, came undone because nobody installed a spam filter on the organization’s email client.

The smartest people in the room indeed.

– JVW

76 Responses to “An Empire Unrealized for Want of a Spam Filter”

  1. I know the Democrats are doing their best to portray us as apologists for Putin, but this whole hacking business turns out to be way more smoke than fire.

    JVW (6e49ce)

  2. Perhaps she really doesn’t know what an email server is!

    Craig Mc (c8ba9d)

  3. Perhaps she really doesn’t know what an email server is!

    Yeah, there’s a lot of irony in her being partially undone by someone else’s email problems.

    My post is at least somewhat tongue-in-cheek. I don’t mean to amplify and spread the DNC talking points that the email release was the only reason that Hillary! lost. I think that in a state like Michigan where she lost by 10,000 votes it’s not inconceivable that the revelations about the DNC putting their thumb on the scales to help her win the primary might have kept Sanders supporters from voting for her, but it’s a stretch to claim that it cost her 45,000 votes in Pennsylvania or even 22,000 votes in Wisconsin. Her ultimate problem was that she was an awful candidate running a very insular campaign, and that’s why she lost.

    JVW (6e49ce)

  4. if it was the Russians what showed us what skanky criminal pigs Hillary and her creepy podesta-renfeld are

    i say thanks a lot you guys! … seriously come over whenever i’ll make onion dip and we can order whatever you want from yelp’s eat24 (not grubhub – yack)

    happyfeet (28a91b)

  5. Try this link.

    An while Podesta is testifying, why not ask him about the substance of the leaked email messages.

    ThOR (c9324e)

  6. seriously that crap from grubhub will make you poop funny

    *avoid*

    happyfeet (28a91b)

  7. Wile e podesta, snooper genius, next they’ll tell us about a great deal from a Nigerian prince, of course no questioned that zaphod’s warning apparently didn’t work on volodya.

    narciso (d1f714)

  8. Try this link.

    Thanks, but no go. The WSJ is pretty good about restricting access to subscribers only.

    JVW (6e49ce)

  9. Let’s not forget that the DNC *was* warned by the FBI, repeatedly, that they had intruders in their system – and those warnings were ignored because the DNC staff didn’t think it was really the FBI calling. They made this judgment in the DNC HQ building, which has a plethora of telephones, and sits a mile from the FBI’s HQ. So not one of those geniuses thought to pick up one of the phones surrounding them and call the FBI to see if the agent was real, or stroll over and ask in person.

    They didn’t think the FBI was real, but they did think the phishing e-mail was… and Trump is the incompetent one?

    However, in fairness, I think it’s glaringly obvious that the Republicans cheated; by having non-morons in IT, they clearly gave themselves an utterly utterly unfair advantage against a party that screwed up six ways from Sunday.

    Arizona CJ (191c8a)

  10. Clearly a microaggression, cj, it was like they ran over a black cat with a car carrying a mirror.

    narciso (d1f714)

  11. I figure about 30 years from now we will find out who (I still think it was from the inside) phished and leaked the DNC Podesta emails–kind of like finally identifying Deep Throat. If that person is alive he/she will think it’s safe to confess at that point, and if he/she was murdered in retaliation someone will divulge that, too. Or Assange may write a very interesting book.

    And another unsubstantiated rumor: Ann Coulter tweeted recently that she has heard from more than one source that it was someone inside who was sympathetic to Bernie who spilled the beans to Wikileaks.

    elissa (da4c50)

  12. She thought they could wipe it with a cloth.

    Donald (370936)

  13. Actually, Bob Woodward’s been kind of quiet lately. With his background and Washington connections the DNC leaks seem like the sort of thing he’d be interested in investigating.

    elissa (da4c50)

  14. Ocassionally he does hint at things, remember the pushback when he pointed out who came up with the sequester.

    narciso (d1f714)

  15. Now Carlos slims already went El godwin, enlisting Ariel dorfman. Allende’s confidantewho previous saw scrooge mcduck as. Capitalist indoctrination.

    narciso (d1f714)

  16. Victor Davis Hanson is worth his weight in gold.

    narciso (d1f714)

  17. If you yourself haven’t gotten these russian phishing attempts in your email account you should consider that you don’t really belong on the internet.

    jd2 (47d6c6)

  18. And another unsubstantiated rumor: Ann Coulter tweeted recently that she has heard from more than one source that it was someone inside who was sympathetic to Bernie who spilled the beans to Wikileaks.

    Julian Assange has made the same allusions, that the DNC hack was closer to an inside job. Again, that’s why I’m beginning to think the GOP ought to agree to the joint investigation, while demanding that all possible options are fully explored.

    JVW (6e49ce)

  19. it’s not a conspiracy

    it’s just that hillary sucks

    obama beat her

    she beat bernie because the dnc rigged it for her

    you all know what trump is

    and he beat her

    she ran a lousy campaign

    it was not even about vaginas

    it was about women as a political concept

    which is stupid

    and even if women were a concept, hillary is nobody’s concept of a woman

    nk (dbc370)

  20. where’s simon jester, btw?

    i hope he’s ok

    DNF too

    he said he replaced a hip joint

    i don’t think he meant he found a new coffee house

    nk (dbc370)

  21. An Empire Unrealized for Want of a Spam Filter

    Couldn’t have happened to a more deserving bunch of folks.

    Bill M (906260)

  22. I love Mr John Podesta because he invested in the Nigerian diamond mine that I solicited him about. He even invested in some orange groves in Alaska!
    Thank you, Mr John Podesta — I’m very much enjoying my new ski chalet in Aspen!

    Cruz Supporter (102c9a)

  23. So these new Facebook checkers guess where they came from before.

    narciso (d1f714)

  24. I get phishing emails all the time. They come from our IT security department. If you fall for one you get to take an embarrassing “survey” to explain why you were a doofus.

    The other thing that comes to mind is “Did no one ever tell them to never put anything in an email that you wouldn’t want to see on the front page of the London Times?”.

    mark (ca18be)

  25. Also heather Mcdonald’s provides some advice.

    narciso (d1f714)

  26. Thanks, but no go. The WSJ is pretty good about restricting access to subscribers only.

    For whatever reason, the WSJ allows access to people coming in from a Google search. So, copy the headline from the piece, plug it into Google, and almost always, the top link at Google will be your article. Just click through and you get the whole thing.

    Anon Y. Mous (9e4c83)

  27. hillary’s campaign consisted of “I’m a woman, Trump is bad and you’re deplorable.” And, they can’t figure out why she lost. I guess it is not just Republican consultants who are stupid.

    jim (a9b7c7)

  28. She still can’t figure out why she isn’t 50 points ahead.

    Anon Y. Mous (9e4c83)

  29. Assange has more than alluded that it wasn’t the Russians. He has flat out denied it 5 times.

    http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2016/12/least-5-times-wikileaks-denied-russia-source-leaked-dnc-emails-liberal-media-wont-report/

    I know Patterico doesn’t hold Gateway Pundit in high regard, but this particular piece is well sourced, including with youtube videos of Assange denying that the Russians were his source. I would also remind everyone that Wikileaks offered a reward for info about the murder of Seth Rich, a DNC staffer. Alegedly, the motive was robbery, though nothing was taken. And if he was a Wikileaks source, that would explain why Wikileaks is offering a reward for his killer.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/wikileaks-offers-reward-in-killing-of-dnc-staffer-in-washington/2016/08/09/f84fcbf4-5e5b-11e6-8e45-477372e89d78_story.html

    Anon Y. Mous (9e4c83)

  30. Convinced me. Swearing off the Russian porn from this point >.

    papertiger (c8116c)

  31. Let the country know that the Hillary Clinton campaign, the most technologically sophisticated campaign anyone had ever seen, came undone because nobody installed a spam filter on the organization’s email client.

    They did have a spam filter.

    http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/13/us/politics/russia-hack-election-dnc.html

    The D.N.C. had a standard email spam-filtering service, intended to block phishing attacks and malware created to resemble legitimate email.

    Charles Delavan also claimed he recognized it as spam and maybe even that was familiar with that very type of e-mail that John Podesta got.

    http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2016/12/an_interview_with_charles_delavan_the_it_guy_whose_typo_led_to_the_podesta.html

    Is it possible, I asked, that you’re misremembering? Is your memory of sending that email at all hazy? No, he said. If I were to look at similar messages he had sent around that time to other staffers getting phished, Delavan told me, I would see that they said, “This is not a legitimate email.” Unfortunately, he said, he can’t prove it, because “they would have all been deleted.”

    The phishing message – I don’t know if you really can call it spear-phishing, since it wasn’t personalized, beyond starting with the words “Hi John” – but john.podesta was his gmail address – arrived in John Podesta’s inbox (or in GMail spam?) on Saturday, March 19, 2016 at 4:34:30 AM EDT and was forwarded by Sara Latham to Charles Delavan at 9:54:05 AM EDT the same day.

    He responded by telling her it was a “legitimate email” and that “John needs to change his password immediately, and ensure that two-factor authentication is turned on his account.” And that he could go https://myaccount.google.com/security to do both. And that it was “absolutely imperative that this is done ASAP.”

    Sara Latham worried about whether John Podesta would be locked out of his account if 2 step verification was established too quickly and so wrote to Milia Fisher telling her also “The gmail one is REAL”

    That means they had gotten this kind of thing before, only it hadn’t purported to be coming from Google.

    Sammy Finkelman (db7fea)

  32. Now note Sara Latham, Charles Delavan, and Milia Fisher all had hillaryclinton.com e-mail addresses. John Podesta had a gmail address

    It was John Podesta who didn’t have a spam filter, beyond the one GMail had, which is usually very good.

    But it may have been a new phishing message at the time and so it didn’t yet get sent into Google’s spam filter. Or possibly Podesta and his aides checked the spam too!

    Now if Hillary Clinton would have gotten such a phishing message, purporting to come from
    her e-mail service, in that case, clintonemail.com, in the first place, it would have looked all wrong and wouldn’t have been in he slightest bit plausible, and in the second place she would have called up the SYSOP on the phone.

    But you couldn’t do this with GMail. You couldn’t reply either because it purported to come from no-reply@accounts.googlemail.com.

    So instead, some assistant of his contacted the HFA Help Desk (whatever that stands for) at Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

    On top of that, Hillary Clinton probably didn’t even set her own password, but it was randomly selected and memorized by her Blackberry so she couldn’t give it away.

    Hillary Clinton’s own e-mail account was probably the most secure e-mail account in the history of e-mail. But she didn’t believe that anybody else had any important secrets, so she let the DNC (and John Podesta) do what they wanted, without doing anything to ensure security. She ensured security by not telling them any important secrets, so you have Neera Tanden and others wondering why she was doing what she doing.

    Sammy Finkelman (db7fea)

  33. The RNC wasn’t, in fact, hacked. But the CIA had some Sooper-Sekrit intelligence that it was:

    http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/10/us/politics/trump-mocking-claim-that-russia-hacked-election-at-odds-with-gop.html

    One question they may want to explore is why the intelligence agencies believe that the Republican networks were compromised while the F.B.I., which leads domestic cyberinvestigations, has apparently told Republicans that it has not seen evidence of that breach. Senior officials say the intelligence agencies’ conclusions are not being widely shared, even with law enforcement.

    Sammy Finkelman (db7fea)

  34. 29.Assange has more than alluded that it wasn’t the Russians. He has flat out denied it 5 times.

    Does anybody have any information on the claims in this article?

    EXCLUSIVE: Ex-British ambassador who is now a WikiLeaks operative claims Russia did NOT provide Clinton emails – they were handed over to him at a D.C. park by an intermediary for ‘disgusted’ Democratic whistleblowers

    Walter Cronanty (f48cd5)

  35. Does anybody have any information on the claims in this article?

    This whole story has been marked with the release of self-serving information from the very beginning. That’s why I now am in favor of Congressional hearings. I get the sense that getting to the body of this will be very embarrassing to the Democrats, provided they aren’t allowed to grandstand and stonewall the investigation.

