Mueller indictment backs July 2016 post on DNC "WikiLeaks" email dumps

On the heels of the 2016 Democratic National Convention, I posted a blog that raised a number of suspicions about what was then being called "the WikiLeaks DNC email dump." In a blog post titled Timing is everything - Why were WikiLeaks DNC emails released now?, 31 July 2016, I wrote:

While there has been a lot of speculation as to the source of the WikiLeaks DNC email dump, with mounting evidence that state-sponsored Russian hackers did it with an eye toward helping Donald Trump getting into the White House, less attention has been paid to the question of when this hack was done.

Obviously, the release, coming only 48 hrs before the start of the convention has had a major disruptive influence. As WikiLeaks leader and founder Julian Assange put it in an interview with Richard Engels of NBC News, this email dump is "now up-ending the DNC as we speak." He noted that because of what they call 'Hilary Leaks', “the very top of the Democratic party, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, is now being forced to resign.” There is no question that the release of these documents after a long nominating process has been completed, but days before it is to be consummated, has disturbed the Democratic National Convention and given an advantage to Donald Trump.

I then asked the question, that has now been answered with a high degree of specificity by the Mueller indictment of twelve Russian GRU operatives:

So when did this hack take place and why is it being released only now?

To show when the hack was most likely done, I listed the seven accounts known to be hacked, and my conclusions based on an analysis of the hacked material:

An examination of the dump shows that the last email from each of the seven accounts was dated May 24th or May 25th:

Account	Email ID#	Time/Date
Communications Director Luis Miranda (10770 emails)	3014	2016-05-25 00:42:48
National Finance Director Jordon Kaplan (3797 emails)	3256	2016-05-25 12:03:21
Finance Chief of Staff Scott Comer (3095 emails)	19781	2016-05-25 12:48:34
Finanace Director of Data Daniel Parrish (1472 emails)	20963	2016-05-25 12:10:00
Finance Director Allen Zachary (1611 emails)	3014	2016-05-25 00:42:48
Senior Advisor Andrew Wright (938 emails)	16150	2016-05-24 18:55:10
N. CA Finance Dir. Robert (Erik) Stowe (751 emails)	17415	2016-05-24 14:02:51

So there is no question that this data was captured on or after May 25th, and since these are people who use these email accounts every day, it is hard not to conclude that this hack was done before emails on or after May 26th could be captured. It would appear that this data capture, whether by leak or hack, took place on or about May 25th.

Now we have learned from the Mueller indictment:

Between on or about May 25, 2016 and June 1, 2016, the Conspirators hacked the DNC Microsoft Exchange Server and stole thousands of emails from the work accounts of DNC employees. During that time, ERMAKOV researched PowerShell commands related to accessing and managing the Microsoft Exchange Server. 30. On or about May 30, 2016, MALYSHEV accessed the AMS panel in order to upgrade custom AMS software on the server. That day, the AMS panel received updates from approximately thirteen different X-Agent malware implants on DCCC and DNC computers.

The indictment also includes this table of eight DNC victims of email hacking:

If the dates in this table indicate the date of first offense, or the day they were first hacked, six of these eight may be in my list above. It might be interesting to find more about that.

I speculated the the emails were released almost two months after they were hacked because they were meant to help Trump against Clinton, not Bernie Sanders against Clinton:

Imagine the difference it could have made had these hacked emails had been released within a week after the last ones stolen? That would have been before the primaries in California, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Dakota and South Dakota were held. Bernie Sanders won two of those and Hillary Clinton won four including California. Would she have done as well if these emails were public knowledge then? What if Debbie Wasserman Schultz has been dismissed as DNC chair at the beginning of June instead of now? We very likely would be experiencing a very different Democratic National Convention now. The very timing of the WikiLeaks release shows it was not done to defend democracy but only to further manipulate the process. This release certainly wasn't timed to help Bernie Sanders, it was timed to help Donald Trump.

Julian Assange hasn't just been silent as to the source of these emails. He also hasn't said when WikiLeaks got hold of them.

The Mueller report also filled in some of the blanks with regards to how these emails went from the Russian GRU to WikiLeaks [Organization 1], and why they took so long to be released:

47. In order to expand their interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, the Conspirators transferred many of the documents they stole from the DNC and the chairman of the Clinton Campaign to Organization 1. The Conspirators, posing as Guccifer 2.0, discussed the release of the stolen documents and the timing of those releases with Organization 1 to heighten their impact on the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

a. On or about June 22, 2016, Organization 1 sent a private message to Guccifer 2.0 to “[s]end any new material [stolen from the DNC] here for us to review and it will have a much higher impact than what you are doing.” On or about July 6, 2016, Organization 1 added, “if you have anything hillary related we want it in the next tweo [sic] days prefable [sic] because the DNC [Democratic National Convention] is approaching and she will solidify bernie supporters behind her after.” The Conspirators responded, “ok . . . i see.” Organization 1 explained, “we think trump has only a 25% chance of winning against hillary . . . so conflict between bernie and hillary is interesting.”

b. After failed attempts to transfer the stolen documents starting in late June 2016, on or about July 14, 2016, the Conspirators, posing as Guccifer 2.0, sent Organization 1 an email with an attachment titled “wk dnc link1.txt.gpg.” The Conspirators explained to Organization 1 that the encrypted file contained instructions on how to access an online archive of stolen DNC documents. On or about July 18, 2016, Organization 1 confirmed it had “the 1Gb or so archive” and would make a release of the stolen documents “this week.” 48.

On or about July 22, 2016, Organization 1 released over 20,000 emails and other documents stolen from the DNC network by the Conspirators. This release occurred approximately three days before the start of the Democratic National Convention. Organization 1 did not disclose Guccifer 2.0’s role in providing them. The latest-in-time email released through Organization 1 was dated on or about May 25, 2016, approximately the same day the Conspirators hacked the DNC Microsoft Exchange Server.

Like I said, the DNC Microsoft Exchange Server was hacked on 25 May 2016! I could have told you that almost two years ago. Oh, I did!

The final point I made in that blog post was that Julian Assange and Wikileaks had some cuplability even if everything they said about their role was true:

There is another aspect of the WikiLeaks DNC email dump that is very likely to have partisan results that favor Donald Trump. In the past WikiLeaks has been careful to redact identifying information about those not their targets. Not so in this case. This data dump contains not just the email addresses of its seven targets but the undisguised email addresses of everyone they corresponded with. So in addition to making public the inter-workings of the DNC, WikiLeaks has also made public the private email addresses of hundreds, if not thousands of DNC employees and supporters. This is an open invitation to mischief. The disruptive possibilities of this list of email addresses is enormous. Even if Russian hackers had nothing to do with this email dump, as Assange claims, they will have a lot of fun with this list.

In October 2016, I published another blog about the curious timing of 7 October the "WikiLeaks" Podesta email dumps in a post titled: Was Wikileaks dump a diversion from Trump Super Predator revelations?, 13 October 2016, in that post I note:

There's an old cop saying: Never believe in coincidence. For example, it is almost certainly no accident that this tape got leaked days before the second debate. A little after 20:00 UTC on Friday 7 October 2016, the Washington Post released a lewd Trump tape that threatens to rock the Republican campaign to its core.

Less than an hour later, at 20:32 UTC Wikileaks released the first 2050 of well over 50000 emails from Clinton Campaign Chairman John Podesta.
View image on Twitter

RELEASE: The Podesta Emails #HillaryClinton #Podesta #imWithHer https://t.co/pjX9tmfINt pic.twitter.com/kDTVFYHih7

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) October 7, 2016

This tweet was followed it quick succession by 20 others detailing revelations about the Clinton campaign from the released emails. Obviously this release had to have been planned well in advance. There is no question that it was a lucky break for the Trump campaign that this story broke just when they badly need a distraction from the lewd tape story.

Was it just fortuitous?

I also made note of RT's [Russia Today] quick line-up pattern on this story. They were the first media outlet to report on it, just 13 minutes after the dump. This latest Mueller indictment also alleges that these emails came from a Russian GRU hack:

49. On or about October 7, 2016, Organization 1 released the first set of emails from the chairman of the Clinton Campaign that had been stolen by LUKASHEV and his co-conspirators.

This treachery coming from WikiLeaks and Julian Assange is a little bit personal. I have had my own links to the Wikileaks organization in the past. I was a Wikileak associate journalist-researcher on the Strafor GIF and the Syria Files. I also was a staff writer for WL Central (An endorsed WikiLeaks resource). You can still see my WL Central posts from the beginnings of the Arab Spring on through the Occupy Wall St. Movement (Which WLC helped to spawn), here, although they have let its SSL certificate expire.

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UPDATE ALREADY! While going over this post one last time for spelling and grammar errors, I became distracted by something else I caught wind of: In the Mueller narrative leading up to the pre-DNC convention email release, I think a tension between WikiLeaks [Julian Assange] and the Russian GRU [Vladimir Putin] is revealed.

In the 31 July 2016 blog post, I said I thought the email release was delayed to help Trump against Clinton, whereas a release soon after the 25 May 2016 hack would have helped Sanders against Clinton. In the Mueller indictment WikiLeaks [Organization 1] seems to favor an early release precisely to help Sanders against Clinton because it thinks Trump's chances of beating Clinton are 1 in 4. The problem for Assange was that the GRU had the emails, so they ultimately controlled the timing of the release.

When the Mueller indictment reports:

b. After failed attempts to transfer the stolen documents starting in late June 2016, on or about July 14, 2016, the Conspirators, posing as Guccifer 2.0, sent Organization 1 an email with an attachment titled “wk dnc link1.txt.gpg.” The Conspirators explained to Organization 1 that the encrypted file contained instructions on how to access an online archive of stolen DNC documents. On or about July 18, 2016, Organization 1 confirmed it had “the 1Gb or so archive” and would make a release of the stolen documents “this week.” 48.

I smell a rat. I know WikiLeaks knows a lot about securely transferring files. I suspect the Russian GRU is pretty good at it too. I just finished another 10 hr shift as a Linux Systems Administrator. We also do a lot of file transfers, and nowhere in the IT world would it be found acceptable for "failed attempts" to run almost three weeks to transfer a gigabyte of data. Important IT operation, major websites even, don't simply grind to a halt for weeks on end because of "failed attempts" at data transfer. To give just one particularly relevant example: When I licensed Vietnam: American Holocaust to Russia Today, [now available on Amazon Prime BTW] we had to coordinate the transfer of an 11GB file from Los Angeles to Moscow. It took a far-too-long three days, largely because of technical issues and low bandwidth on my end, but it was important to both parties so, like any other important IT operation, we stayed on it until we got it done. 1GB data transfers only take weeks if the task is put on hold, and take up later.

Somebody was stalling! And we know who. Julian Assange was being played. He may have favored an early release, but WikiLeaks gave up that kind of independence long ago, by July 2016 he was no more than Putin's puppet.

Syria is the Paris Commune of the 21st Century!

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General Wesley Clark & the Bruce Tanner Standard of Evidence

My Monday blog post, Save the civilians of East Aleppo, started a long email debate with one reader, Bruce Tanner about the Syrian conflict. Readers of this blog are already familiar with my POV on this question. Bruce's is decidedly different. For example, on Tuesday he wrote me:

If the Syrian government has been so savage against the people of the country, how can you explain the massive turnout for the presidential election in 2014, documented by international observers, under attacks by salafi terrorists who were doing truly indiscriminate bombardment with mortars, hell-cannon bombs, grad missiles, etc., to vote overwhelmingly for the continued administration of Assad?

Needless to say, the debate proceeded along familiar lines leading nowhere. After having denied any claim that I made in favor of the revolution, including refusing all citations from Al Jazeera simply because its from Qatar, Bruce began his last letter to me by saying what standard of proof he might be inclined to accept:

I abhor any violence against innocent civilians done by anyone, anytime. For instance, that against the civilians in Yemen currently being attacked indiscriminately with U.S. bombs while the American Air Force refuels the Saudi planes in the air.

If you have any actual evidence of deliberate attacks against Syrian civilians by their government (not including mistakes made in the course of the necessary combating of the invasion of the country by foreign-sponsored militias), I will be interested to see it. But only real, vetted evidence from sources that can be proven to exist. And of course, if there have been any such attacks, I certainly denounce them.

A half million Syrians dead and Bruce Tanner still doubts if the Assad regime has carried out any deliberate attacks against civilians! Then he goes on to repeat, at some length, his view that a legitimate Syrian government is the victim of a US regime change plot - and that's all there is to it:

Can you entertain the possibility that a decision was made, long in advance of the phony "Arab Spring" in Syria, to destabilize the country so that a puppet regime amenable to U.S./NATO/Israeli interests could be put into place? (as evidenced by this:

And the evidence that meets Bruce Tanner's high standard is that tired old 2007 Democracy Now interview in which General Wesley Clark, the fired four-star general who was the supreme allied commander of NATO during the Kosovo War, says that in 2001 an unnamed friend at the Pentagon told him he had a memo, which Wesley Clark says he never saw himself, which outlined a plan for regime change in seven countries, "starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran" in five years:


Here's a transcript:

About 10 days after 9/11, I went through the Pentagon, and I saw Secretary Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz. I went downstairs just to say hello to some of the people on the joint staff who used to work for me, and one of the generals called me in. He said, "Sir, you’ve got to come in and talk to me a second." I said, "Well, you’re too busy." He said, "No, no." He says, "We’ve made the decision we’re going to war with Iraq." This was on or about the 20th of September. I said, "We’re going to war with Iraq? Why?" He said, "I don’t know." He said, "I guess they don’t know what else to do." So I said, "Well, did they find some information connecting Saddam to al-Qaeda?" He said, "No, no." He says, "There’s nothing new that way. They just made the decision to go to war with Iraq." He said, "I guess it’s like we don’t know what to do about terrorists, but we’ve got a good military and we can take down governments." And he said, "I guess if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem has to look like a nail."

So I came back to see him a few weeks later, and by that time we were bombing in Afghanistan. I said, "Are we still going to war with Iraq?" And he said, "Oh, it’s worse than that." He said—he reached over on his desk. He picked up a piece of paper, and he said, "I just got this down from upstairs," meaning the secretary of defense’s office, "today." And he said, "This is a memo that describes how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran." I said, "Is it classified?" He said, "Yes, sir." I said, "Well, don’t show it to me." And I saw him a year or so ago, and I said, "You remember that?" He said, "Sir, I didn’t show you that memo! I didn’t show it to you!"

Accordings to Bruce Tanner, the Arab revolts of 2011 and the resulting revolutions in Libya and Syria didn't come from the people's struggles against their oppression but instead had their origins in a five-sided building outside of Washington, DC, and Wesley Clark has given us the evidence. For many in the fakeLeft this interview is like a talisman they can wave at anyone calling upon them to support the revolutionary struggles of the people of the Middle East and Africa. It's their ultimate proof that those people aren't even masters of their own fate, white people in the Pentagon are. If I had a dollar for every time it has been waved at me over the past five years, I could have a much richer holiday season. There must be thousands of US Leftists that think they can disprove everything we have written about MENA in hundreds of posts since 2011 simply by offering these words of Wesley Clark as their "evidence."

I really can't believe that people are still sending me this video when it's almost 2017 and about a half-million Syrians have been killed, 95% by Assad and his Russian and Iranian supporters. With all the leaks from Wikileaks, Snowden, and others since 2001, this memo which Wesley Clark was only told about, has never surfaced, and the five year plan it was alleged to have laid out was almost over in 2007 when he revealed it, nevertheless it still is being promoted as some sort of ultimate truth that justifies how the US Left has letting down the people of Libya and Syria. In listening to this video and especially in reading the transcript, one would expect that it should have discredited itself in the eyes of any thinking person long ago, but some will always find it easy to believe what makes them feel good, so I guess the job of cleaning the stables is never done.

But before we get into that, just for the purposes of review, here is the people's agency those on the fakeLeft and altRight are intent on denying, as thousands turned out to demonstrate their support for the Syrian Revolution this week, even after all they've been through to this point:

Thousands rally in Turkey over east Aleppo | 17 Dec 2016

Hero of Homs Abdel Basset Sarout Leads Protests in Idlib | 16 Dec 2016

Taking Wesley Clark's statement at face value, the claim is that in early October 2001, an unnamed general at the Pentagon showed Wesley Clark "a piece of paper," and said it was a plan to carry out regime change in seven specific Middle East and African countries in five years. Because it was classified, Clark said he refused to look at it, although he apparently didn't admonished his friend for revealing it, so Wesley Clark has never even been in a position to testify that this memo actually existed. That rests entirely on the word of one unnamed general who Wesley Clark is vouching for. He really should have looked at it for himself, classified status be damned, if he was going to talk about it in open court.

Now consider this: Of all the hackers and leakers that have rocked our world since 9/11, none have had as great an impact, or paid as great a price, as Chelsea Manning. It is said that while she had access to Pentagon and State Department files, she gave us 482,832 documents on the Iraq War, 91,000 documents on the Afghan War, and 251,287 classified State Department cables, but not the one page memo that has been reported to be the master plan of all this that followed. If one believes Wesley Clark, that piece of paper has got to be the Holy Grail of all government documents, and yet in 15 years, not a trace of it has been leaked or hacked. WikiLeaks hasn't found it, Anonymous hasn't found it, Richard Snowden doesn't have it, and yet Bruce Tanner can promote it as the evidence that the deaths happening in Aleppo today were planned by the Pentagon 15 years ago! Such utter nonsense would be laughable if conditions in the world weren't so tragic.

