Article puts Mueller report on Russian interference in doubt...

CrowdStrikeOut: Mueller’s Own Report Undercuts Its Core Russia-Meddling Claims

The report claims that the interference operation occurred "principally" on two fronts: Russian military intelligence officers hacked and leaked embarrassing Democratic Party documents, and a government-linked troll farm orchestrated a sophisticated and far-reaching social media campaign that denigrated Hillary Clinton and promoted Trump.

But a close examination of the report shows that none of those headline assertions are supported by the report’s evidence or other publicly available sources. They are further undercut by investigative shortcomings and the conflicts of interest of key players involved:

In all honesty this article doesn't so much bring up points that have otherwise been ignored, it just brings them up "again" apparently to see if anyone is willing to take a second look at something that conventional wisdom has just demanded is settled. That being said, the article does provide for many instances where the report itself doesn't correspond with what was written in the indictments, or what is being pushed as known fact. This next statement (for example) is taken from the Mueller report.

Between approximately May 25, 2016 and June 1, 2016, GRU officers accessed the DNC’s mail server from a GRU-controlled computer leased inside the United States. During these connections, Unit 26165 officers appear to have stolen thousands of emails and attachments, which were later released by WikiLeaks in July 2016. [Italics added for emphasis.]

So first all the Mueller report doesn't actually conclude or suggest any proof of the main allegation. Rather they actually use the term "appear" in their text. Secondly, for a report offering itself as background evidence used for an indictment of GRU, the idea that they have no actual knowledge of when the event took place is alarming. How can you prove who did something, if you cannot actually prove when it took place.

Imagine for a second a criminal prosecutor coming into a courtroom and telling a jury that sometime between May 25th and June 1st the defendant appeared to have stolen something. Oh, and please find him guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. The only reason the case would not be thrown out of court is because it never would have made it there in the first place.

In another strange twist of events, the Mueller indictment of GRU provides specific chain of events as to how the information was transferred from GRU to Wikileaks. However, the report contradicts the indictment.

But now the report acknowledges that Mueller has not actually established how WikiLeaks acquired the stolen information: "The Office cannot rule out that stolen documents were transferred to WikiLeaks through intermediaries who visited during the summer of 2016."

So basically the indictment (which would require Mueller to prove his allegations beyond a reasonable doubt in court) suggests specifically how the "stolen information" was transferred to Wikileaks, while the report it says suggests that they really do not know.

Moreover, apparently the timing of the Mueller findings is such that Julian Assange was talking about the release of this information two days before he would have first been contacted by GRU, and several days before he would have gotten any information from GRU.

Reading this at face value, it would appear that GRU was looking to offer a supplement to whatever it was that Wikileaks already had. Either way, it certainly appears from Mueller's own report that Wikileaks "already" had the stolen emails to release when first contacted by GRU. This bolsters the claim that the DNC server had been breached by others (and possibly by multiple parties). 

 Assange, curiously, has always suggested that the information he released did not come from GRU, or anyone associated with any Government. He had also agreed to provide the FBI with specific technical information that he said would prove that Russia was not his source. Both the FBI and Special Counsel refused to take him up on the offer. The fact that neither Mueller or Comey made any attempts to interview or collect information from Assange seems inexplicable.

Let's also not forget that neither the FBI, or the office of Special Counsel actually ever saw the servers that were hacked. Their reliance on much of this is on the DNC hired security company Crowdstrike, and their personal analysis of the situation. Keep in mind that there certainly was a political reason for the DNC to blame the Russians. Moreover, the FBI blind reliance on Crowdstrike might not pass muster:

CrowdStrike's accuracy is far from a given. Days after Comey’s testimony, CrowdStrike was forced to retract its claim that Russian software was used to hack Ukrainian military hardware. CrowdStrike's error is especially relevant because it had accused the GRU of using that same software in hacking the DNC.

What we can make of all of this, is that both Mueller and Comey seemed to start out with the idea that the hacking was done by the Russians and spent close to three years attempting to prove it. They relied heavily on second hand information that suggested this, refused to actually investigate any alternative possibilities, and even refused to engage with the one person (Assange) who probably had factual evidence one way or the other. It looks (based on what we can gather from the report itself) that both the FBI and Special Counsel refused to look at anything that might have muddied up their theory. In the end, the theory (while widely accepted) is littered with obvious logical problems.

At the end of the day, there is no "political" reason for anyone to step up and doubt this portion of the Mueller report. Democrats need people to believe it was the Russians, and Republicans have little more incentive to make a dispute on something that is so generally accepted in our conventional wisdom. It seems to just "make sense" that it was the Russians, but it also seems odd that our collective curiously here seems much less important than the nation's collective confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance.