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Wednesday, December 14, 2016

FBI COMEY: No Credible Evidence that Russia Influenced the Outcome of the Recent U.S. Presidential Election

FBI COMEY:  No Credible Evidence that Russia Influenced the Outcome of the Recent U.S. Presidential Election
By James Baxley

Nearly six weeks since the election has ended and we are still talking about why Hillary Clinton lost. The MSM is more concerned with the loser of the election than the winner. The MSM has come to the conclusion that Clinton lost the election because of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Director James Comey, fake news, Clinton’s staff, and the Russian hackers. No mention of Clinton’s inadequacy at running a campaign.

The presidential election of 2016 reminds me of the infamous election of 1948 when incumbent President Harry S. Truman, ran a successful campaign for reelection against Thomas E. Dewey, the Republican nominee. The 2016 election was almost identical to the 1948 election except for the winner was a Democrat.


Every prediction indicated that Truman would be defeated by Dewey just as Clinton was predicted in every poll to defeat Trump. The Democrats regained control in 1948 regained both houses of Congress just as the Republicans did in the 2016 election.

The only difference (besides the winner being a Democrat) was that Dewey did not insist on a recount. Dewey also did not insist that the Electoral College not cast their votes for Truman. There weren’t riots or protests in the streets. Dewey, unlike Clinton accepted his loss.

According to The New York Times bestselling author Ed Klein, “FBI Director James Comey assured the president-elect there was no credible evidence that Russia influenced the outcome of the recent U.S. presidential election by hacking the Democratic National Committee and the e-mails of John Podesta, the chairman of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign” and goes on to say that “James Clapper, the director of National Intelligence, agreed with this FBI assessment.”


John Brennan, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), was the only member of the U.S. intelligence community to agree that it was the Russians who sanctioned the hacking of the DNC, Colin Powell, Soros Open Society Foundation, and John Podesta's emails. Comey asserted this was no surprise, “Brennan takes his marching orders from President Obama.”

JOHN BRENNAN DIRECTOR OF THE CIA
 Klein asserts “In Comey’s view, the leaks to the New York Times and the Washington Post alleging that the Russians tried—and perhaps even succeeded—in tilting the election to [Donald] Trump were a Democratic Party effort to delegitimize Trump’s victory” and “just as likely that the hacking was done by people who had no direct connection to the Russian government.”


A group of retired intelligence experts including retired National Security Agency (NSA) technical director and whistleblower William Binney, former Senator and counterintelligence agent Mike Gravel, former CIA intelligence officer Larry Johnson, former CIA and military intelligence analyst Ray McGovern, retired CIA intelligence officer Elizabeth Murray and former NSA SIGINT analyst Kirk Wiebe all came together to write an open letter arguing that the CIA’s allegations suggesting the Russian government interfered with the U.S. presidential election are unsubstantiated.


 “We draw on decades of senior-level experience—with emphasis on cyber-intelligence and security—to cut through uninformed, largely partisan fog. Far from hiding behind anonymity, we are proud to speak out with the hope of gaining an audience appropriate to what we merit – given our long labors in government and other areas of technology. And corny though it may sound these days, our ethos as intelligence professionals remains, simply, to tell it like it is – without fear or favor.”

The officials noted that, “all signs point to leaking, not hacking. If hacking were involved, the National Security Agency would know it – and know both sender and recipient.”

The former ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray is a well-known supporter, associate, and friend of Julian Assange has said he met the DNC leaker/leakers “Guccifer 2” and the person involved is an insider, not a Russian agent.

CRAIG MURRAY
 A post from Murray’s blog on December 11th, Murray posts:

“The CIA claim they ‘know the individuals’ involved. Yet under Obama the USA has been absolutely ruthless in its persecution of whistleblowers, and its pursuit of foreign hackers through extradition. We are supposed to believe that in the most vital instance imaginable, an attempt by a foreign power to destabilize a US election, even though the CIA knows who the individuals are, nobody is going to be arrested or extradited, or (if in Russia) made subject to yet more banking and other restrictions against Russian individuals? Plainly it stinks. The anonymous source claims of ‘We know who it was, it was the Russians’ are beneath contempt.”

 The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, David Nunes has written to the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper. Nunes asked why this week's reports by the CIA suggesting Russia hacked the Democratic campaign documents contradicts what the agency was saying three weeks ago. Nunes writes: 


“On November 17, 2016 you told the Committee during an open hearing that the intelligence community lacked strong evidence connecting Russian government Cyber-attacks and WikiLeaks disclosures.” 
As for cyber-attacks, the U.S. has a history of these also, even though they aren't as extensive as the U.S.'s history of meddling in the elections of other countries.

FURTHER READING: Trumps Generals

During Obama’s first-term as president, he authorized the Stuxnet cyberattack which destroyed about a thousand of Iran’s centrifuges used for enriching uranium.

The advice given to Obama that the computer viruses would not escape the facility and would not affect any other computers if they did escape was false. The advice he received that the virus could not be traced back to the U.S. was false also. The viruses did escape. They did infect many computers in other countries and were traced back to the U.S.

There’s no strong evidence of the Russian government hacking, but there is evidence that the hacking may have taken place inside the borders of the U.S. Georgia's secretary of state Brian Kemp says the state was hit with an attempted hack of its voter registration database from an IP address linked to the federal Department of Homeland Security (DHS). According to a Wall Street Journal article:


“The secretary of state of Georgia is asking the Department of Homeland Security to explain what appears to be an attempted breach of the state’s computer systems that house its voter registration database by someone in the federal government.”


“In a letter to the Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, Georgia’s Secretary of State Brian Kemp said the state had discovered an unsuccessful attempt to breach the firewall of state computer systems. The attempt occurred on Nov. 15 and was linked to an IP address associated with DHS, he said.”

As usual, the US is still a practitioner of hypocrisy. For decades, American intelligence agencies, especially the CIA have used clandestine tactics to put leaders into office who are favorable to U.S. national interests.

Pulitzer Prize winning author Tim Weiner is known for his work on clandestine national security programs. He writes that “Several months after the CIA was created in 1947, it set out to steal the Italian election in 1948 to support the Christian Democrats who were pro-American, against the socialist Democrats, who were pro-Moscow, and they won,” exclaims Weiner. “It’s just the beginning of a long, long story.”

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER TIM WEINER
“The president [of Afghanistan] after the American invasion post-9/11 was a paid CIA agent, Hamid Karzai.” Weiner continues, “We set up the shah of Iran, who was our best friend for 25 years until he fell, and that created the Iranian Revolution.”


The NSA has a department for difficult missions called "Tailored Access Operations" (TAO). The TAO devises special methods for especially difficult targets. May 2010, the division completed a mission which included the surveillance of Mexico’s President Felipe Calderon and his successor’s Enrique Peña Nieto public email account.

The CIA has also meddled in the politics of places like Guatemala, Indonesia, South Vietnam, Afghanistan and beyond.