The Russian Hack that Wasn't

-Michael Thau, "The Monstrous Lie Behind CrowdStrike"

There’s a simple explanation for the Democratic National Committee’s unwillingness to let outsiders have a peek at evidence its servers were infiltrated by the Russians in 2016: There isn’t any. The Russian hacking that’s caused so much division and turmoil at home and abroad never really happened. It was all a ruse.

Robert Mueller’s investigation into the 2016 presidential election was predicated largely on the claim Russian intelligence had hacked the Democratic National Committee’s servers ahead of the November election. Russia’s guilt is such an article of faith among our political class that a Republican-controlled Congress imposed sanctions on Russia and President Trump signed on, substantially worsening relations with an important and potentially dangerous nation.

Since those sanctions were imposed, Mueller’s team confirmed the Russian espionage they were meant to punish. Since its publication last year, the Washington establishment has treated the Mueller report almost as a sacred document.

Outside the Acela Corridor, however, one finds more skepticism.

A lot of ordinary folks just can’t stop wondering why the DNC wouldn’t let any federal investigators examine their servers. Only CrowdStrike, an independent contractor on the DNC’s payroll, was allowed to do so. CrowdStrike executive Robert Johnson appeared on “60 Minutes” to address concerns that his firm hadn’t been completely forthcoming with its findings. But he only succeeded in raising more questions by claiming that the “FBI got what it needed and what it wanted.”

Even if the self-proclaimed “hard-hitting” investigators at “60 Minutes” couldn’t be bothered to spend 30 minutes researching such an important story, Johnson himself had to know he wasn’t telling the trut

On no less than three occasions before President Trump fired him, FBI Director James Comey testified to Congress about the DNC’s strange unwillingness to let his agency examine their servers in a case they were simultaneously hyping as akin to “an act of war.” Comey testified that the DNC rejected the FBI’s “[m]ultiple requests at different levels” to collect forensic evidence.

A week before Comey testified in January 2017, the DNC had already tried palming off Johnson’s lie and were sternly contradicted the very next day. A senior FBI official told The Hill that his agency “repeatedly stressed to DNC officials the necessity of obtaining direct access to servers and data, only to be rebuffed until well after the initial compromise.” According to The Hill’s source, far from getting everything the bureau wanted, “the FBI [had] no choice but to rely upon” CrowdStrike.

Johnson also must know the FBI isn’t even the only federal agency who ran into a brick wall when they took the DNC’s hysterical spiel about Russian espionage seriously. Obama Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson told Congress he couldn’t even get the DNC to discuss the case with anyone from his agency, even though election security falls under its official purview. The homeland security chief was so disconcerted that he twice told Congress he “should have brought a sleeping bag and camped out in front of” the party’s headquarters.

But Congress never got the chance to ask anyone from CrowdStrike about the peculiar circumstances surrounding its “investigation.” For some strange reason, the executives representing the only entity to inspect the DNC servers refused to discuss the matter under oath.

The crack team of investigative journalists at “60 Minutes” also somehow failed to uncover that, just six months after accusing the Russians of hacking the DNC, CrowdStrike issued a report accusing the very same alleged Russian hackers of having penetrated into some Ukrainian artillery software that was so riddled with errors they were forced to retract it. Perhaps the “60 Minutes” team was too busy telling the rest of us how awesome they are to learn that other actors were known to have been in possession of the malware to which CrowdStrike claimed Russian intelligence had exclusive access since 2015.

Among other problems with the technical aspects of CrowdStrike’s story, the malware which the company claims was used to broadcast Ukrainian artillery positions to the Russians turned out not even to “use GPS nor does it ask for GPS location information.” Jeffrey Carr, the cybersecurity consultant who exposed CrowdStrike’s bogus accusations against the Russians, wryly noted, “[t]hat’s a surprising design flaw for custom-made malware whose alleged objective was to collect and transmit location data.”

“60 Minutes’” gaslighting only succeeded in confirming that the program’s self-proclaimed reputation as fierce and thorough investigators is a joke. And it underscored ordinary folks’ concerns about the DNC’s refusal to cooperate with federal officials.

