The Nation: DNC Hack Was ‘Inside Job,’ Not by Russia – Newsmax

The Democratic National Committee was not hacked by Russia nor by anyone else but instead was "an inside job by someone with access to the DNC's system," according to a report in The Nation.

"There was no hack of the Democratic National Committee's system on July 5 last year not by the Russians, not by anyone else," according to the Nation's report, referencing conclusions by a group of former NSA computer experts.

"Hard science now demonstrates it was a leak a download executed locally with a memory key or a similarly portable data-storage device.

"In short, it was an inside job by someone with access to the DNC's system," the experts concluded, since a remote hack of the committee's servers with the volume of data stolen would have been technologically impossible.

"This casts serious doubt on the initial 'hack,' as alleged, that led to the very consequential publication of a large store of documents on WikiLeaks last summer," the experts concluded.

In addition, the experts found forensic evidence proving the initial documents published by the hacker Guccifer 2.0 were forgeries intended to finger Moscow.

"Forensic investigations of documents made public two weeks prior to the July 5 leak by the person or entity known as Guccifer 2.0 show that they were fraudulent," the experts said.

"Before Guccifer posted them, they were adulterated by cutting and pasting them into a blank template that had Russian as its default language.

"Guccifer took responsibility on June 15 for an intrusion the DNC reported on June 14 and professed to be a WikiLeaks source claims essential to the official narrative implicating Russia in what was soon cast as an extensive hacking operation.

"To put the point simply," the experts concluded, "forensic science now devastates this narrative."

The Nation's report, published Wednesday, details the extensive findings by "qualified experts working independently of one another."

They began working on the DNC case "immediately after the July 2016 events," according to the report.

These experts are part of a group called the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), established in 2003 to investigate claims by the George W. Bush administration that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

The group now has 30 members, most of whom have "decades of experience in matters concerning Russian intelligence and the related technologies," the Nation reported.

In its findings, VIPS determined the NSA had the technical ability to find out exactly what happened because the agency's publicly known programs can capture all electronic data transfers.

"If NSA cannot produce such evidence and quickly this would probably mean it does not have any," the report concluded.

Besides addressing the technological issues surrounding the DNC breach and the Guccifer 2.0 drop, the VIPS report debunks a chronology of events surrounding the hack that led Democrats to finger WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange as a Moscow operative in the breach.

It includes the June 12 warning from Assange it would publish hacked documents on Democrat Hillary Clinton's campaign to Guccifer 2.0's second claim,July 5, that he had remotely breached the DNC servers.

"With his June 12 announcement," the Nation's observed, "Assange effectively put the DNC on notice that it had a little time, probably not much, to act preemptively against the imminent publication of damaging documents.

"Did the DNC quickly conjure Guccifer from thin air to create a cyber-saboteur whose fingers point to Russia?" the magazine asked.

"There is no evidence of this one way or the other, but emphatically it is legitimate to pose the question in the context of the VIPS chronology.

"WikiLeaks began publishing on July 22," the Nation reported.

"By that time, the case alleging Russian interference in the 2016 elections process was taking firm root.

"In short order," the magazine reported, "Assange would be written down as a 'Russian agent.'"

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The Nation: DNC Hack Was 'Inside Job,' Not by Russia - Newsmax