Will the Central Myth of Russiagate Finally Fall? Increasingly that Looks Possible

Get updates from LaRouchePAC on the coup attempt against Trump’s Presidency, text SC20 to (800)929-7566.

Former CIA analyst and State Department counterterrorism expert Larry Johnson has produced a piece over at Pat Lang’s blog, asserting the likelihood that the Internet personas, Guccifer 2.0 and DC Leaks, were created by John Brennan’s CIA. If Johnson is correct, and we don’t have any reason to doubt his account, the entire fabric of Russiagate continues to be blown apart. We now know, thanks to DOJ Inspector General Horowitz, that the MI6’s Steele Dossier was a fabricated hoax. So, the ground is ripe to challenge the second evidentiary peg for Russiagate for which there is, similarly, no actual evidence.

Johnson’s piece arrives twenty four hours after leaks to the New York Times indicated that prosecutor John Durham is now focusing on John Brennan, with CIA cooperation in that investigation, and a piece in The Intercept indicating that former NSA Director Mike Rogers is cooperating with Durham and has met with him several times.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller and the Intelligence Community’s soon to be infamous Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA for short) opined (and that is what they did since they did not present real evidence) that these personas, a critical piece of the “Russia hacked John Podesta and the DNC narrative,” were created by Russian military intelligence’s GRU. Both Mueller and the ICA attribute the WikiLeaks document trove from the DNC and John Podesta, to a Russian internet hack performed by the GRU.

In his piece, Johnson points out that John Brennan reorganized the CIA in October of 2015 to create a new Division of Digital Innovation. This group immediately produced a program called Vault 7 and associated software called Marble capable of both conducting major cyber intrusions and then obfuscating their origin in such a way as to attribute what were really CIA activities to foreign actors. In the case of the Guccifer 2.0 and DC Leaks, these obfuscation activities included inserting Cyrillic characters into the code and creating a trail leading to a Russian name which translated to Felix Dzerzhinksy, the infamous founder of the Russian secret police.

Gullible, or entirely complicit, investigators ate up this “clue” without assessing whether a cyber force as capable as the GRU would really leave such a trail. True to the incompetence of Brennan’s CIA minions, both Vault 7 and Marble were hacked and turned over to WikiLeaks which published them in 2017, after trying to negotiate with the U.S. government for the opportunity to tell them the actual source of the 2016 DNC and Podesta documents they published as well as explaining the vulnerabilities which allowed the CIA’s program to be hacked –all in return for immunity for Julian Assange. That negotiation, conducted by high levels of the DOJ was blown up by Senator Mark Warner and FBI Director Comey, which is a separate seditious scandal. And, as most know, Julian Assange is being slowly killed in Belmar Prison in London as he fights extradition to the U.S. based on his indictment for a crime already beyond the statute of limitations – his publication of documents provided to him by Chelsea Manning.

Aspects of the New York Times’ reporting directly bolsters the alternative account of what happened in 2016 advanced by WikiLeaks, former British Ambassador Craig Murray, and in studies led by former NSA Technical Director Bill Binney and reported by Larry Johnson and others for the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. It is a certainty that the New York Times did not intend this. Binney has demonstrated that the DNC documents published by WikiLeaks are almost certainly the product of a download onto a storage device, or a leak, rather than a hack conducted through the internet. Most importantly, Binney has stated, emphatically, that if a hack happened as described in the ICA and by Robert Mueller, the NSA would have been able to trace it and present conclusive evidence concerning it; yet no such evidence has been presented.

The Times reports that Durham is focused on the January 2017 ICA and its conclusion that Putin directed the Russia hack of the DNC and Podesta to help Trump. According to the Times, there was significant debate even within John Brennan’s handpicked team about this “opinion.” The NSA under Mike Rogers said at the time that it had only moderate confidence in this conclusion. According to the Times article, almost certainly the result of a leak by Brennan or FBI officials similarly under investigation by Durham, the conclusion that Putin ordered the hack to help Trump is not the result of NSA intelligence, rather it relies on a Brennan CIA source alleged to be close to the Kremlin. Other reportage has claimed that Brennan’s “source” is highly dubious. The Times article cites Representative Chris Stewart of Utah as one of those saying that ICA’s conclusions regarding Putin’s intentions were not justified by the classified intelligence he has viewed.

The Times article goes on to make the absurd claim that because Putin avoids phones, the NSA does not have the intelligence by which to attribute motivation for the hack. Absolutely avoided, is the simple point that Bill Binney makes: if the Russians did the hack the NSA would know it and be able to trace it, and, undoubtedly, would be able to attribute the chain of command involved in it. The Times account seems to concede that no such actual evidence exists.

Get updates from LaRouchePAC on the coup attempt against Trump’s Presidency, text SC20 to (800)929-7566.