Wikileaks emails an inside job to get back at Hillary, evidence
suggests
This article is Part 3 in
a series of three articles investigating the Seth Rich murder.
Part 1 developed the following: Hillary’s campaign, lax on
cybersecurity and working with the DNC to make sure Sanders did not have a
chance of winning invited multiple attacks from both hackers on the outside and
from leakers on the inside.
Part 2 makes clear the multiple hacks and multiple leaks that
plagued Hillary’s 2016 presidential campaign came from multiple
sources.
This Part 3 makes the case
that Seth Rich was the likely source of both the WikiLeaks DNC emails published starting
on July 22, 2016, and of the “Podesta File” of emails that WikiLeaks began publishing on Oct.
7, 2016.
The breakthrough in this
series of articles is the attempt to apply intelligence analytical techniques
to sort out the various known cybersecurity attacks on the Democrats during the
2016 presidential campaign to determine the rogue agent responsible for each
separate known cybersecurity attack.
WASHINGTON, D.C. – The
purpose of this third and last article in the three-part series is to determine
if Seth Rich is a likely suspect for having leaked to WikiLeaks the DNC emails
that WikiLeaks emails published starting
on July 22, 2016, and of the “Podesta File” of emails that WikiLeaks began publishing on Oct.
7, 2016.
The first hurdle is to
determine if Seth Rich had a motive to harm Hillary Clinton’s presidential
campaign. The precipitating incident establishing Seth Rich’s motive
demands an investigation of the December 2015 incident in which four IT
specialists in Sanders’ campaign were proven to have breached the DNC voter
database to transfer Clinton campaign proprietary voter data to their Sanders’
campaign computers.
Seth Rich: Motive
On Wednesday, Dec. 16, 2015,
NGP VAN, the software system operated by the DNC that provided donor data (NGP
based in Washington) and voter data (VAN based in Somerville,
Massachusetts) released a
software modification that contained a bug that dropped a firewall, opening a
window of approximately 40 minutes, during which IT specialists in Bernie
Sanders’ campaign were allowed to view and copy voter data proprietary
from Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
A DNC email released
by WikiLeaks made clear Amy Dacey, Communications Director for the Clinton
Campaign, had concluded the data breach was serious.
“As a result of this
analysis, NGP VAN found that campaign staff on the Sanders campaign, including
the campaign’s national data director, had accessed proprietary information
about which voters were being targeted by the Clinton campaign – and in so
doing violated their agreements with the DNC,” Dacey found.
“These staffers [in the
Sanders campaign] then saved this information in their personal folders on the
system, and over the course of the next day, we learned that at least one
staffer appeared to have generated reports and exported them from the system,”
Dacey charged.
The New York Times in reporting on
the data breach quoted an unnamed Clinton staffer who compared the data breach
to “the opposing general getting your battle plans,” in that the DNC through
the VAN system provides all Democratic presidential campaigns with Democratic
voters’ names, phone numbers, and addresses, along with managing proprietary
data each Democratic campaign maintains in the VAN system protected by
firewalls from view by competing Democratic campaigns.
On Dec. 18, 2015, a Twitter
user “Iowa Starting Line” posted the
log-book data from NPG VAN documenting by name four Sanders campaign staffers,
including Sanders’ National Data Director Josh Uretsky, who accessed various
Clinton campaign data files that were saved by the Sanders campaign staffers
into their own computers, appearing to steal the data from the Clinton
campaign.
The log book entries show the
files the Sanders campaign took from Clinton’s proprietary VAN voter data was
potentially useful tactical information, with lifted files identified, for
instance, “Turnout 60+” from folder “Ranged Targets,” and “Turnout 40-60” and
“Not Sanders,” both also from folder “Ranged Targets.”
The log book entries showed
four Sanders IT specialists spent
two hours in the data without notifying NPG VAN of the firewall being
down, calling up information from about a dozen states, downloading data that
included a “turnout” variable showing on a scale of 1 to 100 how likely a
person is to vote, with the goal of establishing a high “Priority” score to
someone the campaign should make an effort to contact and persuade.
David Atkins, a campaign
consultant and county official in the California Democratic Party, told
Politfact.com the information would give the Sanders campaign a view
of how the Clinton campaign was targeting voters, as well as a view of polling
data indicating how well Clinton was doing in various states.
When the breach became known,
a huge controversy developed in which the DNC cut off Sanders from DNC proprietary
data in the NPG VAN system, forcing Sanders to
sue the DNC.
The matter was resolved
acrimoniously but quickly, in a midnight settlement on Friday, Dec. 18, 2015,
that allowed Sanders to regain access to VAN, both for the shared DNC
historical Democratic voters.
On Dec. 18, 2015, as the
settlement was being reached, Sanders fired
Uretsky, who maintains even today his intervention into the Clinton
campaign proprietary database was aimed only at doing his job, being diligent
to document the seriousness of the breach, so NPG VAN could make sure they
never again installed a patch that compromised a firewall.