Moreover, a bunch of not-so-ordinary folks who know a thing or two about computers think there’s a simple explanation for the DNC’s unwillingness to let outsiders have a peek at the evidence: There isn’t any. The Russian hacking that’s caused so much division and turmoil at home and abroad never really happened. It was all a ruse concocted by CrowdStrike.

One such skeptic is an anonymous journalist and computer aficionado who goes by the pseudonym “Adam Carter.” Carter has spent the last few years cataloging evidence, unearthed by himself and others, that CrowdStrike engaged in a disinformation campaign, inventing not just a fake Russian hack but also a fake hacker called “Guccifer 2.0.” Much, but by no means all, of Carter’s evidence is technical. And he’s unquestionably found an inconsistency in the Russia narrative that ought to raise doubts in even the most computer-illiterate congressman’s mind.

Julian Assange’s Warning

But first, why on earth would a private contractor hired by the DNC engage in such tactics? For motive, we need to go back to June 12, 2016, when Wikileaks founder Julian Assange made an announcement that was sure to strike panic in the hearts of Hillary Clinton and her closest advisers:

We have upcoming leaks in relation to Hillary Clinton . . . We have emails pending publication.

A little less than three months earlier, on March 19, hostile actors had gotten ahold of all the emails in campaign chairman John Podesta’s main Gmail account. You may have heard that Podesta’s emails were “hacked,” but they weren’t. There were no faraway cyber-nerds searching for some vulnerability in the DNC network. He fell for a common “spear phishing” scam. A fake email from Google arrived, saying he needed to change his password and providing a link. The link was also fake. Instead of changing his password, Podesta gave it away—along with all of his campaign emails.

Whoops!

The Clinton campaign learned of Podesta’s blunder almost immediately and must have feared that the emails Assange was threatening to release were his. Moreover, on that date, a lot of the revelations contained therein would have been very salient—and not in a good way.

Just six days before, with Clinton still 570 delegates short of the 2,382 needed to win the Democratic nomination, the Associated Press angered Bernie Sanders and his supporters by claiming that she’d already won. The New York Times, CNN, NBC News, USA Today, and The Washington Post all followed suit, declaring Sanders’ loss a fait accompli.

But it wasn’t.

The AP had arrived at its numbers by polling unpledged superdelegates, who couldn’t vote until the convention and were free to change their minds until then or even to deceive the AP.

Sanders supporters had been angry about the role superdelegates played in the nominating process for months. Sanders himself complained about it just one week before Assange’s announcement and a day before the media started writing his campaign’s obituary:

My problem is that the process today has allowed Secretary Clinton to get the support of over 400 superdelegates before any other Democratic candidate was in the race.

The next day’s headlines prematurely declaring Clinton’s victory brought Sanders’ supporters long-simmering anger to a boil. His spokesman blasted the corporate media’s “rush to judgment”:

Secretary Clinton does not have and will not have the requisite number of pledged delegates to secure the nomination. She will be dependent on superdelegates who do not vote until July 25 and who can change their minds between now and then.

For the rest of the week, the big election story was whether Sanders would exit the race gracefully and encourage his followers to forgive, forget, and rally round Hillary Clinton. But just 12 hours after Assange’s announcement, Sanders emerged from a meeting with his top advisors, refusing to concede and reiterating his determination not to let the media gaslight his candidacy into a lost cause:

[W]e are going to take our campaign to the convention with the full understanding that we’re very good in arithmetic and that we know who has received the most votes up until now.

The Immensity of Podesta’s Blunder

John Podesta’s blunder had the potential to destroy Hillary Clinton’s already precarious reputation with voters regardless of their feelings about Bernie Sanders. In some of the emails, Podesta had revealed that Clinton’s most senior advisors—including Podesta himself—denigrated her abilities and her ethics, commented on her poor health, made disparaging remarks about Catholics, Muslims, blacks, and Latinos, and complained that Clinton wanted “unaware and compliant” voters.

