New Twists in the DNC Hack Saga

By Hans Mahncke & Jeff Carlson

We have long argued that the likely false attribution of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) hacking incident represents the holy grail of the Russiagate narrative. Even eight years later, obtaining reliable information remains notoriously difficult. However, there may now be two significant breakthroughs to report.

As it stands, the official narrative surrounding the DNC hack is that at some time between April and June 2016, Russian government hackers infiltrated the computer network of the DNC and stole a significant number of emails, which were later released by WikiLeaks. 

The emails themselves were largely unremarkable and, contrary to common perceptions, were neither about Donald Trump nor Hillary Clinton. Instead, they primarily focused on how the DNC stifled Bernie Sanders' 2016 campaign for president. Unsurprisingly, many initially believed that the emails had been leaked by Sanders' supporters. However, this narrative did not align with the interests of the Clinton campaign, so the Russian angle was promoted instead, as forever memorialized in a June 14, 2016, Washington Post article: “Russian government hackers penetrated DNC, stole opposition research on Trump.”

The fact that the Washington Post published this story so early, just a few days after the alleged hacking attack was discovered, suggests that it was more about planting a narrative than ascertaining the facts. The Democratic Party's cybersecurity contractors, CrowdStrike, a company that has recently again made headlines for all the wrong reasons, quickly stepped in to promote the Russian hacking narrative. Robert Mueller's special counsel team later not only adopted this ostensibly false narrative but also charged several Russians for hacking the DNC, knowing they would never appear before a U.S. court; in other words, Mueller would never have to present any evidence. When Concord Management, one of the Russian entities charged by Mueller, unexpectedly appeared in a Washington, D.C., courtroom to defend against charges of meddling in the 2016 election, the Department of Justice decided to drop the case.

All these facts illustrates how flimsy the entire DNC hack narrative is. Yet, that narrative remains deeply entrenched. While even the media now admits that the Steele dossier was fabricated, they consistently fall back on the claim that Russia hacked the DNC and, therefore, interfered in the 2016 election to help elect Trump.

We have challenged this narrative from day one for several reasons. First, there has never been any evidence presented that definitively points to Russia. Second, the Washington Post's involvement so early in seeding the narrative suggests that the narrative is likely false. Third, CrowdStrike's immediate conclusion that it was Russia is equally suspect, especially considering that when CrowdStrike was brought before Congress to repeat their claims under oath, they could not. Instead, when under oath, CrowdStrike stated that they only suspected it was Russia but did not possess any hard evidence. Fourth, the FBI and Mueller's team vigorously promoted the narrative of Russian hacking, despite never having physical possession of the DNC's server. They relied on CrowdStrike's unsound assertions and their own preferred narrative.  

Over the years, there has been very little information available to solve the puzzle of who hacked the DNC, or whether it was hacked at all. The only thing that has been clear from the start, for the reasons just named, is that it probably wasn’t Russia. However, there are now at least two new strands of information that may help in discovering an answer. First, there is the involvement of a group of Hillary Clinton operatives in the hack attribution process. While this does not, in itself, prove that Russia did not conduct the hacking, nor does it identify who did, the mere fact that we have been misled for the past eight years about the involvement of Clinton operatives in the hack attribution raises alarm bells

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The fact that we know about this at all is thanks to an online researcher who goes by the name of “Undead FOIA.” After Special Counsel John Durham revealed in 2021 that a group of researchers from Georgia Tech had been involved in creating the false theory that Donald Trump was communicating with Vladimir Putin through the servers of Russia’s Alfa Bank—“Undead FOIA” filed Freedom of Information (FOIA) requests with Georgia Tech. This resulted in a years-long legal battle, which was finally resolved last week when the Supreme Court of Georgia found that the researchers involved were indeed subject to FOIA laws. The university had claimed that data held by its contractors, such as those involved in the Alfa Bank scheme, was not subject to FOIA laws. The trial court and the appellate court agreed, but the Supreme Court has now determined that, under the language of the statute referring to “custodians” of the data, contractors are indeed subject to FOIA laws.

As a side note, the ruling has significant implications for FOIA laws in general, as there are countless circumstances—well beyond the realm of Russiagate—where contractors possess data that, until now, was not available for public access. In a major win for transparency and accountability, this has now changed.

We do not yet know how the Georgia Tech aspect of the story will conclude, as we are currently awaiting whether the contractors will turn over any information. Additionally, we do not know whether any information they may provide will aid us in attributing the hack. There are various tidbits of information that show that the Georgia Tech researchers not only moonlighted for the Clinton campaign but worked on the hack attribution. For instance, in response to an inquiry from Senator Chuck Grassley, the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency admitted in 2022 that the same cyber researchers involved in Clinton’s Alfa Bank hoax had authored a DNC hack attribution report in August 2016. Furthermore, other emails involving Heather Alpino, a member of Mueller’s team, strongly suggest that these cyber researchers were later engaged in hack attribution in tandem with the Mueller team.

Now, it may turn out that these researchers do not possess any new information on the hack. However, the fact that the same team of Clinton contractors involved in the Alfa Bank scheme was also involved in the government’s DNC hack attribution should raise alarm bells, especially considering that this fact was concealed from the public for so many years.

The second prong of new information stems from an effort by independent IT specialists who have been working on this case in their spare time and sharing their findings on Twitter. These experts recently discovered that, contrary to the claims made by Mueller’s team, it may not have been the DNC's in-house Microsoft server that was hacked. In this context, it is important to recall that neither the FBI nor Mueller’s team ever had access to the allegedly hacked server.

Through some clever analysis, an internet researcher going by the name of “The Forensicator” had previously noticed that the DNC’s emails had been filtered by a company called AppRiver, i.e. not Microsoft. In and of itself, that does not tell us much, but through additional analysis, another internet researcher, using the pseudonym “Tralfamadorenik,” was able to deduce that the DNC likely had a backup email system hosted by the same company, AppRiver. This opens up an intriguing possibility: Were the DNC emails taken from a server managed by a completely different company of which we hadn’t even heard yet? If that is the case, then any hack attribution would necessarily need to go back to square one. (Curiously, Twitter has made “Tralfamadorenik’s” thread on the matter unavailable. It is not known why this was done. The thread has since been archived on the Thread Reader App.)

While these efforts to uncover the truth behind the alleged DNC hack continue, the mere existence of these independent investigative initiatives, along with their progress, demonstrates once more that the immediate attribution of blame to Russia was, at best, completely unreliable and, more likely, entirely fraudulent.