Counterpunch | The investigation methods used to come to the conclusion that the Russian Government led the hacks of the DNC, Clinton Campaign Chair John Podesta, and the DCCC were further called into question by a recent BuzzFeed report by
Jason Leopold, who has developed a notable reputation from leading
several non-partisan Freedom of Information Act lawsuits for
investigative journalism purposes. On March 15 that the Department of
Homeland Security released just two heavily redacted pages of
unclassified information in response to an FOIA request for definitive
evidence of Russian election interference allegations. Leopold wrote,
“what the agency turned over to us and Ryan Shapiro, a PhD candidate at
MIT and a research affiliate at Harvard University, is truly bizarre: a
two-page intelligence assessment of the incident, dated Aug. 22, 2016,
that contains information DHS culled from the internet. It’s all
unclassified — yet DHS covered nearly everything in wide swaths of black
ink. Why? Not because it would threaten national security, but because
it would reveal the methods DHS uses to gather intelligence, methods
that may amount to little more than using Google.”
In lieu of substantive evidence provided to the public that the
alleged hacks which led to Wikileaks releases of DNC and Clinton
Campaign Manager John Podesta’s emails were orchestrated by the Russian
Government, CrowdStrike’s bias has been cited as
undependable in its own assessment, in addition to its skeptical
methods and conclusions. The firm’s CTO and co-founder, Dmitri
Alperovitch, is a senior fellow at
the Atlantic Council, a think tank with openly anti-Russian sentiments
that is funded by Ukrainian billionaire Victor Pinchuk, who also
happened to donate at least $10 million to the Clinton Foundation.
In 2013, the Atlantic Council awarded Hillary Clinton it’s Distinguished International Leadership Award. In 2014, the Atlantic Council hosted one of several events with former Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, who took over after pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych was ousted in early 2014, who now lives in exile in Russia.
In August, Politico reported that
Donald Trump’s favorable rhetoric to Russia was concerning Ukraine, who
have been recovering from Russian interference in their own country’s
revolution. The article cited, “Russia wants Trump for U.S. president; Ukraine is terrified by Trump and prefers Hillary Clinton.” Trump recently appointed Atlantic Council Chairman Jon Huntsman as U.S. Ambassador to Russia, which Vox called a
“baffling” choice, and Democrats and anti-Russian hysterics haven’t
bothered to attempt to criticize, scrutinize or insinuate ties between
Huntsman and Russia.