Many of Podesta’s emails also contradict claims made in defense of the private email server Clinton used as secretary of state. Others reveal that the FBI investigation into the matter was anything but unbiased. At a minimum, the emails prove Clinton’s campaign knew from the beginning that she was breaking the law.

It’s easy to forget how serious an issue Clinton’s unsecured server was when Assange issued his warning. James Comey’s surprise announcement exonerating her was still three weeks away, on July 5, 2016. A few weeks earlier, the State Department had sharply rebuked Clinton for violating department rules, generating unpleasant headlines such as, “Hillary Clinton’s email problems just got much worse.”

A June 1 Morning Consult poll found that about half of voters thought her private email server was “illegal, unethical and a major problem.” Even a quarter of Democrats agreed. There’s little question that Assange’s threat would have made the poll disturbingly salient to Clinton and her top advisers.

But, given Sanders’ supporters’ cresting anger on the very day Assange issued his warning and Clinton’s need for their enthusiastic support to prevail against Trump, her team would have been more concerned about emails revealing her disdain for the kind of voters who flocked to Sanders and some of their most beloved progressive policies.

How would Sanders’ passionate and ideological followers react upon learning, at the very height of their anger, that Clinton secretly opposed gay marriage and supported fracking? The Democratic nomination was almost within her grasp and those revelations alone might have made it impossible for Sanders to graciously concede and put the weight of his campaign behind hers.

All the more so when his followers discovered that she and other top campaign officials routinely mocked both Sanders and them. Making matters worse, if Assange released Podesta’s emails they would also find out that CNN contributor Donna Brazile had given Clinton at least three questions in advance for her debates with Sanders. And an extraordinary number of emails confirm Sanders supporters’ long-standing complaints that the DNC and the mainstream media had been colluding with Clinton to torpedo his candidacy from its inception.

But perhaps the most troubling of Podesta’s emails would have been those containing passages from speeches Clinton gave to Goldman Sachs and other big-money outfits at $225,000 per appearance. In these speeches, Clinton downplayed Wall Street’s role in the 2008 recession. She even assured the wealthy bankers enriching her that they themselves ought to be the ones writing any legislation necessary to make sure such a crash didn’t reoccur.

Clinton’s Wall Street benefactors also heard her confess to being “obviously” out of touch with the struggles of middle-class voters. She further admitted to having distinct public and private positions on political issues. Finally, though it wouldn’t bother many of Sanders’s followers, moderate voters wouldn’t be happy to learn that Clinton assured her wealthy patrons that she secretly favors open borders.

Like the controversy over her private email server, Clinton weathered this storm so well that it’s hard to remember how much her unreleased speeches alarmed Sanders’ supporters, to whom she was little more than a corporate shill. Sanders himself had been mocking the extraordinary sums Clinton’s Wall Street patrons had paid to hear her speak and suggesting that they must have been getting more than just talk for their money in his own stump speeches for months:

If you’re going to give a speech for $225,000 it’s gotta be really, don’t you think an extraordinarily brilliant speech, I mean why else would they pay that kind of money? . . . Must be a speech written in Shakespearean prose. So I think, if it is such a fantastic speech, the secretary should make it available to all of us.

To make matters worse, three weeks before Assange’s announcement, Clinton released a mandatory financial statement that brought her Wall Street speeches to the forefront of campaign news, yielding disastrous headlines like, “How corporate America bought Hillary Clinton for $21M” and “The massive scale of the Clintons’ speech-making industry.”

A few days later, reporters even annoyed President Obama at a G7 summit in Japan by pestering him about whether she ought to release her speeches. On June 1, just 11 days before Assange’s warning, a Morning Consult poll had 64 percent of voters saying she needed to do so, including two-thirds of independents and even almost half of Democrats.

Many readers have likely forgotten the many serious political storms Hillary Clinton was navigating in the week preceding Assange’s June 12 announcement and how desperately she needed to placate Sanders’ increasingly angry supporters. If you weren’t too distracted by the Russian hacking narrative, however, you probably remember some of the above revelations from Podesta’s emails that would have made doing so impossible had Assange not given Clinton’s camp so much time to prepare.

By October 7, when Wikileaks finally began releasing Podesta’s emails, Democrat voters had been taught to tune them out by angrily reciting the mantras “Putin” and “Russia.” They were warned by CNN that it was illegal for folks who didn’t work for CNN or some other CNN-approved corporation to so much as look at the Podesta’s emails. Trump couldn’t push Wikileaks’ disclosures because doing so immediately rebounded back at him, raising worries he might be “Putin’s puppet,” rather than reflecting poorly on Clinton.

Clinton Uses the Russian-Hacking Narrative to Great Effect

Whether Adam Carter is right that the Russian DNC hack was a ruse designed to deflect the damage if it turned out Assange’s warning meant he had Podesta’s emails, there’s no question Clinton and her surrogates were instantly prepared to use it that way.

Within hours of WikiLeak’s October 7 release, Podesta himself made a transparent attempt on Twitter to tie the disastrous revelations caused by his own bone-headed blunder to a dastardly Russian scheme perpetrated on Trump’s behalf:

While I’m in pretty good company with Gen. Powell & Amb. Marshall, I’m not happy about being hacked by the Russians in their quest to throw the election to Donald Trump.

Clinton had avoided any situations in which she’d have to take questions as much as possible throughout the campaign. So she forestalled publicly addressing any of the disclosures in Podesta’s emails until her third debate with Trump, 12 days after they appeared.

She was asked about the secret preference for open borders she’d revealed in a speech to a group of Brazilian bankers and the $225,000 they paid for the privilege of hearing about it. After a few nonsensical words claiming that she’d meant open borders for electricity, not people, Clinton quickly shifted to her real defense:

But you are very clearly quoting from WikiLeaks. What is really important about WikiLeaks is that the Russian government has engaged in espionage against Americans. They have hacked American websites, American accounts of private people, of institutions. Then they have given that information to WikiLeaks for the purpose of putting it on the internet. This has come from the highest levels of the Russian government. Clearly from Putin himself in an effort, as 17 of our intelligence agencies have confirmed, to influence our election. So, I actually think the most important question of this evening, Chris, is finally, will Donald Trump admit and condemn that the Russians are doing this, and make it clear that he will not have the help of Putin in this election.

A more transparently rehearsed attempt to deflect the damaging revelations in Podesta’s emails by branding them with the words “Wikileaks,” “espionage against Americans,” “Putin,” and “Donald Trump” would be impossible.

So, by the time Assange released them on October 7, tainting the publication of Podesta’s emails as a Russian scheme perpetrated out of love for Donald Trump was demonstrably the Clinton campaign’s go-to strategy. But a Washington Post story about the DNC hack published just two days after Assange’s June 12 warning shows the strategy was prepared much earlier.

CrowdStrike’s Perplexing Announcement

The June 14 Washington Post article marks the first time the DNC went public about the alleged Russian hack. It includes the detail that the Russians stole a file of Trump opposition research; which, though no ordinary readers could have known it at the time, would turn up months later when Wikileaks released Podesta’s emails.

Indeed, this detail is also the article’s big takeaway, as it’s mentioned in both the lead sentence and even its headline: “Russian government hackers penetrated DNC, stole opposition research on Trump.”

The story extensively quotes CrowdStrike president Shawn Henry, who previously was in charge of FBI cyber operations. Henry just so happens to have been promoted to that position by none other than Robert Mueller when he ran the agency. CrowdStrike’s founder and Chief Technology Officer, Dmitri Alperovitch is also featured prominently. Though born in Russia, his family fled the country when he was fourteen and Alperovitch is now a senior member of the vehemently anti-Russian Atlantic Council.

All information for the Washington Post story was provided voluntarily by CrowdStrike and the DNC. According to Alperovitch, the DNC “decide[d] to go public…about their incident and give us permission to share our knowledge.”

So, why on June 14, 2016, had the DNC wanted everyone to know the embarrassing fact that the Russians had penetrated their servers and the content of one particular pilfered file?

