{UAH} THEY ARE RELEASING INFORMATION AT A SPEED I HAVE NEVER EXPECTED -> This just came out 5 minutes ago

BREAKING: Crowdstrike Wasn’t Certain Russians Stole DNC Emails, Declassified Docs Show

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By Jim Hayek May 9, 2020

For years, many people have questioned the conclusion by cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike, hired by the Democratic National Committee to analyze the hacking theft of emails from the party’s servers, that Russia was behind it.

Now, new evidence casts further doubt about whether Moscow was really involved, giving new weight previous earlier theories that the emails might have been obtained some other way.

Newly declassified transcripts of secret congressional testimony obtained during the House Intelligence Committee’s probe into alleged ‘Russian collusion’ during the 2016 presidential election show that Crowdstrike was not certain that Moscow was behind the theft, Just The News reported Friday.

The site adds:

During the interview made public Thursday, Shawn Henry explained that CrowdStrike found some evidence that information was taken from DNC servers, but it was not conclusive.

Responding to a question from Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas), he said, “There is evidence of exfiltration, not conclusive, but indicators of exfiltration off the DNC.”

Henry noted further that based on evidence reviewed by his firm, analysts believe “70 gigabytes of data” were exfiltrated from the DNC’s network.

But, when asked by Rep. Mike Conaway (R-Texas) whether he could “unequivocally say it was or was not exfiltrated out of the DNC, from what you know of?” Henry answered, “I can’t say based on that,” the transcript says.

Just The News says that it’s widely believed throughout the intelligence community that Russia was behind the DNC server hack. However, there have been questions about it because FBI officials and cyber analysts were never permitted by the DNC to examine the servers. As such, the bureau has been forced to rely on Crowdstrike’s conclusions. And up to now, Democrats have touted the firm’s conclusions as decisive.

Henry is a former FBI agent who was in charge of the bureau’s cyber crimes division before he transitioned into the private sector. He was interviewed on Dec. 5, 2017, by Reps. Castro, Conaway, Adam Schiff, Chris Stewart, and Eric Swalwell, with lawyers present as well.

His interview is one of 57 closed-door sessions held by the committee during its two-year Russia probe.

But the finding that Crowdstrike was never certain, after all, of the Russian hack is noteworthy because during the lead-up to the 2016 nominating conventions is when the news broke that ‘someone’ had hacked the DNC’s servers, exposing embarrassing emails exchanged between Hillary Clinton and her campaign manager, John Podesta.

“The story quickly became: The Russians hacked the server and they did it to help Donald Trump. We know this, DNC officials said, because the private cybersecurity firm the organization hired — Crowdstrike — said so,” The National Sentinel reported.

William Binney, a former high-ranking NSA official-turned-whistleblower, and Larry Johnson, a former CIA analyst and State Department counterterrorism expert, wrote in February 2019 that they didn’t think Russia was responsible for the hack.

“If the Russians actually had conducted an internet based hack of the DNC computer network then the evidence of such an attack would have been collected and stored by the National Security Agency,” they wrote.

“The technical systems to accomplish this task have been in place since 2002. The NSA had an opportunity to make it clear that there was irrefutable proof of Russian meddling, particularly with regard to the DNC hack, when it signed on to the January 2017 ‘Intelligence Community Assessment,’ regarding Russian interference in the 2016 Presidential election,” they added.

In that assessment, the NSA said it only had “moderate confidence” in the ‘Russia aspired to help Trump over Clinton’ narrative.

“If those emails had been hijacked over the internet then NSA also would have been able to track the electronic path they traveled over the internet. This kind of data would allow the NSA to declare without reservation or caveat that the Russians were guilty,” Binney and Johnson added.

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