Marci Wheeler Analyzes the CIA Leak Story

In this detailed post, Marci Wheeler (Emptywheel blogger) teases apart (or as she calls it, "unpacks") the CIA leak stories from the Washington Post and New York Times. She prefaces her post with a caveat that when Trump takes the oval office, Putin's backing of Syria's Assad will take favor over the current US alliance with the Saudi's "covert war against Assad,"  noting that the CIA is currently aligned with the Saudis, hinting loudly that the CIA will not be a friend of Trump's.

Wheeler also notes that the story was leaked "within hours" of Obama announcing an investigation into possible Russian hacking of the election, when all along he has been signaling that there was no such thing.

Which is to say, the CIA and/or people in Congress (this story seems primarily to come from Democratic Senators) leaked this, apparently in response to President Obama’s not terribly urgent call to have all intelligence agencies weigh in on the subject of Russian influence, after weeks of Democrats pressuring him to release more information.

[...]

The difference between this story and other public assessments is that it seems to identify the people — who sound like people with ties to the Russian government but not necessarily part of it — who funneled documents from Russia’s GRU to Wikileaks.

[...]

This is the part that has always been missing in the past: how the documents got from GRU, which hacked the DNC and John Podesta, to Wikileaks, which released them. It appears that CIA now thinks they know the answer: some people one step removed from the Russian government, funneling the documents from GRU hackers (presumably) to Wikileaks to be leaked, with the intent of electing Trump.

  Emptywheel

(For what it's worth, Julian Assange has said that it wasn't Russia that provided the documents to Wikileaks.)

The Post story went on to say that the "CIA presentation to senators about Russia’s intentions fell short of a formal U.S. assessment produced by all 17 intelligence agencies. A senior U.S. official said there were minor disagreements among intelligence officials about the agency’s assessment, in part because some questions remain unanswered."

That’s a conflict.

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Remember: we went to war against Iraq, which turned out to have no WMD, in part because no one read the “minor disagreements” from a few agencies about some aluminum tubes. A number of Senators who didn’t read that footnote closely (and at least one that did) are involved in this story.

That "CIA presentation to senators" happened before Obama announced the intent to investigate, and may be what prompted that announcement, but as Marcy Wheeler says,

Whatever that review is intended to be, what happened as soon as Obama announced it is that the CIA and/or Democratic Senators started leaking their conclusion. That’s what this story is.

That's what this story is.

Wheeler updates her analysis to say that even more recent information from the Times (by reporters David Sanger and Scott Shane) says the RNC was also hacked by GRU, which, she says, would add weight to the claim that the hackers wanted Trump to win the election, because no RNC information was leaked.

That gets quite complex. First of all, we'd have to assume that it's actually true that the RNC was hacked.  And, even assuming we did believe that it was, we'd then have to assume that there was something in the information gleaned from the hack that was comparable to the emails in the DNC records - in other words, something juicy. Recall what RNC chair Reince Priebus told Andrea Mitchell when she asked why the DNC emails were hacked and the RNC's weren't?

"Well, maybe they did and we have a better system at the Republican Party," Priebus told Andrea Mitchell on Monday during an interview on MSNBC, when asked why hackers did not appear to target the RNC as they did the DNC. "Maybe our, maybe our folks are better at securing our email and our cloud and our data than the DNC. I don't know what the answer to that is, Andrea, but at this point, we haven't been hacked. And we don't expect to be. And we're monitoring it every day, but, I can assure if someone hacked my emails, they wouldn't find me calculating against particular candidates, and that's not something that I would do."

  Politico

Republicans are boring.

Back to Wheeler:

Also, Sanger and Shane say “largely documents” from Dems were leaked. That’s false. There were two streams of non-Wikileaks releases, Guccifer, which did leak all-Dem stuff, and DC Leaks, which leaked stuff that might be better qualified as Ukrainian related. The most publicized of documents from the latter were from Colin Powell, which didn’t help Trump at all.

Indeed. So, the RNC hack that wasn't - or wasn't leaked - doesn't hold all that much water as to whether or not the Russians did the hacking.

And just to be clear, the RNC still says it wasn't hacked.  So that point would be moot.

House Homeland Security Chairman Mike McCaul [(R-Texas)]said that he “misspoke” Wednesday when he told CNN that Russian hackers had penetrated the computer systems of the Republican National Committee.

  Politico

He "misspoke".  We certainly don't need that added to the mix.  What happened?  Did he get carried away trying to push back on the Putin loves Trump story and got his facts mixed up?

On CNN, McCaul had said that Russian hackers had attacked both political parties in an effort to “infuse chaos into our election system coming up in November.”

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In a statement released shortly after his TV appearance ended, McCaul (R-Texas) said it was "Republican political operatives," not the RNC, that had been hacked. The RNC also swiftly denied that its systems had been breached.

And who are these Republican political operatives? And what was hacked?  Are we talking Colin Powell's emails?

He said he did not know the extent of the damage done to RNC networks or what data the hackers were able to retrieve. McCaul also said the hacking of the RNC is currently being investigated by the FBI.

[...]

"It’s important to note, Wolf, that they have hacked not only hacked into the DNC but also into the RNC,” McCaul said in an appearance on CNN's "The Situation Report" with Wolf Blitzer. “So they are not discriminating one party against the others."

So, did he "misspeak" about the FBI investigating the RNC hacking, since the RNC says there wasn't any such thing?  Really, these guys are not being helpful, unless the actual goal is to muddy the waters, and frankly, I wouldn't be surprised.

"Yes, the Russians are doing this, but they're not trying to elect Trump."  Is that his point?  Why is this man even talking?

In reality, as Trump himself once said, anybody could be hacking any or all of these people and entities.  Maybe not anybody, but there's a wide host of possibilities, the FBI and the CIA among them.

This is all a big, hot mess. Meanwhile, perhaps we should be asking how we are currently being screwed while we're being distracted?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.