[In response to Noel Rooney's "The Conspirasphere" column, Fortean Times, no. 397, October 2020, p. 17.]
Unpublished letter
Noel Rooney ("The Conspirasphere", FT397p17) writes that "An
investigation into the hacking of a DNC email server, the alleged
incident that kicked off the Russiagate juggernaut, concluded that
there was no evidence of the Russians having hacked the system; in
fact, there was no evidence that anyone had done so." This is an
inaccurate statement, likely based on CrowdStrike President Shawn
Henry's statement before the U.S. House Intelligence Committee that
"We didn't have a sensor in place that saw data leave. We said that
the data left based on the circumstantial evidence. That was the
conclusion that we made." This statement has been misrepresented to
mean there was no evidence of compromise or data exfiltration. On the
contrary, CrowdStrike, which was hired to respond to intrusions at the
DNC, found ample evidence of intrusion activity, including
installations of X-Agent software, a remote access trojan (RAT) used
by the Russian GRU. The quoted statement doesn't say that there was no
evidence of intrusion, it says that CrowdStrike did not have sensors
in place in the network to see data actually being exfiltrated from
the network as it occurred. The indictments of individuals of the
Russian GRU that came out of the Mueller investigation confirm that
the Russians compromised and stole the data and subsequently used it
for information operations by leaking the data to the public through
the DC Leaks website which they set up, as well as via
WikiLeaks. CrowdStrike has a June 5, 2020 blog post explaining the
misunderstanding of Henry's testimony, and their previous reporting
documents the evidence of intrusion that they found:
https://www.crowdstrike.com/blog/bears-midst-intrusion-democratic-national-committee/
Jim Lippard
Phoenix, Arizona