    JVW (6e49ce)

  36. Murray is a classical antiisraeli moonbat, he was the envoy to taskhent in the early years of the longwar when the late karimov, offered basing rights to stage into Afghanistan.

    narciso (d1f714)

  37. That being said after expulsion from the foreign office and exile to u of Dundee, he seems to become fairly involved with the assuange netsirk. And recall many of their exploits are inside jobs, Stratford done by anonymous us the exaction.

    narciso (d1f714)

  38. Walter Cronanty (f48cd5) — 12/17/2016 @ 8:17 pm

    EXCLUSIVE: Ex-British ambassador who is now a WikiLeaks operative claims Russia did NOT provide Clinton emails – they were handed over to him at a D.C. park by an intermediary for ‘disgusted’ Democratic whistleblowers

    That could be true. I mean, the Russians could have gotten the files to Wikileaks that way, and hey might have if they thought Wikileaks would be more likely to publish them in that case.

    But there was a person who claimed to be the hacker, except he claimed to be Romanian and to with Russia. He also claimed he got in the Democratic Congressional ampaign Committee later, but technical analysis showed that the break-in to the DCCC came first.

    http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/13/us/politics/russia-hack-election-dnc.html

    Concerned that word of the hacking might leak, they decided to go public in The Washington Post with the news that the committee had been attacked. That way, they figured, they could get ahead of the story, win a little sympathy from voters for being victimized by Russian hackers and refocus on the campaign.

    But the very next day, a new, deeply unsettling shock awaited them. Someone calling himself Guccifer 2.0 appeared on the web, claiming to be the D.N.C. hacker — and he posted a confidential committee document detailing Mr. Trump’s record and half a dozen other documents to prove his bona fides.

    Looks like the Russians had a spy somewhere around there, so before astory could appear in the Washington Post, saying Russians had hacked the DNC, Guccifer 2.0 made his appearance.

    Guccifer 2.0 also claimed to have given the DNC files to Wikileaks.

    http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/13/us/politics/russia-hack-election-dnc.html

    Guccifer 2.0 called himself a “lone hacker” and mocked CrowdStrike for calling the attackers “sophisticated.”

    But online investigators quickly undercut his story. On a whim, Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, a writer for Motherboard, the tech and culture site of Vice, tried to contact Guccifer 2.0 by direct message on Twitter.

    “Surprisingly, he answered right away,” Mr. Franceschi-Bicchierai said. But whoever was on the other end seemed to be mocking him. “I asked him why he did it, and he said he wanted to expose the Illuminati. He called himself a Gucci lover. And he said he was Romanian.”

    That gave Mr. Franceschi-Bicchierai an idea. Using Google Translate, he sent the purported hacker some questions in Romanian. The answers came back in Romanian. But when he was offline, Mr. Franceschi-Bicchierai checked with a couple of native speakers, who told him Guccifer 2.0 had apparently been using Google Translate as well — and was clearly not the Romanian he claimed to be.

    Cyberresearchers found other clues pointing to Russia. Microsoft Word documents posted by Guccifer 2.0 had been edited by someone calling himself, in Russian, Felix Edmundovich — an obvious nom de guerre honoring the founder of the Soviet secret police, Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky. Bad links in the texts were marked by warnings in Russian, generated by what was clearly a Russian-language version of Word.

    When Mr. Franceschi-Bicchierai managed to engage Guccifer 2.0 over a period of weeks, he found that his interlocutor’s tone and manner changed. “At first he was careless and colloquial. Weeks later, he was curt and more calculating,” he said. “It seemed like a group of people, and a very sloppy attempt to cover up.”

    Sammy Finkelman (db7fea)

  39. * he claimed to be Romanian and to have nothing to do with Russia.

    Theer was also DCLeaks.com, which was registered in April. This claimed to be the work of “hacktivists” but it looked [to whom?] like a clumsy front for the same Russians who had stolen the documents.

    Anyway they didn’t need to use it very much, because Wikileaks was publishing the documents.

    Also:

    In addition to what Guccifer 2.0 published on his site, he provided material directly on request to some bloggers and publications

    Then he started leaking things about Democrats running for Congress, I think maybe just to try to look more neutral and not focused on the presidential race.

