NSA whistleblower William Binney spoke to RT about his recent meeting with CIA director Mike Pompeo, where they discussed accusations that Russia meddled in 2016 US presidential election by hacking the Democrats.

In an interview with RT America host Ed Schultz on Wednesday, Binney said tests have “clearly showed” the DNC was not hacked by Russia before the 2016 presidential election, but that the data was downloaded locally.

Binney met with CIA director Mike Pompeo on Wednesday to review analysis by the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), which challenged the notion that the Democratic National Committee (DNC) was hacked by Russia. In a letter to President Donald Trump, the group claims the “data was leaked (not hacked) by a person with physical access to DNC computers.”

After analyzing the data, VIPS concluded that the transfer simply does not support the claim the documents were hacked by Russian agents, as leaders of the US intelligence community claimed in a January report.

Binney also spoke with RT's Neil Harvey on Wednesday.

During the meeting, Binney shared test findings gleaned on the transfer rate of data, which he said “clearly showed that it was a local download and not an international hack.”

“It was very clear it was a local download, because of the speeds and all,” Binney said, explaining how his colleagues set up a test between a data center in New Jersey and another in the UK, and could not reproduce the download that took place on July 5, 2016.

The approximately 16GB of data was downloaded in two bursts, totaling 87 seconds, with a 12-minute pause between them.

“It had to be done locally,” Binney told RT America.

The data logs and the speed test were the only concrete evidence available for examination, he pointed out. “Everything else is speculation, and agenda- and emotionally-driven assertions.”

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If the intelligence community had some factual evidence proving Russian hacking, that would be another matter, the NSA whistleblower said, but “so far they’ve produced nothing.”

When asked who could have been behind the leak, Binney said it may have been an “inside job,” but he couldn’t attribute it to anybody in particular, because “we never knew who did the download, or whether or not it went anywhere else.”

President John F. Kennedy presented aerial surveillance photos of Soviet missiles in Cuba during the 1962 missile crisis, Binney pointed out. Reagan presented Japanese radio intercepts of orders to shoot down the Korean airliner in 1983. No such evidence has been offered for the hacking accusation, though many lawmakers have described it as an act of war.

“They need to put up or shut up,” said Binney. He said he does not buy into such claims without any factual evidence, “and that’s basically what their situation is. They have zero evidence.”

However, if there was an agency who would be able to detect if the DNC was hacked, it would be the NSA, Binney said.

“If anybody did anything across the net, NSA has so many taps on the fiber network inside the US and around the world and so many traceroute programs embedded by the hundreds around the network, they would know where these packets went,” Binney told RT America.

The NSA and FBI “know a lot more than they're telling the president,” Binney added.

The analysis from VIPS implies the intelligence community is not telling the Trump administration what really happened, Binney said. They don’t want the American people to hear the truth either, he added.

“They’re hiding this. They keep the population ignorant, uninformed so they can manipulate them any way they want,” Binney said. “This is the same thing the mainstream media is doing.”

Mainstream media outlets have branded the VIPS analysis as “disputed,” “fringe,” or a “conspiracy theory” (Washington Post, NBC, and CNN respectively) while failing to apply the same level of skepticism to the US intelligence community narrative.

On Wednesday, the NSA whistleblower was repeatedly called Binney a “conspiracy theorist” in a CNN article about the meeting.

“That’s basically showing the shallow weakness of their argument,” Binney said. “They produce no facts whatsoever and simply throw labels at people to do character assassination.”