Alperovitch says the DNC wanted to “help protect even those who do not happen to be [CrowdStrike] customers.” It’s hard to understand how telling the world Russia had stolen a file of Trump opposition research from the DNC servers did anything to help those not fortunate enough to be able to rely on CrowdStrike. But, even if sense could be made of the philanthropic motives Alperovitch ascribed to the DNC, they must have had more self-interested ones to, once again, publicly connect Hillary Clinton’s name to lost emails and unsecured servers while her already existing troubles concerning such matters were still a very live issue.

Clinton’s team must have suspected that Assange had Podesta’s emails and they certainly knew the file of Trump opposition research was among them. So announcing that the Russians had stolen it two days after Assange’s warning is, in hindsight, either an incredible coincidence or the first step in a strategy designed to taint the damaging information in Podesta’s emails with Russian perfidy.

But CrowdStrike and the DNC weren’t the only ones calling attention to that file of Trump opposition research in the days following Julian Assange’s fateful warning.

The Russian Spy Who Was Wasn’t

The day after CrowdStrike’s announcement, a new actor dramatically took the stage announcing himself as “Guccifer 2.0.” His name was supposed to pay tribute to a hacker who’d gone by the nom de guerre Guccifer, famous for having plagued Hillary Clinton.

Guccifer 2.0 expressed his intention to take up his imprisoned namesake’s mantle by boldly claiming to be the very hacker whose existence Alperovitch and Henry had just announced on the front page of yesterday’s Washington Post!

And, to prove it, he posted 230 pages of Trump opposition research on his newly minted blog and emailed copies to Gawker and The Smoking Gun.

If you hadn’t known it was all real, you might have thought all this sensational news coincidentally emerging on the heels of Assange’s warning was coming from a script.

We’re supposed to think that G2 (as he’s called for short) was a Russian spy passing documents he hacked from the DNC servers to Wikileaks. In fact, though hardly anyone is aware how crucial the allegation is, G2’s alleged role as WikiLeaks’ source is the only evidence we’ve ever seen that the DNC emails WikiLeaks published really did come from Russian intelligence.

But if G2 really is a Russian spy, Putin ought to be pitied rather than feared.

When he debuted claiming to be the hacker featured on the front page of the previous day’s Post, G2 made no attempt to deny he was a Russian spy. Anyone reading his first blog post also familiar with the Washington Post story was given no reason to doubt G2 was an agent of Russia as Alperovitch and Henry had claimed. Would a real Russian spy connect himself to a report outing him as a Russian spy without denying it?

Why on earth would he connect himself to such a report at all?

Would a real Russian spy trying to hide his nationality end the second sentence in his first blog post with “)))”, the symbol Russians use in place of our “lol.” G2 did.

Would a real Russian spy on a secret mission to sabotage Hillary Clinton reveal his purpose by naming himself after someone famous for having already done so? The story in the previous day’s Washington Post hadn’t given any indication whatsoever that Clinton was his target. Why was G2 so anxious that we know?

And, why would a Russian spy using WikiLeaks as a clandestine front announce that he’d sent the documents he’d stolen to WikiLeaks? G2 gave the whole game away in that very first blog post:

I’ve been in the DNC’s networks for almost a year . . . The main part of the papers, thousands of files and mails, I gave to Wikileaks. They will publish them soon.

Is it at all credible that a spy sent by Vladimir Putin on a secret mission to control the outcome of the U.S. presidential election would start a blog a day after his espionage had been reported in the Washington Post in order take credit for and inform the public of some crucial facts about his operation that hadn’t been exposed; like identifying both his target and his secret accomplice?

Shawn Henry, Dmitri Alperovitch, James Comey, James Clapper, and Robert Mueller are all asking you to believe that it is.

Mueller uses absurdly expurgated quotes from alleged communications between G2 and WikiLeaks to prove he was the source of their DNC emails. If Mueller’s insidious gaslighting hadn’t caused so much damage, his neglecting to mention that G2 announced he was WikiLeaks’ source in his very first blog post would be comical. Mueller is, of course, also silent about the other 11 occasions in his brief time in the public spotlight on which G2 made public statements explicitly connecting himself to WikiLeaks.

