No Evidence Of Russia-Wikileaks Connection

A newly-released Joint Analysis Report about Russian hacking has plenty of goodies for cyber-geeks, but it doesn’t have what is desired by the anti-Trump Left. The report gives no evidence that Russian hackers gave any information obtained through hacking to Wikileaks.

Sure, Page #3 of the report says, “The U.S. Government assesses that information was leaked to the press and publicly disclosed.”

However, such a claim isn’t evidence of a link between the hackers and Wikileaks.

From The Hill: “Obama has asked the public to take the assessment of Russian interference largely on faith, suggesting that the American people already know everything they need to know to accept the conclusions of the CIA report. . . Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, which published the stolen emails, has denied that the Russian government gave them the files. Private security firms have provided more detailed forensic analysis linking two well-known Russian intelligence groups to the data breach at the DNC. Beyond that, the evidence of Russian interference is compelling, though circumstantial.”

Political partisans on both sides of this issue don’t doubt that Russian hackers gained access to the DNC through a phishing scheme – just as the hackers tried to hack the RNC the same way.

What is not proven is what the hackers did with the information that they gained.

The Obama Administration has not eliminated the possibility that two things happened at the same time: Russians hacked while disgruntled Democrats leaked.

Yes, the hacking by Russians is a problem for the USA. From CBS News: “While the public largely became aware of the cyber attacks during the Democratic National Convention, U.S. officials believe that for about a decade Russian intelligence services have been conducting cyber espionage on a wide range of targets in the country. Investigators allege that Russian-backed cyberattacks have stolen information from and disrupted U.S. government organizations, critical infrastructure, think tanks, universities, political organizations and corporations. U.S. investigators are going public with this analysis, in part because they suspect that Russian hacking units have likely hit targets they aren’t aware of. Officials say they have no reason to believe the cyberattacks will stop.”

However, if the Clinton data publicized by Wikileaks came from disgruntled Democrats – as Wikileaks officials claim – then the Democratic Party is blaming the wrong people for Clinton’s loss.

Blaming the wrong people is what CNN political commentator John Phillips describes in “Fake excuses for Hillary Clinton’s election loss”. He writes, “After a political party loses an election, top party strategists and donors usually demand that a proverbial “autopsy” be performed so that everybody knows what went wrong and they theoretically don’t repeat the same mistakes in future elections. But that may not happen this time around. Why? Top Democrats say it’s not their fault.”

Jonathan Tobin writes, “The point here is not so much their [Democrats’] understandable hard feelings about the election results. Rather, it is that they are still stuck in the denial stage of grief and can’t shake it off. Though they’ll pay lip service to the notion of serving the best interests of the country, there’s little doubt that they are far more interested in continuing the project to delegitimize Trump. That’s why so many of them continue to harp on the farcical notion that Vladimir Putin elected Trump or to hope some other Hail Mary play like parlaying disputes over the president-elect’s admittedly tangled and far-flung financial interests into an impeachment putsch even before he takes office will do the trick.”

Democrats might soothe their hurt feeling by claiming that Russians caused Clinton to lose, but what they are doing isn’t helping the Democratic Party to rebuild after its 2016 losses. Besides, they wouldn’t have to worry about unwanted exposure of their dirty laundry if they didn’t create dirty laundry to begin with.

The dirty laundry exposed by Wikileaks didn’t harm Clinton because it was allegedly false. It harmed her because it was actually true.

Now for a word from a member of the “green” party: