Obama Admits Gap in Russian ‘Hack’ Case

Note the disconnect between the confidence about hacking and the stark declarative sentence about the information ending up at WikiLeaks. Obama does not bridge the gap because to do so would represent a bald-faced lie, which some honest intelligence officer might call him on. So, he simply presents the two sides of the chasm – implies a connection – but leaves it to the listener to make the leap.

.. Assange, has made clear that the two separate batches of Democratic emails – one from the DNC and the other from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta – also were leaks from insiders, not hacks from outsiders.

.. “In his final press conference, beginning around 8 minutes 30 seconds in, Obama admits that they have no evidence of how WikiLeaks got the DNC material. This undermines the stream of completely evidence-free nonsense that has been emerging from the US intelligence services this last two months

.. “Most crucially of all Obama refers to ‘The DNC emails that were leaked.’ Note ‘leaked’ and not ‘hacked.’

Trump Adviser Had Twitter Contact With Figure Tied to Russians

Roger J. Stone Jr., an off-and-on adviser to President Trump for decades, has acknowledged that he had contact on Twitter with Guccifer 2.0, the mysterious online figure that is believed to be a front for Russian intelligence officials.

.. But Mr. Stone insisted in an interview that the contact had been brief and involved nothing more than the exchange of a few direct messages, well after the party committee had been hacked. “Even if he is a Russian agent, my cursory exchange with him happens after he releases the D.N.C. stuff,” Mr. Stone said on Saturday. “There’s only one exchange with him. I had no further exchanges.”

.. He denied any knowledge of what the hackers were up to before their attacks. “This is a witch hunt,” Mr. Stone said. “It’s the worst form of McCarthyism. Seems as if you’re not for nuclear war with the Russians over Syria, then you must be a traitor.”

.. During the campaign, Guccifer 2.0 used social media to invite individual reporters and Republican operatives to request specific caches of documents.

As Russia probe looms, Roger Stone touts relationship to WikiLeaks

Over the weekend, the longtime Trump confidant tweeted that he had a “back channel” to WikiLeaks during the presidential campaign — only to later delete it.
“[N]ever denied perfectly legal back channel to Assange who indeed had the goods on #CrookedHillary,” Stone tweeted late Saturday night. The post was gone after almost 40 minutes.
 .. Over the weekend, the longtime Trump confidant tweeted that he had a “back channel” to WikiLeaks during the presidential campaign — only to later delete it.

“[N]ever denied perfectly legal back channel to Assange who indeed had the goods on #CrookedHillary,” Stone tweeted late Saturday night. The post was gone after almost 40 minutes.
.. WikiLeaks took to Twitter, saying it was unaware of communications between Stone and the organization or Assange.

Stone said on Twitter more than a week later that it would soon be Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s “time in the barrel.”
The message proved prescient. In early October, WikiLeaks began posting Podesta’s emails online for public consumption.
.. As Stone regularly touted WikiLeaks’ releases, the self-styled radical transparency organization once again said it had never communicated with Stone.
 .. Stone told CBS4 Miami at the time that his tweet was not meant to reflect upcoming WikiLeaks disclosures and said he had communicated with Assange indirectly.

“I do have a back-channel communication with Assange because we have a good mutual friend,” he said in the October interview.

The CIA’s No Good, Very Bad, Totally Awful Tuesday

This extraordinary collection, which amounts to more than several hundred million lines of code, gives its possessor the entire hacking capacity of the CIA.

.. The dump itself is mostly developer notes and Wiki-type contents, probably from a private Atlassian development coordination server based on automatic-text in a PDF. It describes a large variety of tools targeting a whole host of platforms, ranging from Cisco routers to iPhones to Samsung Smart TVs. Technically, there really are no big surprises; these are all systems we would expect the CIA’s hackers to target.

.. Dates in the files suggest that the compromise happened in February or March of 2016, so this is a recent breach.