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Last night, attorneys for the Democratic National Committee and CrowdStrike formally objected to subpoenas from Ed Butowsky, refusing to provide any records about whether DNC emails were leaked internally or hacked by Russians. The FBI also missed a deadline yesterday for providing records about Seth Rich.

Surprise, surprise. Three years after the purported Russian attack on DNC servers, and nobody outside the DNC or its contractors has seen those servers. Why not?

Frankly, I expected the DNC and CrowdStrike to balk, and I’ll be filing motions to compel in the next few weeks.

You will recall that Roger Stone forced federal prosecutors to admit in late May that neither the FBI nor Special Counsel Robert Mueller had investigated the DNC servers that allegedly were hacked by Russians. Instead, Mueller and the FBI relied exclusively on a redacted report from CrowdStrike.

To my knowledge, the U.S. Department of Justice had never before handed off a computer crime investigation to a third-party contractor hired by the alleged victim. Instead, the FBI (or some other law enforcement agency) had always investigated those crimes. Obviously, the DNC doesn’t want any independent investigation of its claims that Russian hackers — as opposed to a DNC employee like Seth Rich — were responsible for transferring DNC emails to Wikileaks.

Here’s another subject to ponder. More than a year ago, the DNC filed a kamakaze lawsuit alleging that the Trump campaign and the Russian government had conspired to hack its servers, apparently in hopes that the lawsuit would keep the Russian collusion hoax alive through the 2018 elections. At the time, President Trump welcomed the lawsuit, saying it would finally allow for an independent inspection of the DNC’s servers.

Why hasn’t that happened yet? The Trump campaign and some of the other defendants are represented by major law firms (as you would expect), and those firms have dutifully filed motions to dismiss, but it seems that none of those firms have demanded discovery, e.g., an opportunity to inspect the servers. Why not? And why didn’t some of the Congressional committee chairmen subpoena the servers when the House was under GOP control? Why isn’t Sen. Lindsey Graham doing it now?

I’ve long observed that Republican lawyers (and Republicans generally) tend to be very cautious and even a little passive, whereas their Democratic counterparts tend to be hyper-aggressive. Maybe some of the defendants in DNC v. Russian Federation need to light a fire under their lawyers. If somebody had demanded access to the DNC servers back in 2018, the Russian collusion hoax might have collapsed a lot earlier, and Nancy Pelosi might not be Speaker of the House.

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You can read the DNC’s and Crowdstrike’s objections to the Butowsky v. Folkenflik subpoenas by clicking here and here. You can read their objections to the Butowsky v. Gottlieb subpoenas by clicking here and here.