Because of this incident,
there is evidence
to suggest Seth Rich, a Bernie supporter, felt Amy Dacey, his boss on
the voter mobilization campaign, used the incident to embarrass the Sanders
campaign.
Bernie supporters HATED
Hillary during the 2016 campaign:
Infowars.com has established
by interviews with various DNC and Sanders campaign staff that Seth Rich felt
Dacey, a staunch Clinton loyalist and spirited Sanders critic, had overreacted,
blaming Uretsky for purloined data instead of accepting responsibility that a
glitch in a NGP VAN patch had opened a firewall that allowed the Sanders
campaign to view the proprietary Clinton voter database.
In the DNC organizational chart, Seth
Rich reported to Technology Director Andrew Brown, the person Sanders
identified as having recommended he hire Uretsky as the national data director
for the Sanders campaign.
In the aftermath of the
incident, Sanders went so far as to charge the breach of the Clinton voter data
may have been a “false
flag” attack staged by the DNC and carried off by a “plant,” namely
Uretsky, who Sanders hired on the recommendation of Andrew Brown, the DNC’s
National Data Director, and Bryan Whitaker, the former COO of NGP VAN.
“I mean here we are being
attacked for the behavior of an individual [Uretsky], which we ultimately
fired,” Sanders said.
“We agree he acted improperly, but it’s just amazing to me that this …
individual that actually caused this trouble in our campaign was recommended by
these guys. It’s not as if we conjured this guy Josh from thin air.”
Sanders insisted his campaign
had not hacked the DNC’s NGP VAN system, but had taken advantage of a computer
glitch, yet the result was the Sanders campaign was being attacked by both the
DNC and by NGP VAN.
But as the incident resolved,
Sanders loyalists seethed that
NGP VAN provided the Clinton campaign audit of the data breach that the Clinton
team made sure was released to the media, while the Sanders’ team was kept in
the dark.
“It’s easy to speculate how
Seth Rich could have become disgruntled after witnessing the DNC attempt
to sabotage the Sanders campaign. As such, it’s not a stretch to imagine
that Rich – a guy with access to sensitive emails and technical
skills, did in fact communicate with WikiLeaks in order to expose and root out
the DNC’s misdeeds,” a poster identified as “ZeroPointNow” posted on
the ZeroHedge.com blog on May 19, 2017.
July 22, 2016: WikiLeaks
starts publishing DNC emails
Starting on Friday, July 22,
2016, WikiLeaks began
releasing over 2 publications 44,053 emails and 17,761 attachments
from seven key figures in the DNC, none of whom included then-DNC Chair Debbie
Wasserman Schultz.
By far, the largest number of
emails came from DNC Communications Director Luis Miranda (10,520 emails), who
had approximately three-times the emails released for the next highest on the
list, National Finance Director Jordon Kaplan (3,799 emails) and Finance Chief
of Staff Scott Corner (3,095 emails).
The emails covered the period
from January 2015 until May 2016, with the last email dated May 25, 2016.
The emails have in common
that one or more of the “From,” “To,” and or “CC” listings indicate the email
was sent by or to an addressee using the DNC email server, identified as @dnc.org.
While the DNC email server
could have been hacked, what is equally plausible is that someone on the inside
(perhaps an employee with their own @dnc.org email address) could have
discerned the usernames (possibly identical with the person’s email address)
and the password for each of the seven DNC officials included in the WikiLeaks
release.
If obtaining the DNC emails
was an “inside job,” downloading the emails would have been as simple as
accessing each official’s email account and downloading all emails listed
there.
Unless each DNC official made
sure emails on the DNC email server were erased (not simply that the emails
were erased as viewed within a downloading computer), the leaker could have
downloaded conceivably every email that user had written and/or received from
the first email in the system.
If the email theft was a leak
(as opposed to a hack from the outside), the DNC officials exposed may have
been less attentive to cybersecurity in their choice and use of usernames and
passwords, as well as less well trained on the hazards of failing to delete
emails on the server.
The New York Times, reporting on
Friday, July 22, 2016, commented the DNC emails released by WikiLeaks showed
top officials at the DNC “criticized and mocked Senator Bernie Sanders of
Vermont during the primary campaign, even though the organization publicly
insisted it was neutral in the race.”
The New York Times noted that
in an email dated May 21, Mark Paustenbach, a committee communications
official, “wrote to a colleague about the possibility of urging reporters to
write that Mr. Sanders’s campaign was ‘a mess’ after a glitch on the
committee’s servers gave it access to Clinton voter data.”
“Wondering if there’s a good
Bernie narrative for a story, which is that Bernie never ever had his act
together, that his campaign was a mess,” Mr. Paustenbach wrote to Luis Miranda,
the communications director for the committee.
