The Plot to Hack America

Guccifer 2.0, who claimed to be a Romanian lone wolf, was clearly a cover-up for the CYBER BEARS. Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, a staff writer at VICE Motherboard who covers hacking and information security, writes, “[C]onsidering a long trail of breadcrumbs pointing back to Russia left by the hacker, as well as other circumstantial evidence, it appears more likely that Guccifer 2.0 is nothing but a disinformation or deception campaign by Russian state-sponsored hackers to cover up their own hack—and a hasty and sloppy one at that.”¹²

Franceschi-Bicchierai, who actually chatted with Guccifer 2.0, points to the blogger’s use of certain characters that are popular in Russia and metadata that indicates the blogger might actually be Russian. He also points out other linguistic evidence—such as his seemingly poor Romanian and broken English that wasn’t necessarily consistent with a Romanian speaking English as a second language, but might bear some resemblance to Russian-English syntax—as indicators that Guccifer 2.0 might not be who he claimed to be.¹³

Regardless of whether or not Guccifer 2.0 really did infiltrate the DNC systems or release the documents to WikiLeaks, CrowdStrike issued an update to its original post in response, reiterating its findings about the presence of the two Russian groups in DNC networks. “Whether or not this posting is part of a Russian Intelligence disinformation campaign, we are exploring the documents’ authenticity and origin,” Alperovitch wrote. “Regardless, these claims do nothing to lessen our findings relating to the Russian government’s involvement, portions of which we have documented for the public and the greater security community.”¹⁴

Fomenting Civil War among Democrats

On July 22, 2016 a few days before the opening of the DNC, WikiLeaks published 19,252 emails alleged to be from the DNC hack.¹⁵ Operation LUCKY-7 was now fully underway. The emails weren’t spectacular, mostly mundane discussions that would happen between personnel, including their preferred candidate. However, as released by WikiLeaks it fueled suspicions of the most hardcore Bernie Sanders supporters that the Democratic presidential nomination was engineered and stolen.

Team Trump saw the opportunity and they too piled on in a series of tweets that tried to drive a wedge between the Clinton and Sanders camps. On July 23, Trump tweeted “The WikiLeaks e-mail release today was so bad to Sanders that it will make it impossible for him to support her, unless he is a fraud!”¹⁶ Assange immediately replied to the Trump tweet and linked to the DNC cache so his followers would find it with a cheery “everyone can see for themselves.”

The emails revealed that DNC chairperson Debbie Wasserman-Shultz, whose role should make her neutral until the nomination process was complete, had been strongly favoring Hillary Clinton throughout the primary process. The DNC did not dispute the content of the emails themselves.

There was an email thread started on May 5, 2016 with the title “No shit” in which Brad Marshall, the CFO for the DNC, allegedly suggests to get someone to ask Sanders what his beliefs are in order to portray him as an atheist. It read “My Southern Baptist peeps would draw a big difference between a Jew and an atheist.”¹⁷ Follow up emails suggest that Amy Dacey responded with “Amen.”

In some of the emails for example, senders made recommendations to diminish the Sanders campaign. An email from May 21, 2016 allegedly from committee communications official Mark Paustenbach, made a suggestion to criticize the Sanders campaign as a “mess” that didn’t have its “act together” when it was discovered that they had accessed voter data belonging to the Clinton campaign.¹⁸ He also stated “It’s not a DNC conspiracy, it’s because they never had their act together” in one email.¹⁹

In a particularly pointed email dated May 17, 2016, soon-to-be-former DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman-Shultz called Jeff Weaver, the Sanders Campaign manager “particularly scummy” and a “damn liar.”²⁰ The Sanders campaign had spent many months calling for the resignation of the DNC Chairwoman, and the emails provided their chance.

The Response to the Hacks