    Sammy Finkelman (db7fea)

  40. Here’s the New York Times back in late July:

    http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/28/us/politics/is-dnc-email-hacker-a-person-or-a-russian-front-experts-arent-sure.html

    Who is Guccifer 2.0, the self-proclaimed Romanian “lone hacker” responsible for copying thousands of emails and other files from the Democratic National Committee — a real person, or a front created by Russian intelligence officials?

    Technology specialists have been debating that question since June 15, when CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity firm hired by the Democratic National Committee, announced that sophisticated hacker groups with Russian links were responsible for breaching the committee’s computer servers. Within hours of the announcement, someone using the moniker Guccifer 2.0 started a blog to mock that finding, posting several of the stolen documents and claiming sole credit.

    But the publication by WikiLeaks of an archive of the committee’s internal emails — and the uproar they caused on the eve of the Democratic National Convention — have focused wider attention on who, or what, is operating behind that name. While WikiLeaks has not said how it obtained the emails, Guccifer 2.0 claimed in a blog post last month to have sent them to WikiLeaks….

    …On June 21, Motherboard, an online technology magazine, posted a Twitter chat log of an interview with Guccifer 2.0, in which the person using that account claimed to be Romanian and denied working with the Russian government. Pressed on why Russian language markings showed up in the metadata of the documents he had sent out, Guccifer 2.0 claimed that was just a “watermark.”

    “I don’t like Russians and their foreign policy. I hate being attributed to Russia,” Guccifer 2.0 wrote.

    During the interview, Motherboard switched from using English to Romanian and to Russian. Guccifer 2.0 claimed not to speak Russian and abruptly cut off the interview.

    Motherboard later reported findings of linguistics specialists who said that his Romanian answers did not seem like those of a native speaker, and that the syntax of several of his English lines echoed Russian sentence constructions.

    And a linguistic analysis provided to The New York Times by Shlomo Argamon, a chief scientist at Taia Global, a cybersecurity firm that has questioned cyberattack attribution claims in the past, also concluded that Guccifer 2 is Russian.

    Sammy Finkelman (db7fea)

  41. It’s the same sort of swarmy self congratulatory unjustified smug that informs the Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories.

    Good King Kennedy was too mighty and well loved to ever be struck down by a lowly high school drop out in a Che Guvera t-shirt and a single shot $15 Yugo rifle.

    papertiger (c8116c)

  42. @ Sammy Finkleman;

    Interesting article, but it seems to me that the elephant in the room is this; if Guccifer 2.0 was indeed a Russian operation, it defies belief that the vaunted Russian intel services, who have a very long history of operating in Eastern Europe, wouldn’t use an agent or staffer who speaks Romanian well enough to get through an online chat. The first rule of foreign ops is have a believable cover. The Russians are many things, but utterly-incompetent-in-ops they are not.

    If such a glaring issue has managed to escape the notice of these “experts” at the NYT and elsewhere to the point where they didn’t even consider it, they aren’t competent to tie their own shoes.

    Arizona CJ (191c8a)

  43. Well there is that, but there was an early dezinformatya effort first nod by mitrokhin, (whose organization uncovered Abe mazen kgb ties) much of that early work, joesten, Buchanan, et Al was mainstreamed by Oliver stone

    narciso (d1f714)

  44. Yes he’s too obvious a false flag.

    narciso (d1f714)

  45. The WSJ is pretty good about restricting access to subscribers only.

    Standard method:

    Highlight headline. Copy headline.
    Go to Google. Paste headline. Search. First link is to article bypassing paywall.

    From the article:

    A third person familiar with the investigation said RNC staff members didn’t realize they had been the target of spies until June, after Democratic committee leaders revealed that hackers had successfully gained a foothold inside their networks. Once inside, they reportedly were able to access a trove of DNC opposition research on Mr. Trump, then a candidate.

    RNC officials, concerned they too might have been compromised, called a private computer security firm, which in turn called the FBI and obtained information about what kinds of malicious emails to look for, the person said. Upon inspection, the RNC found that its electronic filters had blocked emails sent to a former employee matching the description they’d been warned about.