The WikiLeaks emails,
released the Friday before the Monday, July 25, 2016, start of the Democratic
National Convention had the immediate impact of forcing DNC Chair Debbie
Wasserman Schultz to
resign under fire on Sunday, July 24 – a move that threw the national
nominating convention into disarray.
Recall that in June 2016, the
DNC had acknowledged its computer network had been breached, a conclusion that
led the DNC to
hire cybersecurity expert CrowdStrike that investigated and reported
the Russian government had had used two separate hacker groups, identified as “Cozy
Bear” and “Fancy Bear,” to hack the DNC computer.
As reported in the second
article on this series, the CrowdStrike report appears to have been the basis
the DNC and U.S. intelligence used to conclude incorrectly that Guccifer 2.0
was responsible for providing the DNC emails WikiLeaks started making public on
July 22, 2016, despite the fact there is no evidence Guccifer 2.0 ever hacked
into any Democratic email server.
Recall, Guccifer 2.0 only
ever published hacked internal documents from the DNC and the DCCC, as well as
donor data apparently hacked from the NGP database.
Still, on July 22, 2016, DNC
officials in interviews with
the Washington Post blamed the WikiLeaks publication of DNC emails on Guccifer
2.0, citing the CrowdStrike investigation as proof.
Oct. 7, 2016: WikiLeaks
begins publishing Podesta emails
WikiLeaks began
publishing the Podesta emails on Oct. 7, 2016, less than one
hour after the Washington Post published the lewd Access Hollywood
video with Trump making lewd comments to Access Hollywood’s Billy
Bush.
WikiLeaks continued
publishing a total of 57,153
Podesta emails in a series of drops, with the final “Part 34”
published on Nov.
7, 2016, three days after Election Day.
The last date of a Podesta
email published by WikiLeaks was March 21, 2016, approximately two months
earlier than the last date of the DNC emails published by WikiLeaks in July.
Of the 57,153 Podesta emails,
48,862 contain “Podesta@” making it clear the key breach producing the emails
WikiLeaks began releasing Oct. 7, 2016, was one John Podesta’s email @gmail.com
– the email Podesta appeared to use almost exclusively, shunning the use of a
Clinton campaign email address.
That Podesta was lax about
cybersecurity is obvious from emails in the cache indicating Podesta lost his
cell phone in a taxicab, fell
victim to a phishing attack, and shared with an assistant his Apple ID and
password.
Given that Podesta
used john.podesta@gmail.com as
his Apple ID (username) and “Runner4567” as his password, it is likely Podesta
(given his apparent disregard for Internet security) may have used this
username and password for all, or most, of the Internet websites to which he
subscribed, as well as using the password for other transactions, maybe even
including credit card or ATM transactions.
Again, an insider familiar
with Podesta’s use of his @gmail.com account for virtually all his campaign
email correspondence would only need to know (or guess at) his password to gain
access to all undeleted Podesta emails that remained on the gmail.com email
server, possibly back to the very first Podesta sent or received.St
When WikiLeaks began
publishing the Podesta emails in October 2016, the Democrats reacted once again
to claim the Russians had used Guccifer 2.0 to hack Podesta’s emails.
“We are not going to confirm
the authenticity of stolen documents released by Julian Assange who has made no
secret of his desire to damage Hillary Clinton,” Clinton spokesman Glen
Caplin told
the press on Oct. 7, 2016.
“Guccifer 2.0 has already
proven the warnings of top national security officials that documents can be
faked as part of a sophisticated Russian misinformation campaign,” Caplin
continued.
That the last date of the
Podesta emails precedes the last date of the DNC emails released by WikiLeaks
suggests an internal operative seeking to leak emails damaging to Hillary may
have accessed Podesta’s @gmail.com account first.
That the last date of the DNC
emails was May 25, 2016, suggests events may have influenced the internal
operative that the emails should be released right then.
What happened in May 2016?
The Democratic Party Indiana
Primary took place on May 3, 2016.
Sanders achieved a 5 point
victory upset over Clinton in Indiana, winning 52.46 percent to 47.54 percent,
but the “superdelegates” swung
to Clinton, giving Clinton a total of 46 delegates from the Indiana primary,
compared to 44 to Sanders.
What in May was clear was
that the Democrats had stacked the deck for a DNC-preferred candidate to win
the nomination, with the clear majority of the 712 superdelegates (about 15
percent of all delegates) would vote for Clinton, such that Sanders could earn
a majority of the 1,670 delegates up for grabs in popular voting during the
primaries, and still lose the nomination.
By June 7, 2016, in the early
hours of counting the ballots in the Democratic Party California primary, the
Associated Press declared that
Hillary Clinton had won enough delegates and superdelegates to win the
Democratic Party nomination for president.
The likely scenario is that a
leaker internal to the Democratic Party released to WikiLeaks both the DNC
emails and the Podesta emails at one time in late May or early June 2016.
The final determination of
how to sort out the emails and when to publish them remained a decision
WikiLeaks would reserve exclusively to itself.
Even President Obama in
his final
news conference appeared to concede the DNC emails were leaked to
WikiLeaks, not the result of a hacking attack from the outside.
“The conclusions of the
intelligence community with respect to the Russian hacking were not conclusive
as to whether WikiLeaks was witting or not in being the conduit through which
we heard about the DNC e-mails that were leaked,” President Obama said.
“I don’t pay a lot of
attention to Mr. Assange’s tweets, so that wasn’t a consideration in this
instance,” he continued. “And I’d refer you to the Justice Department for any
criminal investigations, indictments, extradition issues that may come up with
him.”
The strongest evidence
Seth Rich leaked the WikiLeaks emails
The strongest indication that
Seth Rich leaked the DNC and Podesta emails to WikiLeaks comes from Julian
Assange himself.
In an interview broadcast on Dutch
television on Aug. 9, 2016, the host Eelco van Rosenthal asked Assange, “The
stuff that your sitting on, is an October Surprise in there?”
Assange insisted, “WikiLeaks
never sits on material,” even though Assange had previously said WikiLeaks yet
ha more material related to the Hillary Clinton campaign that had yet to be
published.
Then, on his own
initiative, without
being specifically asked, Assange began talking about Seth Rich.
“Whistleblowers go to
significant efforts to get us material, and often very significant risks,”
Assange volunteered.
“There’s a 27-year-old
that works for the DNC who was shot in the back, murdered, just a few weeks
ago, for unknown reasons, as he was walking down the streets in Washington,”
Assange continued.
Van Rosenthal objected that
the murder of DNC staffer Seth Rich was a robbery.
“No, there’s no findings,”
Assange answered.
“What are you suggesting?”
Van Rosenthal interjected.
“I’m suggesting that our
sources take risks – and they become concerned to see things occurring like
that,” Assange responded.
There was no reason for
Assange to have spontaneously brought up Seth Rich in the context of the risks
his leakers take if Rich were not the leaker involved in the DNC and Podesta
emails that WikiLeaks published.
On Aug. 9, 2016,
WikiLeaks offered a
$20,000 reward “for information leading to the conviction for the murder of DNC
staffer Seth Rich.”
Again, why would WikiLeaks do
this if Seth Rich were not the leaker in question?
Repeatedly, Assange has
denied that the Russians “or any state party” supplied WikiLeaks with
the DNC and/or Podesta emails.
The attempt to distinguish is
disingenuous, suggesting the Russians may have been responsible for the hack,
turning the information to a third party, not the Russians or a state actor,
who handed WikiLeaks the emails and thus became “the source.”
Speaking plainly, Assange – a
political operative with an established reputation of telling the truth – has
denied the Russians or any state actor was involved, knowing he was leaving the
clear impression the DNC and Podesta emails traced back to a leaker internal to
the DNC – the same conclusion President Obama suggested in his final press
conference.
Why the cover-up in the
Seth Rich murder investigation?
The next most convincing
reason to believe Seth Rich is the leaker revolves around the way the
Washington Police Department and the Democratic Party have perpetrated a
cover-up of key evidence of his murder investigation.
About all the Washington
Police Department have released with certainty is that Sean Rich was shot to
death in the Bloomingdale section of Washington, D.C., in the early hours of
Sunday, July 10, 2016.
To date, the Washington
Police have refused to release any investigative report or autopsy that
precisely described the wound.
Despite intensive research
efforts by Internet sleuths, we do not know for certain which hospital in D.C.
the Washington Police took Rich for treatment after the shooting.
Was there any identification
of the shooting suspects, or results from a subsequent police investigation?
There appears to be some 2 ½
hours unaccounted
time between 1:15 a.m. when Rich left a local bar and 4:25 a.m. when
he was shot near his home, even considering the time Rich would have required
to walk home.
Sorting through the thin
evidence is unlikely to produce a conclusive break-through in the case, as long
as the Washington Police Department withhold all investigative reports and the
Democratic National Party continue to dismiss the Seth Rich murder as a
“conspiracy theory,” so as to deflect any threat to their determination to
advance the “Russian collusion” meme that itself lacks evidence.
These articles have argued
a tighter, forensic case, premised on examining the content and context of each
known cyberattack against the Clinton campaign so as to determine the most
likely means required to pull the cyberattack off successfully and, from there,
to determine the most likely perpetrator.
The conclusion of these
three articles is that the DNC and Podesta emails published by WikiLeaks during
the 2016 presidential campaign were stolen and leaked by an operative within
the Democratic Party, with the likely perpetrator of the leak being Seth Rich.