Mueller also wants you to believe that G2 immediately denied he was Russian—by no means Mueller’s only blatant lie.

G2 first denied being Russian only when explicitly questioned about his nationality in an interview six days after his debut. But by then it was too late. No one believed him because it had already emerged that there were “Russian fingerprints” all over the documents he’d released. Odd enough by itself, given the “superb operational tradecraft” attributed to him by Alperovitch and the fact that he was conducting one of history’s most significant clandestine operations.

Russian intelligence must run hundreds of cyber operations every year that go entirely undetected. Yet, when agents are sent directly by Vladimir Putin himself to control the outcome of the U.S presidential election, they announce their presence to the world and leave a half-dozen clues that identify them as Russian spies which are found before they even have time to deny it.

But it gets worse.

Putin Must Not be Sending His Best

The first evidence of Russian involvement was found within hours of G2’s June 15 debut. Someone at Gawker opened the metadata in the files he sent and, what do you know? Sitting there plain as day for anyone to see was the name of Soviet secret police founder Felix Dzerzhinsky!

Even though the name is hardly a household word in the United States, it was still impossible to miss its significance since it just so happened to be written in the Russian alphabet. All that was missing was a link to Wikipedia to save anyone the trouble of googling, “Феликс Эдмундович.”

The five files G2 sent out when he debuted all later turned up in Podesta’s emails—absent any Russian names in their metadata, of course. The metadata in the versions released by G2, however, shows that the Russian spymaster’s name appeared because their content was cut and pasted from somewhere else into a Russian template from Microsoft Word with “Феликс Эдмундович” set as the username.

Editing the documents couldn’t have served any legitimate purpose since the files G2 released were identical in content to the versions that later turned up in Podesta’s emails. Moreover, the needless cut-and-pasting, which also caused Russian error messages to appear in various places just in case no one bothered looking at the metadata, was done the very same day G2 released the files!

Is it at all credible that a Russian spy sent by Vladimir Putin on a secret mission to control the outcome of a U.S. presidential election would go to the trouble of editing documents he was sending to the press as a Word file with a famous Russian spymaster’s Russian name set as username, causing it to appear in the metadata? Would he cut and paste the documents’ content into a Russian template, causing Russian language error messages to pop up when the journalists to whom he was sending them tried reading the files? Is it credible that he’d do all that the same day he sent the documents out even though he didn’t alter their content at all and, hence, had no reason whatsoever to edit them?

Shawn Henry, Dmitri Alperovitch, James Clapper, James Comey, and Robert Mueller are all asking you to believe that it is.

In fact, they’re insisting that you do.

Even had G2 altered the content of the files, it’s preposterous to suppose that a Russian spy on the most serious mission imaginable would be so careless as to leave clues revealing his identity to a Gawker reporter within hours of his sending them to her. But, since the content of the documents wasn’t altered at all, the procedures which caused the “Russian fingerprints” to immediately appear could only have been designed to do exactly that.

If we weren’t so desperate for sensational news, a Gawker reporter finding evidence that G2 was a Russian intelligence agent in the files he’d sent her mere hours after his debut by itself would have raised enormous red flags.

But, believe it or not, that’s not all Henry, Alperovitch, Comey, Mueller, and their intelligence community cohorts expect you to swallow.

G2 also chose to use a company based in Russia to cloak his IP address. Even then, there are plenty of email providers that would conceal the Russian IP address. Yet G2, who Hillary Clinton suggested “clearly” took orders directly from KGB prodigy Vladimir Putin, somehow chose one that didn’t.

If G2 had simply done nothing, there would have been nothing connecting Wikileaks to Russian intelligence and no one would have been the wiser. Instead of doing nothing, he went out of his way to create the only evidence we’ve seen that any of the emails Assange released in the run-up to the 2016 election came from Russian intelligence.

