Last week the respected left-liberal magazine The Nation published an explosive article that details in great depth the findings of a new report authored in large part by former U.S. intelligence officers which claims to present forensic evidence that the Democratic National Committee was not hacked by the Russians in July 2016. Instead, the report alleges, the DNC suffered an insider leak, conducted in the Eastern time zone of the United States by someone with physical access to a DNC computer.
This report also claims there is no apparent evidence that the hacker known as Guccifer 2.0 supposedly based in Romania hacked the DNC on behalf of the Russian government. There is also no evidence, the reports authors say, that Guccifer handed documents over to WikiLeaks. Instead, the report says that the evidence and timeline of events suggests that Guccifer may have been conjured up in an attempt to deflect from the embarrassing information about Hillary Clintons presidential campaign that was released just before the Democratic National Convention. The investigators found that some of the Guccifer files had been deliberately altered by copying and pasting the text into a Russianified word-processing document with Russian-language settings.
If all this is true, these findings would constitute a massive embarrassment for not only the DNC itself but the media, which has breathlessly pushed the Russian hacking narrative for an entire year, almost without question but with little solid evidence to back it up.
You could easily be forgiven for not having heard about this latest development because, perhaps to avoid potential embarrassment, the media has completely ignored it. Instead, to this point only a few right-wing sites have seen fit to publish follow-ups.
The original piece, authored by former Salon columnist Patrick Lawrence (also known as Patrick L. Smith) appeared in The Nation on Aug. 9. The findings it details are supported by a group of strongly credentialed and well-respected forensic investigators and former NSA and CIA officials. The group call themselves Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, or VIPS, and originally came together in 2003 to protest the use of faulty intelligence to justify the invasion of Iraq under President George W. Bush.