    The apparently successful blocking of a Russian espionage operation offers one possible explanation why the GOP’s main political organization didn’t suffer the same fate as its Democratic counterpart—a deluge of leaked emails revealing private correspondence and internal strategy.

    But the suspicion that Russians did try to break into the RNC, using the same techniques and tactics that worked so well on the Democrats, suggests that at least initially, they were trying to gather potentially incriminating or embarrassing information on both parties.

    Kevin M (25bbee)

  46. Arizona CJ (191c8a) — 12/17/2016 @ 9:39 pm

    it defies belief that the vaunted Russian intel services, who have a very long history of operating in Eastern Europe, wouldn’t use an agent or staffer who speaks Romanian well enough to get through an online chat.

    What taht tells me is that this is a very small, highly secret operation, and they didn’t have any good Rumanian speakers and/or they’re improvising.

    The first rule of foreign ops is have a believable cover. The Russians are many things, but utterly-incompetent-in-ops they are not.

    They maybe didn’t expect to get discovered.

    Sammy Finkelman (db7fea)

  47. Now, the NY Times is downright solid on THEIR paywall.

    Kevin M (25bbee)

  48. Then again they are giving up eight floors of office space, so they are really zeroing in on a moor selective audience.

    narciso (d1f714)

  49. It was first a pure espionage operation at first, as the Wall Street Journal says. They knew it was discovered and the espionage part wss over, because they were stopped, if for no other reason, Possibly at that point it came to the attention of Putin, and he dedided to use the information to damage the Democratic Party. Only after it was discovered did the leaks start.

    Sammy Finkelman (db7fea)

  50. If cozy beat is indeed responsible they have hacked many gift instslatuons before in many countries.

    narciso (d1f714)

  51. This will get you there

    Kevin M (25bbee)

  52. This despite him being a drugged out womanizer, stumbling from one self inflicted potentially world ending in thermonuclear war foreign policy disaster to the next, and even the media, the trusted third leg on the stool of any incompetent Demo administration, even them wish casting for a redneck with a pop gun by giving the minute by minute e. t. a. all the way up to arrival at Daley Plaza.

    papertiger (c8116c)

  53. I write “apparently” because I’m too cheap to have a WSJ online subscription

    To get any WSJ article, just paste the link into Google and follow the link it gives you. here is a working link to the article.

    Milhouse (40ca7b)

  54. So, copy the headline from the piece, plug it into Google, and almost always, the top link at Google will be your article

    Forget the headline, copy the URL and you’ll always get a working link.

    Milhouse (40ca7b)

  55. Donna Brazille was on ABC’s This Week today – she seemed to consider it very important to say that it wasn’t the Democratic Party that was hacked – it was the president’s party. I don’t know what the point was. That Obama should have been more concerned? That it was more serious for a foreign country to hack the president’s party than some other party?

    She said that while she had a DNC account, it wasn’t hacked – i.e., the information about getting questions did not come from there. Was that in an e-mail thread that included John Podesta?

    It looks like that’s the case.

    Sammy Finkelman (7d0f6e)

  56. She’s not the smartest knife in the drawer, sammeh, seeing the experience of various parliaments, they should have sectioned off, various division with progrsdively more secure systems.

    narciso (d1f714)

  57. Saying Donna Brazile is not the smartest knife in the drawer is like saying the Wolfman could use a shave, but that’s not the strategy. The strategy is to create a narrative which will confuse the s*** out of everybody, and hide the truth that Hillary sucked as a candidate and the DNC swallowed for trying to foist her off on the country.

    nk (dbc370)

  58. But of course, Grey poupon, last time it was the butterfly and adnan khashoggi. Or words to that nature.

    narciso (d1f714)

  59. I guess occam’s razor, doesn’t point in the obvious direction here.

    narciso (d1f714)

  60. If the DNC had ordered the hit on Seth Rich, it would have looked like a mugging.
    Watch, wallet, phone and a ring(if any) would be gone. As it is, this smells like an SVR
    false flag operation.Creating the impression of a hit to cast suspicion on the DNC
    is a classic.

    Bar Sinister (f5ce19)

  61. anything is possible,

    http://foreignpolicy.com/author/elias-groll/

    it sounds a little like a Michael Lawson story in the pre snowden era

    narciso (d1f714)

  62. narciso@61 There’s also this book review in the New York Times:

    http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/18/books/review-debriefing-the-president-tears-into-the-cia.html

    Most C.I.A. memoirs are terrible — defensive, jingoistic and worst of all, tedious. Others are doomed by the C.I.A.’s heavy-handed and mandatory censorship.

    There are exceptions, and that list includes the refreshingly candid “Debriefing the President: The Interrogation of Saddam Hussein” by John Nixon…

    ….More broadly, Mr. Nixon offers a stinging indictment of the C.I.A. and what he sees as the agency’s dysfunctional process for providing intelligence to the president and other policy makers. The agency, he writes, is so eager to please the president — any president — that it will almost always give him the answers he wants to hear.

    This (on page C1) didn’t maanage to prevent the following Op-ed piece form appearing on a different page in the same newspaper: (on page A21)

    http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/19/opinion/will-trump-play-spy-vs-spy.html

    And he has rejected the tradition of receiving the intelligence community’s daily briefing, implying that he would rather rely on information and analysis from his inner circle of advisers.

    It’s a disturbing set of developments, if only because we’ve been here before.

    Sammy Finkelman (7d0f6e)

  63. except sammeh, Nixon’s seems to be a trusting soul, kyle orton has revealed the degree that the Salafists had taken hold in the higher ranks of the army and security services since the 80s

    narciso (d1f714)

  64. 62. Bar Sinister (f5ce19) — 12/19/2016 @ 7:14 am

    If the DNC had ordered the hit on Seth Rich, it would have looked like a mugging.

    And if anyone connected to the Clintons had done it, it would have looked like an accident. Or even natural causes.

    So his murder has nothing to do with him being a source, not even, I think, the Russians killing him and pretending it was the DNC killing him because he was the source. That’s too much, and there’s no evidence for it.

    Yes, maybe the Russians, and Wikileaks, are maybe using his death that way but they wouldn’t have killed him, and Wikileaks wouldn’t be protecting him any more.

    Sammy Finkelman (7d0f6e)

  65. What the people who wanted to connect the death of Seth Rich to the leak in any simple way are proposing is that the DNC pretended to get hacked, and a Russian (Guccifer 2.0) pretended to be the hacker who actually had information from both the DNC and DCCC. The Russian was pretending all right, but what he was pretending was to be acting alone.

    And then, on July 10, Seth Rich is killed because he’s the leaker? His job was not anything like that of Snowden, so he’s not really a plausible source.

    It has to be much more reasonable that Seth Rich’s death is not connected to the leak of files to Wikileaks, although it may be connected to some other kind of intrigue. But the fact of the matter is, there were lots of armed robberies there, and sometimes robbers are inexperienced, so the only connection would be that somebody decided to use this to try to pretend, to relatively uninfromed people that it was not a hacker.

    Sammy Finkelman (7d0f6e)

  66. narciso @68 The war is not against Christians, or against anyone else – it’s against what is loosely called western civilization.

    Sammy Finkelman (7d0f6e)

  67. just to put it out there,

    https://twitter.com/UPI/status/810859706541477888

    narciso (d1f714)

  68. Sammy Finkelman (7d0f6e) — 12/19/2016 @ 8:14 am

    Sammy, that is just plain wrong. If I thought you really believed your comment, I would be embarrassed for you.

    felipe (023cc9)

  69. Live Electoral College Results

    No flips with 20% in.

    What other prog fantasies are on tap before Inauguration Day? Will prog stupidity exceed the electoral college nonsense with their next ‘one weird trick’?

    Rick Ballard (835ba0)

  70. I’ve gotta fevah, and the only cure is moar Sammeh!

    Colonel Haiku (2601c0)

  71. Rick, my bet is on having the Electoral College declared unconstitutional by the 4-4 Supreme Court.
    Been articles on it published and everything.

    Ingot (e5bf64)


Powered by WordPress.

Page loaded in: 0.1331 secs.