Yet, somehow, we’re supposed to believe he was sent by Putin on a mission to sabotage the Clinton campaign. Apart from G2’s self-undermining announcement that Clinton was his target, neither the Trump opposition file nor any other file he ever released contained anything damaging to her.

So, on top of all the other completely preposterous nonsense, a Russian spy intent on getting Trump elected released 230 pages of damaging information on Trump but nothing negative about Hillary Clinton.

Viewed in quick and haphazard slices, G2’s debut may look like a collaboration between Putin and Assange. But Russian spies trying to hide their identity don’t openly confess to crimes the Washington Post attributed to Russian spies the day before.

Nor do they use Russian emoticons.

Nor do they publicly announce their mission and name their accomplices.

Nor do they send documents to reporters containing clues that they are Russian spies which are discovered within hours.

And they most certainly don’t go out of their way to plant such clues.

And when Russian spies release 230 pages of negative information about Trump, you can bet that it’s Trump, and not his enemies, they are trying to harm.

When we widen our view, the only question becomes who Alperovitch, Henry, Mueller and their cohorts are grossly insulting more: Russia’s intelligence agencies or the American public’s intelligence.

Where Did Guccifer 2.0 Get the Trump File?

Hindsight together with Adam Carter and crew’s hard work shows that G2, rather than trying to harm Clinton, worked to manufacture a fake connection between Assange and Russian intelligence. This fake connection could later be used by Clinton as a shield to immediately deflect the avalanche of damaging information in Podesta’s emails on to Trump should Assange release them. The moment he did, the fake connection allowed her to claim he’d done so at Putin’s behest and, therefore, that Putin not only wanted Trump in the White House but had perpetrated dirty Russian espionage designed to put him there.

Putin had attacked not just her campaign but all of America on Trump’s behalf, Clinton scolded. That was the real story voters needed to focus on, not all the proof of her corruption and incompetence Julian Assange had tried to bring to their attention. In fact, it was every American’s patriotic duty to ignore they’d been given irrefutable evidence in her own words and those of her closest advisors that she was grossly unfit for office. Not ignoring it would make you complicit in a filthy Russian attack on America and likely a piece of vile Russian-loving scum yourself.

It was a message perfectly designed to appeal to the tolerant souls without a trace of bigotry in their loving hearts who make up the Democratic Party’s base.

The Washington Post headline announcing that the Russians had hacked a Trump opposition file from the DNC set the stage for its delivery. But the article made no mention of Assange or Wikileaks. Alperovitch and Henry could say they’d found Putin’s minions infesting the DNC servers. That was no problem since Comey was running the FBI and he could be counted on to say whatever words they decided to put in his mouth.

But nothing they could plausibly claim they’d discovered examining the DNC servers would be able to connect the little Russian devils they were going to say they found there to Assange.

So, considered alone, the Washington Post story they would use to get the ball rolling had zero potential to discredit anything he might release.

G2 forged the crucial link to Assange the next day by taking credit for the Russian hack Alperovitch and Henry had announced in the Washington Post and saying he’d turned over the spoils to Wikileaks. The fact that he released the Trump opposition research file mentioned in the Post’s headline confirmed that he really was the hacker CrowdStrike’s executive duo had credited with stealing files from the DNC and not some prankster merely pretending to be. If Assange did release Podesta’s emails, as the Clinton campaign surely must have feared he would, the fact that the Trump opposition file G2 released was among them could also be used to directly connect G2 to their theft if narrative reinforcement became necessary.

Absent G2 bringing Wikileaks into the picture, the Washington Post story would have informed voters of an embarrassing Russian DNC hack of some Trump opposition research, without any mitigating way to connect those Russians to Julian Assange and thereby taint anything he might publish.

So the information released to the Post serves no purpose and, indeed, could have only harmed the DNC, unless Alperovitch and Henry knew G2 would immediately enter the fray to shift attention away from the poor internet security that had allowed Russian spies to breach the DNC servers and towards speculation about their connection to Wikileaks.

But there’s another more conclusive reason to think that G2 had to be working with CrowdStrike and Hillary Clinton.