There is also the question of how well this alleged plan actually correlates with reality. Wesley Clark supporters say that is the point, it explains what has been happening with the Arab Spring and in Libya and Syria. But that is such a stretch. It was a five year plan "starting with Iraq, then Syria and Lebanon, then Libya, then Somalia and Sudan, and back to Iran." So if it kicked off in 2003 with the invasion of Iraq by over 300,000 coalition troops, we should have seen a serious effort to overthrow Assad, second on Clark's list in the next year or so, if this bold plan to carry out seven regime change operations, consecutively by 2008, was to stay on track. Obviously that is not what happened. The post 2011 events this revelation is generally proffered to explain, took place after this plan was suppose to have ended and it was the government of Libya that fell second when it was fourth on Clark's friend's list. If he was a betting tout, a lot of clients would be asking for their money back and looking elsewhere for advise.

No doubt, supporters of the conspiracy theory would explain these discrepancies, together with the fact that this five year plan in now apparently going into fourteenth year, by necessary real world revisions forced on the Pentagon. If that were the case, we could expect to have found documentation of those revisions and at least references to the original memo Wesley Clark has made famous. Where are they?

The bottom line is that there isn't anything like a shred of evidence that this memo ever existed, let alone the grand plan it is reported to have outlined. This whole story, which has gained a life of its own, rests on the words of one man. So who is Wesley Clark? This is what Murtaza Hussain said about him in The Intercept, 20 July 2015 after Wesley Clark shocked his liberal supporters by calling for a revival of internment camps to help combat Muslim extremism:

The comments were shockingly out of character for Clark, who after serving as supreme allied commander of NATO made a name for himself in progressive political circles. In 2004, his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination was highly critical of the Bush administration’s excessive response to the 9/11 terror attacks. Since then, he has been a critic of policies that violate the Geneva Convention, saying in 2006 that policies such as torture violate “the very values that [we] espouse.”

In a memoir written the following year, he also famously alleged that the White House under Bush had developed a massively imperialistic plan for the Middle East, which would see the administration attempt to “take out seven countries in five years,” beginning with the invasions in Iraq and Afghanistan.

This image of Wesley Clark as the progressive anti-war general is of a more recent vintage. Jeffrey St. Clair and Alexander Cockburn give us a pre-9/11 perspective on him in Gen. Wesley Clark Fights On and On, CounterPunch, 12 Nov 1999:

At the beginning of the Kosovo conflict, CounterPunch delved into the military career of General Wesley Clark and discovered that his meteoric rise through the ranks derived from the successful manipulation of appearances: faking the results of combat exercises, greasing to superiors and other practices common to the general officer corps.

In their further discussion of him, phrases like "gross distortion of the truth" and "sleight of hand" are employed enough to let us know that these authors didn't see him as a man that should be taken at his word.

We also know he had a history of bragging about his inside knowledge. On 11 September 2001, Clark, spoke as if he saw this coming, he told CNN:

Retired Gen. Wesley Clark, former supreme NATO commander, said the aircraft appeared to hit the southwestern side, or the Army side of the building, the area responsible for planning and logistics. "We've known for some time that some group has been planning this," he said, adding that "obviously, we didn't do enough" to prepare for such an attack.

After General Wesley Clark was "forced into retirement," he reinvented himself as the anti-war general and the liberal peace candidate, but his bombing campaign in the Kosovo War is said to have been brutal, Human Rights Watch put the number of civilians killed at between 488 and 627. It was also poorly executed, as in when he accidentally bombed the Chinese embassy. The CounterPunch authors continued:

Despite such embarrassments, Clark can take heart from the fact that his influence on warfare already transcends the Balkans. Since Operation Allied Force laid waste to the Serbian civilian infrastructure, the targeting of such infrastructure has become routine and acceptable. The Israelis, who have for years shown relative care in avoiding the Lebanese infrastructure in their raids, were quick to change tactics, citing the Balkan operation as a legitimizing precedent. More recently the gangsters in the Kremlin have used the same justification for their terror-bombing of Chechnya.

But they wrote that in 1999, so we are obliged to add the attacks on civilian infrastructure that characterized the US Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as Qaddafi's war against Libya, Saudi Arabia's war against Yemen, and especially the current war in Syria to that list of modern diseases for which Wesley Clark's War was Patient Zero.

I deeply regret having to write any of this. It seems so ridiculous that so many should claim these very questionable comments from a war criminal with a history of fraud and deception, explain anything about our modern world.

Syria is the Paris Commune of the 21st Century!

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