2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: GOP Rocked By Clinton Truth Bomb That Russia Is Helping Trump [View all]newthinking
(3,982 posts)And FAIR has a balanced report on this as well:
The actual culpability of Russia for those leaks, its worth noting, is still unproven. The only three parties that have audited the hack are contractors for the US government, and the DNCs initial story has since changed considerably. At first the DNC (and by extension their security firm CrowdStrike) said no financial, donor or personal information appears to have been accessed or taken, but this later turned out not to be true at all.
Six weeks since the hack was first revealed by the Washington Post (6/14/16), no one in the US government, including the FBI and White House (who have reportedly reviewed the situation in detail), have implicated or even suggested Russian involvement in the leakneither on the record nor anonymously. Thus far, all suggestions to this effect have taken place outside the organs of the United States government a common and deliberate conflation that even led to this correction in the Vox recap of the situation (7/23/16):
Thus far, the Obama administration has avoided any such claims. Indeed, if one reads carefully, so have the security firms in question. Buried in the followup report by the Washington Post (6/20/16) alleging confirmation of Russian involvement is the admission by the three firms (the experts Clintons camp refers to) that they cannot be sure WikiLeaks alleged source Guccifer 2.0 is Russian, let alone an agent of Putin:
The DNCs interest in painting this as a Russian plot also bears mentioning. Around the same time this was going down, Bloomberg (6/22/16) suggested the DNC itself was looking to play up the Russian espionage angle as a means of obfuscating what they knew would be embarrassing revelations:
A spokesman for Baker & McKenzie didnt respond to requests for comment. DNC spokesman Luis Miranda said the party worked only with CrowdStrike and the law firm Perkins Coie.
If the Democrats can show the hidden hand of Russian intelligence agencies, they believe that voter outrage will probably outweigh any embarrassing revelations, a person familiar with the partys thinking said.
http://fair.org/home/with-dnc-leaks-former-conspiracy-theory-is-now-true-and-no-big-deal/
SNOPES: Although the DNC has blamed Russia for a computer network security breach, little surrounding the hack has been confirmed or verified.
http://www.snopes.com/2016/06/17/guccifer-2-0-claims-responsibility-for-dnc-hack/