Remember, on June 15, Guccifer 2.0 emailed the Trump opposition file along with four other documents to Gawker and The Smoking Gun and posted them on his blog. But, apart from the Russian fingerprints he planted, every one of those files was found among Podesta’s emails when Assange released them four months later.

So, how did G2 get ahold of five files from John Podesta’s Gmail account? That’s what Adam Carter wants everyone to start asking.

Given how hard G2 worked to discredit Wikileaks, it’s impossible he got the files from them.

Since G2 manifestly isn’t the implacable foe of Hillary Clinton he pretended to be, it’s unlikely that he hacked the DNC servers as claimed. Indeed, since none of those first five files G2 released appeared in the DNC emails later published by WikiLeaks, we’ve no reason to suppose they were even on the DNC servers to be hacked.

We know they were attached to emails in Podesta’s Gmail account; which would mean they were on Google’s servers. None of them were sent to him from a DNC email address, nor did he send any of them to one, nor were they copied to any. So we have no reason to think they were on the DNC servers at all. Moreover, Carter and other experts say the methods G2 claims he used to hack the DNC make no technical sense and couldn’t have worked anyway.

Even putting aside that CrowdStrike’s announcement that the DNC servers had been hacked makes no sense unless they knew G2 would emerge to bring WikiLeaks into the picture and the question of how G2 got ahold of files the Clinton campaign knew would appear as attachments to Podesta’s emails when they were released, it’s grossly implausible that G2’s operation wasn’t coordinated with CrowdStrike. The effort G2 made to make it look like Assange had gotten anything he might publish damaging to Clinton from Russian intelligence would be bizarre if he were just some random stranger who decided to step in and help out Clinton in her time of need.

Moreover, even if that very unlikely hypothesis somehow turned out to be true, Alperovitch, Henry, Mueller, Clapper, Comey, and a host of others would still be guilty of perpetuating G2’s hoax as a means to falsely substantiate that the DNC had been hacked by Russia and the spoils passed to Assange.

And the fact that they used a hoax to substantiate the Russian DNC hack and Assange’s DNC emails having been passed to him by Russia, indicates that both of those claims must also be hoaxes. Of course, it would be an incredible coincidence if Alperovitch and Henry perpetrated a hoax and G2 came along and perpetrated a different hoax which just so happened to be exactly what the CrowdStrike executives needed to make theirs successful.

But the fact that G2 somehow got ahold of files from John Podesta’s Gmail account seems inexplicable, given everything else we now know, unless someone very high up in the Clinton campaign gave them to him because that person knew those files were stolen with John Podesta’s emails and would be released along with them. G2’s having released them together with all the clues he’d planted indicating he was with Russian intelligence would provide a means to reinforce the idea that Podesta’s emails had been stolen by Russia should it become necessary.

Given everything we know, G2 couldn’t have been in possession of files the Clinton campaign knew would turn up in John Podesta’s stolen emails unless he was part of a CrowdStrike disinformation campaign designed to protect Hillary Clinton from the consequences of Podesta’s blunder.

But even if G2 just happened to come along and perpetrate a hoax that perfectly met Hillary Clinton’s needs, Alperovitch, Henry, Mueller and the rest would have still used that hoax to deceive Americans into believing that Julian Assange is a Russian puppet and Trump owes his 2016 victory to Russian espionage.

The absurdity of anyone claiming that Guccifer 2.0 was a Russian spy and the way in which the narrative that the WikiLeaks releases were part of a Russian plot to help Trump, means that everyone who promoted the story was pushing a monstrous lie.

It also means that Robert Mueller’s two-year, $32 million investigation, the sanctions Congress placed on Russia, and all the unbelievably nasty political strife Americans have suffered since Trump was elected were all predicated on the very same monstrous lie.

Let’s hope our political class notices and the culprits are finally punished.

The monstrous lie has reigned for far too long.

Michael Thau is a contributor to American Greatness. He's currently working on a book about the fake Russian hack of the DNC. He also blogs...