“There was no hack of the Democratic National Committee’s system on July 5 last year — not by the Russians, not by anyone else. Hard science now demonstrates it was a leak — a download executed locally with a memory key or a similarly portable data-storage device. In short, it was an inside job by someone with access to the DNC’s system. This casts serious doubt on the initial “hack,” as alleged, that led to the very consequential publication of a large store of documents on WikiLeaks last summer.”

So says an extremely well written and carefully put together column by The Nation’s Patrick Lawrence about research that has been done by the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. The article contains a lucid breakdown of the publicly available information about what VIPS has uncovered, as well as some material based on interviews with members of the team, and, perhaps most importantly, it is the closest thing to mainstream coverage that the VIPS memo has received thus far. If we push this article into the mainstream spotlight as aggressively as we can, we stand a very good chance of forcing the intelligence community and the establishment media to answer the potentially explosive questions that it asks.

And make no mistake, the findings published by VIPS are huge. The respected and highly-trained intelligence veterans have discovered that it would have been physically impossible for would have been physically impossible for Guccifer 2.0’s NGP-VAN archive to have been downloaded by hackers overseas in the time the metadata shows, and that the download speed was much more in line with an insider downloading the files to a thumb drive. If this is true, it means it was a leak from an insider as many have contended, not a hack at all. Even more damning, they’ve found evidence that the metadata for the Guccifer 2.0 files was deliberately “Russianified” with fake Russian hacking fingerprints. Russia was framed.

Now, it is technically possible that there is a perfectly good explanation for the information that VIPS and its researchers have uncovered, and that behind these stunning revelations are more revelations which lead right back to Boris and Natasha. If this is the case, the intelligence community needs to come forward and explain how, ideally through the heads of each agency involved, or at least an official and in-depth statement from Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats. As Lawrence writes:

“Under no circumstance can it be acceptable that the relevant authorities — the National Security Agency, the Justice Department (via the Federal Bureau of Investigation), and the Central Intelligence Agency — leave these new findings without reply. Not credibly, in any case. Forensic investigators, prominent among them people with decades’ experience at high levels in these very institutions, have put a body of evidence on a table previously left empty. Silence now, should it ensue, cannot be written down as an admission of duplicity, but it will come very close to one.”

They must respond, and we need to make lots of noise until they do. I’d like everyone reading this to start sharing Lawrence’s Nation article with the hashtag #HackingHoax every morning, and throughout the rest of the day too as willing. Like this:

Share it on Twitter, Facebook and whatever else you kids are using these days, and bring everybody on board for this, because we’ll need everyone. Tell your Trumpster friends, tell your libertarian friends, tell your woke lefty friends, tell your independent critical thinker friends. Join online communities and let them know what we’re doing with the hashtag and the Nation article. If we all shove this thing as hard toward the mainstream as we can, the establishment will be forced to respond to it. We will then be able to fact-check their responses with independent experts like the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity and figure out if they’ve provided a valid explanation or if they’ve exposed even more plot holes in the Russiagate narrative. Hopefully if they do respond they’ll be able to come up with something better than the statement released by CrowdStrike, the highly suspect private company whose expert testimony formed the basis for the DNC hacking narrative. Per Patrick Lawrence:

“We continue to stand by our report,” CrowdStrike said, upon seeing the VIPS blueprint of the investigation. CrowdStrike argues that by July 5 all malware had been removed from the DNC’s computers. But the presence or absence of malware by that time is entirely immaterial, because the event of July 5 is proven to have been a leak and not a hack. Given that malware has nothing to do with leaks, CrowdStrike’s logic appears to be circular.

If that’s any indication of the excuses we’ll be seeing from the intelligence community, it won’t be long before we’re shining a big, bright light on this thing. By pressuring the US power establishment to respond we can force them to overextend themselves to regain control of the narrative, and as any good fighter knows, getting your opponent to overextend themselves is a great way to create an opening for a knockout blow.

The idea, of course, is to finally expose the truth about what these bastards have been hiding from us this whole time and reveal it to mainstream America. There are far too many plot holes in the Russia narrative now, and as Lawrence correctly notes in his column, “All sides agree that relations between the United States and Russia are now as fragile as they were during some of the Cold War’s worst moments. To suggest that military conflict between two nuclear powers inches ever closer can no longer be dismissed as hyperbole.” This is simply too important to be trusted to the secretive shadows of the intelligence community any longer.

From the Gulf of Tonkin incident to the false Nayirah testimony to the amazing network of lies spun about Saddam Hussein to the “humanitarian” intervention in Libya to the unconscionable Bana Alabed psy-op in Syria, the US government has an extensive history of lying to its people to promote military escalations with other countries. Now, they appear to be doing this with a nuclear superpower, and our entire species has got to fight back. We can help achieve this by dragging so much attention to the gaping plot holes in the Russia story with this new Nation article that we can no longer be ignored.

The entire Russia narrative has been premised upon the assertion that Russia hacked the DNC emails and gave them to WikiLeaks, and to this day it remains the only item of apparent substance on the list. The John Podesta emails were not obtained by a hacking infiltration, and there’s substantial reason to believe they may not have even been obtained via phishing, either.

There’s a common belief that Podesta was using the word “p@ssw0rd” as a password prior to WikiLeaks obtaining his emails, but that was just a temporary password given to him after he carelessly left his phone in a taxi in early 2015. An under-appreciated WikiLeaks document reveals that Podesta’s password was actually “Runner4567”, and from the context of the email appears to have been commonly known among his office assistants. He’s seen asking his assistant Eryn Sepp if she knows his password, and she tells it to him “in case Milia hasn’t gotten it to you let [sic],” referring to Podesta aide Milia Fisher. This remained his password for many months, and still wasn’t changed after WikiLeaks began publishing his emails, which was almost certainly how one of the naughty boys on 4chan was able to access Podesta’s Twitter account and make this tweet:

The Twitter hack was confirmed by the Clinton campaign, and Podesta hasn’t had any issues with that account since. That mischievous /pol/ anon was able to get in there because Podesta not only used this very weak, easy-to-remember password for months, but apparently used it for everything in addition to his Apple ID as well.

So we’re really meant to believe that this guy who couldn’t even keep track of who at his office knew his weak password, and who used that weak password for everything, needed to be hacked or phished by Russian operatives in order for those emails to make their way to WikiLeaks? In an environment like that, anyone who spent any time around his office could’ve gained access to those emails — read the drama about Podesta’s taxicab experience for a clear picture of how involved his assistants were in his passwords and technology access. Anyone with any insider access could have leaked Podesta’s emails to WikiLeaks, and WikiLeaks ally Craig Murray insists that this is exactly what happened. Podesta’s email security was as airtight as a sieve, so there doesn’t seem to be any valid reason to attribute their release through WikiLeaks specifically to Russia.

We’ve been told in an increasingly authoritative tone that there is simply no questioning the story that Russia hacked Democratic party emails and gave them to WikiLeaks, and that there are many reasons to believe that Trump colluded with them in doing so. This has been used to manufacture support for a new cold war with the only other nuclear superpower on the planet. The arrogant, cocky people navigating these escalations cannot possibly control all its many, many unpredictable moving parts, and there is every possibility that someone could end up deploying a nuke in all the confusion, chaos and tension. We barely survived the last cold war, and we did so only because of sheer, dumb luck. Let’s not tempt fate again. Let’s end this.

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