CIA Names Russians

The CIA has identified Russian officials who fed material hacked from the Democratic National Committee and party leaders to WikiLeaks at the direction of Russian President Vladimir Putin through third parties, according to a new U.S. intelligence report, senior U.S. officials said on Thursday.

  Reuters

So stop clamoring for evidence now.

The intelligence assessment was presented to President Barack Obama on Thursday and will be briefed to Trump on Friday.

That'll make for some fun tweets.

In some cases, one official said, the material followed what was called “a circuitous route” from the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency, to WikiLeaks in an apparent attempt to make the origins of the material harder to trace, a common practice used by all intelligence agencies, including U.S. ones.

These handoffs, the officials said, enabled WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to say the Russian government or state agencies were not the source of the material published on his website.

[...]

Not all 17 intelligence agencies participated in preparing the assessment. An unclassified version of the report is expected to be released on Friday morning, two officials said.

[...]

One such example, the officials said, was that intercepted messages and conversations among senior Russian officials in Putin’s inner circle indicated they were aware of the hacking campaign and celebrated Trump’s election as a victorious end to the campaign.

[...]

"People who knew what this was about were celebrating a victory over the United States,” said one official.

Well, that satisfies me. (Like all those Arabs that Trump saw celebrating the 9/11 attack.) No question they were involved.

Another example of inferential evidence, the officials said, was that as time passed and the early leaks attracted media attention that undermined or eclipsed Clinton’s campaign, the Russians increasingly focused their hacking “almost exclusively” on Democratic rather than Republican targets.

Inferential evidence. How's that work in court?

Has someone checked all the Republican possible targets?

There was also strong resemblance -- including the use of the same computer malware -- the Russians have used against targets in Europe and the marriage of traditional espionage tactics used by Soviet and Russian intelligence such as bribery, blackmail and internet vulnerabilities, which they said Putin has devoted increasing resources and attention to exploiting.

Jesus Fucking Christ. This is the same bullshit over and over and over. It's not any more factually conclusory than it was before.

Where are the names of these Russian officials who supposedly fed the material to Wikileaks? That must be classified information. Presumably, Trump will get it. We'll be watching for the tweets.

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