Malcolm Nance - The Plot to Hack America

Julian Assange said that WikiLeaks actually timed the release of the leak to coincide with the start of the convention. “That’s when we knew there would be maximum interest by readers, but also, we have a responsibility to,” Assange told CNN’s Anderson Cooper. “If we published after, you can just imagine how outraged the Democratic voting population would have been. It had to had to have been before.” 23The Assange friendly media joined in on the disinformation campaign against Clinton too. News articles abounded such as the Guardian’s headline “WikiLeaks Proves Primary Was Rigged: DNC Undermined Democracy.” 24

Around the same time, Assange, with the help of Russia Today also brought another prominent conspiracy theory to promenence when he suggested a DNC staffer who had been murdered in July might have been an informant killed for leaking information to WikiLeaks. “Whistleblowers often take very significant efforts to bring us material and often at very significant risks,” Assange said in an interview on a Dutch television program, discovered by BuzzFeed’s Andrew Kaczynski. “There’s a 27-year-old who works for the DNC and who was shot in the back, murdered, just a few weeks ago, for unknown reasons as he was walking down the streets in Washington.” 25When asked if he was suggesting Rich might be a WikiLeaks source, Assange replied that they do not comment on their sources. Then, WikiLeaks announced on Twitter it was offering a $20,000 reward “for information leading to conviction for the murder of DNC staffer Seth Rich.” Jeremy Stahl, a senior editor at Slate wrote, “Julian Assange and his WikiLeaks organization appear to be actively encouraging a conspiracy theory that a Democratic National Committee staffer was murdered for nefarious political purposes, perhaps by Hillary Clinton.” 26He noted however, that there was “zero evidence” to support these conspiracy theories, and that the fact checking website, Snopes had debunked many of them. 27

Despite Assange straying off the deep end of conspiracy theory, the most significant aspect of the WikiLeaks dump was a surprise that the CYBER BEARs had given the stir-crazy Assange and his gullible supporters: The Russians had infected the downloadable package of DNC emails with a wide variety of hacking malware. Tens of thousands of people who would download the emails from their WikiLeaks’ Global Intelligence Files would find their computers filled with malware and open their lives to exploitation by the CYBER BEARS. It was quickly noticed and warnings went out across the cyber security community to beware of malware embedded in emails from WikiLeaks. 28

Fomenting a crisis between the two competing candidates of the Democratic Party was the objective and it looked like it could succeed, if not for Donald Trump himself. During the convention the family of U.S. Army Captain Humayun Khan, a soldier killed in Iraq by a suicide bomber, came to the stage to give a speech. The Khans were Gold Star parents—parents who have lost their children in war. His father Khzir Khan gave a stirring patriotic speech attacking Trump’s knowledge of sacrifice and of the U.S. Constitution. Captain Khan’s mother, Ghazala stood next to her husband, devastated in grief under a 20-foot high photo of her son. She was struck speechless. Trump could not resist the opportunity to insult the family and in an instant the fury over the DNC leaks essentially ended in a plume of Trump-initiated radioactivity. 29

Though the protests did slowly calm down or were repressed and the persistent interruption of speakers ceased, tensions remained during the convention throughout the entire week. While the Republican Party spent the election season plagued by internal factions, the hacked emails were enough to make internal disputes within the Democratic Party the focus of political media. During President Obama’s address to the convention, a shout-out to Senator Sanders met with the televised image of a prickly-looking Sanders.

Ignoring the implications that Russia might be trying to influence the outcomes of this election by taking attention off of Trump and discrediting Clinton, Sanders supporters expressed outrage that the Democratic Party bigwigs had picked a candidate before primary voters had. The doubts about Clinton, amplified by release of the stolen emails, called into question her own campaign’s involvement in the election. Though the tensions waned, and the Democratic party did not suffer a split, a secondary desired effect was that many Sanders supporters now had a hard time supporting Clinton.

For the CYBER BEAR hackers this effect was well on track for what the operation had intended to produce, though a Democratic Party split would have been optimal.

To paraphrase J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter, the mischief had been managed, but the attack was not yet finished. The CYBER BEARs were going to systematically waltz their way through the remaining arms of the Democratic Party’s machine and steal, reveal, discredit, and attack anyone who stood against Donald Trump, and by extension, Russia.

The first two days of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia had been chaotic. The forces between Clinton and Sanders where engaged in tit-for-tat taunts and accusations of divisiveness. If the hacks were designed to damage the convention it was performing nominally. The entire pathway of Kompromat from surveillance, planning, and hacking, to establishing a legend in Guccifer 2.0 and gaining international credibility by channeling the release through WikiLeaks was happening within planning parameters and with only minor hitches. Even the international media was buying into the belief that it was absolutely unimportant how the information from the hacks was acquired, but that the content was critical. So long as the CYBER BEARs could infuse doubt as to their participation, there was little chance for repercussion. Julian Assange hinted at future releases though the Guccifer 2.0 legend and the ever-compliant WikiLeaks. There also remained perfect opportunites to prepare and introduce Black Propaganda—false documents that could be taken from a clean source and modified ever so slightly to make it malicious. Science and Technology Directorate of the FSB’s SVR could easily fabricate such documents if the mission required letters, money, deeds, titles, or any other falsely impugning evidence. Working with the SVR political warfare specialists, the cyber warriors of the FSB could also seamlessly change a word or two in an email without a trace and reintroduce it into a flood of legitimate documents. But then that plan was suddenly spoiled.

Speaking to the American press conference when asked about the subject of hacking Trump brought up the private Hillary Clinton emails deleted from her server. Trump blurted out, “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing… I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.” 30Almost immediately a media storm shook the campaign and people wondered aloud if Trump was actually in league with the Kremlin. It made some wonder if the comments made by Fox News’s Andrew Napolitano in May—stating that Russia was engaged in an inter-Kremlin argument about whether to release Clinton’s hacked emails—was tied to Trump’s call to release them. Did Team trump have advance knowledge of what the Kremlin was doing?

In another strange twist, Trump ally Roger Stone would later claim to be in direct communication with the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. “I actually have communicated with Assange,” Stone said. “I believe the next tranche of his documents pertain to the Clinton Foundation but there’s no telling what the October surprise may be.” 31While Stone has no official role in the Trump campaign, Roll Call writes that he “might have inadvertently linked the Donald Trump campaign with the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.” 32