08/31/16

Totalitarianism: Feds Move To Nationalize State Election Systems Amid Cyber Attacks

By: Terresa Monroe-Hamilton

Russians

In a development that is alarming in more ways than one, Jeh Johnson and DHS are making noises that we should federalize states’ voting systems because of hacking by the Russians and others. That should send a very cold shiver down your spine. Not only have the feds pretty much taken over the mainstream media, they now want to control our elections. Let me see… where have I heard that before? Oh yeah! Every single dictator on the planet has done the very same thing, just not as slyly. If this happens, we are no longer a Constitutional Republic. We become an outright banana republic run by despots.

Yahoo! News broke the hacking story first:

The bulletin does not identify the states in question, but sources familiar with the document say it refers to the targeting by suspected foreign hackers of voter registration databases in Arizona and Illinois. In the Illinois case, officials were forced to shut down the state’s voter registration system for 10 days in late July, after the hackers managed to download personal data on up to 200,000 state voters, Ken Menzel, the general counsel of the Illinois Board of Elections, said in an interview. The Arizona attack was more limited, involving malicious software that was introduced into its voter registration system but no successful exfiltration of data, a state official said.

The FBI is now warning all states that they should start securing their voting systems to avoid hacking in the next election. Let me ask you this, shouldn’t the states have been doing that all along? Why now? DHS and the FBI are now referring to the election systems as critical infrastructure, like the power grid and Wall Street. First off, they’ve never done a thing about the power grid. They want to nationalize utilities so the government controls them too… but no one has done a thing to invest in modernizing and strengthening the power grid. As far as Wall Street goes, that is a reference to banking which they have pretty much already nationalized, but I guess they want to ‘further’ control it. Don’t you see the power grab here? Venezuela anyone? The feds now have control over our power grid, media, food and financial sectors. Now they want an iron grip on voting… exactly what do you think will happen? We don’t have a two party system anymore. They are basically in cahoots with one another, so voting has already been compromised. Now this.

Frankly, I fear the Russians hacking the system to mess with our elections. But that doesn’t mean that I want to hand over our voting process to the federal government any more than I want the Internet handed over to the UN and foreign countries, which Obama is making happen as well. Nationalizing the voting process is breathtakingly unconstitutional. If it happens, you will never be able to trust the results ever again. There was a reason our Founding Fathers wanted the states to have the power over elections and it was to prevent something like this. An arrogant move towards a despotic regime and it’s happening right before our eyes.

The talk of nationalizing the voting structure started before the Russian hacking of Arizona and Illinois’ election boards. This has been talked about for a while now. It should be all over the news, but as usual… crickets.

From Jeh Johnson:

“We should carefully consider whether our election system, our election process, is critical infrastructure like the financial sector, like the power grid,” Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said.

“There’s a vital national interest in our election process, so I do think we need to consider whether it should be considered by my department and others critical infrastructure,” he said at media conference earlier this month hosted by the Christian Science Monitor.

DHS clarifies further on their website: “There are 16 critical infrastructure sectors whose assets, systems, and networks, whether physical or virtual, are considered so vital to the United States that their incapacitation or destruction would have a debilitating effect on security, national economic security, national public health or safety, or any combination thereof.”

What happens when those in power control everything that defines out country and our survival? To let them control all this instead of putting it under the purview of the states and private entities is simply insane. It’s begging for a dictatorship.

A White House policy directive adds, “The federal government also has a responsibility to strengthen the security and resilience of its own critical infrastructure, for the continuity of national essential functions, and to organize itself to partner effectively with and add value to the security and resilience efforts of critical infrastructure owners and operators.”

Johnson also stated that the primary issue is that there isn’t a central election system since the states run elections. “There’s no one federal election system. There are some 9,000 jurisdictions involved in the election process,” Johnson said.

“There’s a national election for president, there are some 9,000 jurisdictions that participate, contribute to collecting votes, tallying votes and reporting votes,” he said. Yes and that runs so well. Not. It’s already corrupt and rigged and now they want that to apply to ALL ELECTIONS. They are using security and the fact that we are vulnerable as an excuse to seize power over voting. It doesn’t take a genius to see it.

Russians1

Georgia’s top election official is flatly digging in his heels and saying no thank you to the fed’s so-called assistance. He’s correct in saying that the Obama Administration is ginning up a cybersecurity threat to intrude on states’ authority. That is exactly what is happening and I totally agree with Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp.

“It seems like now it’s just the D.C. media and the bureaucrats, because of the DNC getting hacked — they now think our whole system is on the verge of disaster because some Russian’s going to tap into the voting system,” Kemp, a Republican, told POLITICO in an interview. “And that’s just not — I mean, anything is possible, but it is not probable at all, the way our systems are set up.” I think the Russians are a serious threat, but the power and the responsibility should still reside with the states. Somebody needs to actually, you know, read the Constitution.

In an earlier interview with NextGov, Kemp warned: “The question remains whether the federal government will subvert the Constitution to achieve the goal of federalizing elections under the guise of security.” Trust, me they will… Obama has nothing to lose and he’s setting the stage for Clinton. Kemp sees a “clear motivation from this White House” to expand federal control, citing Obama’s healthcare law, the Dodd-Frank financial-reform legislation and the increased role of the Education Department in local schools.

Kemp is far from alone. Election officials in other states are now ringing the alarm bells as loudly as they can, but it is hard to be heard in a media vacuum that squelches your voice. Many election officials see the classification of their election systems as critical infrastructure as the first stage of a more intrusive plan. They are not wrong here.

“I think it’s kind of the nose under the tent,” said Vermont Secretary of State Jim Condos, who is a Democrat. “What I think a lot of folks get concerned about [is] when the federal government says, ‘Well, look, we’re not really interested in doing that, but we just want to give you this,’ and then all of a sudden this leads to something else.” Oh, you bet it does.

“Elections have always been run and organized by the states,” said Connecticut Secretary of State Denise Merrill, another Democrat. “And I think there has always been a fear that there would be federal intervention that would not recognize differences among the states.” Yes, there has and rightly so. Things are so whacked out, I’m now agreeing with Democrats. SMH. Merrill went on to say that having this kind of rhetoric this close to a major election is not helpful. That’s an understatement.

This kind of thing makes you paranoid. First you worry that the Russians are rigging the election for one of the candidates. Then you worry that the feds are just waiting to pounce on an excuse to make our elections utterly meaningless. This gives either candidate fodder to claim if they lose, that everything was rigged.

Bruce McConnell, a former DHS deputy undersecretary for cybersecurity under Obama, outright rejected Kemp’s suggestion that states should fear greater federal involvement in elections. “I think it’s pretty clear today which is the greater risk to the republic: citizens losing complete confidence in our election system, or the states working carefully with Washington to prevent disaster while keeping the 10th Amendment well in mind,” said McConnell, now the global vice president at the EastWest Institute. He was referring to the Bill of Rights provision that declares limits on federal authority. Which is exactly what the feds are trying to nullify and subvert.

A number of lawmakers from both parties have urged the administration to improve cyber-protections for parties, political groups and election offices. So did a bipartisan group of security experts from the Aspen Institute, who said in July that “voting processes and results must receive security akin to that we expect for critical infrastructure.” Right, yes… the Aspen Institute, which is a Progressive Marxist front. Of course they would be for this.

Johnson said on Aug. 3rd that DHS “should carefully consider” the critical infrastructure question. Twelve days later, he held a conference call with state election officials in which he discussed a possible role for Washington. Kemp was not happy with this and again, I don’t blame him. He found it troubling. Agreed. He also pointed out that it all has to do with the definition of ‘critical infrastructure’. Again correct… they are controlling the language here, so it gives the feds a foot in the door.

The White House is now coming forward and claiming that Kemp and others who are concerned about the constitutional implications of this are wrong about the law. “The concern about … ‘we’ll be designated as critical infrastructure and then we’re going to be regulated’ is just based on a false premise,” said the former official, who requested anonymity to speak candidly. The official instead argued the benefits of this fascist move.

Kemp was unmoved by these word games and argued that it was clear during Johnson’s conference call with state election officials that a regulatory push “was obviously something that had been in the works.” “Everybody that was on that call was in lockstep with Secretary Johnson,” he added. On that same call, state officials accepted the offer to create an election cybersecurity partnership committee. Careful folks… that looks a lot like political candy to me.

Say it with me… TOTALITARIANISM. That’s what this amounts to. To federalize voting is to strip the states and voting Americans of that power and hand it to the government.

Totalitarianism is a political system where the state recognizes no limits to its authority and strives to regulate every aspect of public and private life wherever feasible. Totalitarian regimes stay in political power through an all-encompassing propaganda campaign, which is disseminated through the state-controlled mass media, a single party that is often marked by political repression, personality cultism, control over the economy, regulation and restriction of speech, mass surveillance, and widespread use of terror. A distinctive feature of totalitarian governments is an “elaborate ideology, a set of ideas that gives meaning and direction to the whole society.”

Benjamin Franklin once said: “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” His words are haunting us today and we had better stop the Marxists before they gain such a stranglehold that the Republic is throttled. Tyranny has returned to America… not on a horse this time, but via cybersecurity.

08/29/16

FBI: Foreign hackers penetrated election databases in Illinois, Arizona

By: Renee Nal | New Zeal

US-presidential-elections vote

“Two state election boards have been popped, and data has been taken. This certainly should be concerning to the common American voter.” – Rich Barger, chief intelligence officer for ThreatConnect, a cybersecurity firm

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has warned that “foreign hackers penetrated two state [later identified as Illinois and Arizona] election databases in recent weeks,” as first reported by Michael Isikoff at Yahoo News. The FBI alert “comes amid heightened concerns among U.S. intelligence officials about the possibility of cyberintrusions, potentially by Russian state-sponsored hackers, aimed at disrupting the November elections.”

The report noted:

“…one of the IP addresses listed in the FBI alert has surfaced before in Russian criminal underground hacker forums.”

Continue reading

08/18/16

WATCH: Update Brazil: Russian Infiltration of US politics, with Trevor Loudon (video)

By: Renee Nal | New Zeal

Update Brazil

Terça Livre Presents – Update Brazil, Episode 39: “Russian Infiltration of US politics, with Trevor Loudon,” hosted by Jeff Nyquist and Allan Dos Santos.

Trevor Loudon explains how and why Russia has been infiltrated in US politics.

Watch:

06/15/16

Guccifer 2.0, the Hacked Trump Files from the DNC

Denise Simon | FoundersCode.com

The intrusions at the DNC are noteworthy for the sophistication of the groups behind it. One of the intrusions, by a well-known cyberespionage group called Cozy Bear, appears to have happened in the summer of 2015, according to Crowdstrike‘s CTO and co-founder Dmitri Alperovitch. The second breach, involving another Russian group, Fancy Bear, happened in April this year.

Cozy Bear has been previously associated with attacks on the White House and the US. State Department. The group has also been tied to numerous attacks on US defense contractors, government agencies, financial services companies, technology firms and think tanks, Alperovich said.  Fancy Bear, or Sofacy, as the group is also known, is similarly believed responsible for targeted attacks on various government and private sector organizations in multiple countries including the US, Canada, China and Japan, he said.

The two groups did not appear to be collaborating with each other or communicating in any fashion on the DNC attacks. But both targeted the same systems and the same data, employing a variety of sophisticated techniques in the process Crowdstrike’s CTO and co-founder Dmitri Alperovitch said in a blog post.

The Cozy Bear team used a Python-based malware tool dubbed SeaDaddy and another backdoor in Powershell to gain persistence on comprised DNC systems and to remain undetected on them for more than a year. According to Alperovitch, the Powershell backdoor was noteworthy for its use of a one-line command to establish an encrypted connection with command and control servers and for downloading additional modules.

The Fancy Bear group meanwhile used a different malware sample to remotely execute malicious commands on compromised DNC systems, to transmit files and to enable keylogging. The group deployed tactics like periodically clearing event logs and resetting the timestamps in files in an attempt to conceal their activities. More details here from DarkReading.

Gawker: A 200+ page document that appears to be a Democratic anti-Trump playbook compiled by the Democratic National Committee has leaked online following this week’s report that the DNC was breached by Russian hackers. In it, Trump is pilloried as a “bad businessman” and “misogynist in chief.”

The document—which according to embedded metadata was created by a Democratic strategist named Warren Flood—was created on December 19th, 2015, and forwarded to us by an individual calling himself “Guccifer 2.0,” a reference to the notorious, now-imprisoned Romanian hacker who hacked various American political figures in 2013.

The package forwarded to us also contained a variety of donor registries and other strategy files, “just a few docs from many thousands I extracted when hacking into DNC’s network,” the purported hacker claimed over email, adding that he’s in possession of “about 100 Gb of data including financial reports, donors’ lists, election programs, action plans against Republicans, personal mails, etc.”

His stated motive is to be “a fighter against all those illuminati that captured our world.”

The enormous opposition document, titled simply “Donald Trump Report,” appears to be a summary of the Democratic Party’s strategy for delegitimizing and undermining Trump’s presidential aspirations—at least as they existed at the end of last year, well before he unseated a field of establishment Republicans and clinched the nomination. A section titled “Top Narratives” describes a seven-pronged attack on Trump’s character and record.

The first is the argument that “Trump has no core”:

One thing is clear about Donald Trump, there is only one person he has ever looked out for and that’s himself. Whether it’s American workers, the Republican Party, or his wives, Trump’s only fidelity has been to himself and with that he has shown that he has no problem lying to the American people. Trump will say anything and do anything to get what he wants without regard for those he harms.

Second, that Trump is running a “divisive and offensive campaign”:

There’s no nice way of saying it – Donald Trump is running a campaign built on fear-mongering, divisiveness, and racism. His major policy announcements have included banning all Muslims from entering the U.S., and calling Mexican immigrants “rapists” and “drug dealers” while proposing a U.S.-Mexico border wall. And Trump’s campaign rallies have become a reflection of the hateful tone of his campaign, with protestors being roughed up and audience members loudly calling for violence.

Third, Trump is a “bad businessman”:

Despite Trump’s continual boasting about his business success, he has repeatedly run into serious financial crises in his career and his record raises serious questions about whether he is qualified to manage the fiscal challenges facing this country. Trump’s business resume includes a long list of troubling issues, including his company’s record of forcing people from their homes to make room for developments and outsourcing the manufacturing of his clothing line to take advantage of lower-wage countries like China and Mexico. His insight about the marketplace has proven wrong many times, including in the run-up to the Great Recession. And Trump’s record of irresponsible and reckless borrowing to build his empire – behavior that sent his companies into bankruptcy four times – is just one indication of how out-of-touch he is with the way regular Americans behave and make a living, and it casts doubt on whether he has the right mindset to tackle the country’s budget problems.

Fourth, Trump espouses “dangerous & irresponsible policies”:

Trump’s policies – if you can call them that – are marked by the same extreme and irresponsible thinking that shape his campaign speeches. There is no question that Donald Trump’s rhetoric is dangerous – but his actual agenda could be a catastrophe.

Fifth, in classically corny Democratic Party style, Donald Trump is the “misogynist in chief”:

Through both his words and actions, Trump has made clear he thinks women’s primary role is to please men. Trump’s derogatory and degrading comments to and about women, as well as his tumultuous marriages, have been well publicized. And as a presidential candidate, Trump has adopted many of the backwards GOP policies that we’ve come to expect from his party.

Sixth, Donald Trump is an “out of touch” member of the elite:

Trump’s policies clearly reflect his life as a 1-percenter. His plans would slash taxes for the rich and corporations while shifting more of the burden to the shoulders of working families. He stands with Republicans in opposing Wall Street reform and opposing the minimum wage. Trump clearly has no conception of the everyday lives of middle class Americans. His description of the “small” $1 million loan that his father gave him to launch his career is proof enough that his worldview is not grounded in reality.

The seventh strategy prong is to focus on Trump’s “personal life,” including that “Trump’s Ex-Wife Accused Him Of Rape,” which is true.

What follows is roughly two hundred pages of dossier-style background information, instances of Trump dramatically changing his stance on a litany of issues, and a round-up of the candidate’s most inflammatory and false statements (as of December ‘15, at least).

It appears that virtually all of the claims are derived from published sources, as opposed to independent investigations or mere rumor. It’s also very light on anything that could be considered “dirt,” although Trump’s colorful marital history is covered extensively:

The DNC hack was first revealed Tuesday, when the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike announced it had discovered two hacking collectives, linked to Russian intelligence, inside the DNC network after the DNC reported a suspected breach. In a blog post, the company identified the groups as “COZY BEAR” and “FANCY BEAR”—two “sophisticated adversaries” that “engage in extensive political and economic espionage for the benefit of the government of the Russian Federation.”

The hackers were able to access opposition files and may have been able to read email and chat traffic, but did not touch any financial, donor, or personal information, the DNC saidTuesday. However, the user who sent the files to Gawker refuted that claim, writing, “DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz said no financial documents were compromised. Nonsense! Just look through the Democratic Party lists of donors! They say there were no secret docs! Lies again! Also I have some secret documents from Hillary’s PC she worked with as the Secretary of State.”

Among the files sent to Gawker are what appear to be several lists of donors, including email addresses and donation amounts, grouped by wealth and specific fundraising events. Gawker has not yet been able to verify that the Trump file was produced by the DNC, but we have been able to independently verify that the financial documents were produced by people or groups affiliated with the Democratic Party.

Also included are memos marked “confidential” and “secret” that appear to date back to 2008, and pertain to Obama’s transition into the White House, and a file marked “confidential” containing Hillary’s early talking points, at least some of which ended up being repeated verbatim in her April, 2015 candidacy announcement.

Finally, there is a May, 2015 memo outlining a proposed strategy against the field of potential GOP candidates. Donald Trump, who had not yet officially announced his candidacy, does not appear in the document.

The purported hacker writes “it was easy, very easy” to hack and extract thousands of files from the DNC network, “the main part” of which he or she claims are in the custody of Wikileaks. He or she also appears to have sent the documents to The Smoking Gun, which posted about the dossier earlier today.

Warren Flood did not immediately return a request for comment. DNC Press Secretary Mark Paustenbach was not able to immediately confirm the authenticity of the documents, but the party is aware that they’re circulating.

Guccifer 2.0, the Hacked Trump Files from the DNC

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The intrusions at the DNC are noteworthy for the sophistication of the groups behind it. One of the intrusions, by a well-known cyberespionage group called Cozy Bear, appears to have happened in the summer of 2015, according to Crowdstrike‘s CTO and co-founder Dmitri Alperovitch. The second breach, involving another Russian group, Fancy Bear, happened in April this year.

Cozy Bear has been previously associated with attacks on the White House and the US. State Department. The group has also been tied to numerous attacks on US defense contractors, government agencies, financial services companies, technology firms and think tanks, Alperovich said.  Fancy Bear, or Sofacy, as the group is also known, is similarly believed responsible for targeted attacks on various government and private sector organizations in multiple countries including the US, Canada, China and Japan, he said.

The two groups did not appear to be collaborating with each other or communicating in any fashion on the DNC attacks. But both targeted the same systems and the same data, employing a variety of sophisticated techniques in the process Crowdstrike’s CTO and co-founder Dmitri Alperovitch said in a blog post.

The Cozy Bear team used a Python-based malware tool dubbed SeaDaddy and another backdoor in Powershell to gain persistence on comprised DNC systems and to remain undetected on them for more than a year. According to Alperovitch, the Powershell backdoor was noteworthy for its use of a one-line command to establish an encrypted connection with command and control servers and for downloading additional modules.

The Fancy Bear group meanwhile used a different malware sample to remotely execute malicious commands on compromised DNC systems, to transmit files and to enable keylogging. The group deployed tactics like periodically clearing event logs and resetting the timestamps in files in an attempt to conceal their activities. More details here from DarkReading.

Gawker: A 200+ page document that appears to be a Democratic anti-Trump playbook compiled by the Democratic National Committee has leaked online following this week’s report that the DNC was breached by Russian hackers. In it, Trump is pilloried as a “bad businessman” and “misogynist in chief.”

The document—which according to embedded metadata was created by a Democratic strategist named Warren Flood—was created on December 19th, 2015, and forwarded to us by an individual calling himself “Guccifer 2.0,” a reference to the notorious, now-imprisoned Romanian hacker who hacked various American political figures in 2013.

The package forwarded to us also contained a variety of donor registries and other strategy files, “just a few docs from many thousands I extracted when hacking into DNC’s network,” the purported hacker claimed over email, adding that he’s in possession of “about 100 Gb of data including financial reports, donors’ lists, election programs, action plans against Republicans, personal mails, etc.”

His stated motive is to be “a fighter against all those illuminati that captured our world.”

The enormous opposition document, titled simply “Donald Trump Report,” appears to be a summary of the Democratic Party’s strategy for delegitimizing and undermining Trump’s presidential aspirations—at least as they existed at the end of last year, well before he unseated a field of establishment Republicans and clinched the nomination. A section titled “Top Narratives” describes a seven-pronged attack on Trump’s character and record.

The first is the argument that “Trump has no core”:

One thing is clear about Donald Trump, there is only one person he has ever looked out for and that’s himself. Whether it’s American workers, the Republican Party, or his wives, Trump’s only fidelity has been to himself and with that he has shown that he has no problem lying to the American people. Trump will say anything and do anything to get what he wants without regard for those he harms.

Second, that Trump is running a “divisive and offensive campaign”:

There’s no nice way of saying it – Donald Trump is running a campaign built on fear-mongering, divisiveness, and racism. His major policy announcements have included banning all Muslims from entering the U.S., and calling Mexican immigrants “rapists” and “drug dealers” while proposing a U.S.-Mexico border wall. And Trump’s campaign rallies have become a reflection of the hateful tone of his campaign, with protestors being roughed up and audience members loudly calling for violence.

Third, Trump is a “bad businessman”:

Despite Trump’s continual boasting about his business success, he has repeatedly run into serious financial crises in his career and his record raises serious questions about whether he is qualified to manage the fiscal challenges facing this country. Trump’s business resume includes a long list of troubling issues, including his company’s record of forcing people from their homes to make room for developments and outsourcing the manufacturing of his clothing line to take advantage of lower-wage countries like China and Mexico. His insight about the marketplace has proven wrong many times, including in the run-up to the Great Recession. And Trump’s record of irresponsible and reckless borrowing to build his empire – behavior that sent his companies into bankruptcy four times – is just one indication of how out-of-touch he is with the way regular Americans behave and make a living, and it casts doubt on whether he has the right mindset to tackle the country’s budget problems.

Fourth, Trump espouses “dangerous & irresponsible policies”:

Trump’s policies – if you can call them that – are marked by the same extreme and irresponsible thinking that shape his campaign speeches. There is no question that Donald Trump’s rhetoric is dangerous – but his actual agenda could be a catastrophe.

Fifth, in classically corny Democratic Party style, Donald Trump is the “misogynist in chief”:

Through both his words and actions, Trump has made clear he thinks women’s primary role is to please men. Trump’s derogatory and degrading comments to and about women, as well as his tumultuous marriages, have been well publicized. And as a presidential candidate, Trump has adopted many of the backwards GOP policies that we’ve come to expect from his party.

Sixth, Donald Trump is an “out of touch” member of the elite:

Trump’s policies clearly reflect his life as a 1-percenter. His plans would slash taxes for the rich and corporations while shifting more of the burden to the shoulders of working families. He stands with Republicans in opposing Wall Street reform and opposing the minimum wage. Trump clearly has no conception of the everyday lives of middle class Americans. His description of the “small” $1 million loan that his father gave him to launch his career is proof enough that his worldview is not grounded in reality.

The seventh strategy prong is to focus on Trump’s “personal life,” including that “Trump’s Ex-Wife Accused Him Of Rape,” which is true.

What follows is roughly two hundred pages of dossier-style background information, instances of Trump dramatically changing his stance on a litany of issues, and a round-up of the candidate’s most inflammatory and false statements (as of December ‘15, at least).

It appears that virtually all of the claims are derived from published sources, as opposed to independent investigations or mere rumor. It’s also very light on anything that could be considered “dirt,” although Trump’s colorful marital history is covered extensively:

The DNC hack was first revealed Tuesday, when the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike announced it had discovered two hacking collectives, linked to Russian intelligence, inside the DNC network after the DNC reported a suspected breach. In a blog post, the company identified the groups as “COZY BEAR” and “FANCY BEAR”—two “sophisticated adversaries” that “engage in extensive political and economic espionage for the benefit of the government of the Russian Federation.”

The hackers were able to access opposition files and may have been able to read email and chat traffic, but did not touch any financial, donor, or personal information, the DNC saidTuesday. However, the user who sent the files to Gawker refuted that claim, writing, “DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz said no financial documents were compromised. Nonsense! Just look through the Democratic Party lists of donors! They say there were no secret docs! Lies again! Also I have some secret documents from Hillary’s PC she worked with as the Secretary of State.”

Among the files sent to Gawker are what appear to be several lists of donors, including email addresses and donation amounts, grouped by wealth and specific fundraising events. Gawker has not yet been able to verify that the Trump file was produced by the DNC, but we have been able to independently verify that the financial documents were produced by people or groups affiliated with the Democratic Party.

Also included are memos marked “confidential” and “secret” that appear to date back to 2008, and pertain to Obama’s transition into the White House, and a file marked “confidential” containing Hillary’s early talking points, at least some of which ended up being repeated verbatim in her April, 2015 candidacy announcement.

Finally, there is a May, 2015 memo outlining a proposed strategy against the field of potential GOP candidates. Donald Trump, who had not yet officially announced his candidacy, does not appear in the document.

The purported hacker writes “it was easy, very easy” to hack and extract thousands of files from the DNC network, “the main part” of which he or she claims are in the custody of Wikileaks. He or she also appears to have sent the documents to The Smoking Gun, which posted about the dossier earlier today.

Warren Flood did not immediately return a request for comment. DNC Press Secretary Mark Paustenbach was not able to immediately confirm the authenticity of the documents, but the party is aware that they’re circulating.

05/5/16

The Propaganda Network Behind Trump’s Bizarre Tabloid Charges

By: Cliff Kincaid | Accuracy in Media

Ted Cruz

Until Tuesday, political observers thought Donald J. Trump got information about foreign affairs from the Sunday shows. Then we learned that he had relied on an unsubstantiated story in the National Enquirer for the facts about the assassination of John F.Kennedy.

The charges were classic Russian disinformation. These had a double purpose—taking attention away from the communist conspiracy that actually murdered President Kennedy, and transferring the notoriety to Trump’s political opponent in the U.S. presidential race.

The attack on Cruz’s father, publicized by Trump on the Fox News Channel, was taken directly from the National Enquirer but has also been transmitted by a series of outlets known to be part of Moscow’s global propaganda apparatus, and some lesser-known left-wing, or “progressive,” sites. One name that figures prominently in several of the reports and who apparently “broke” the story is Wayne Madsen, who claims all kinds of high-level intelligence connections. Until the Cruz story, his main claim to fame was being the source for a story in the Globe—another supermarket tabloid—which allegedthat President George W. Bush was having an extramarital affair with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

A regular contributor to the Russia Today and Iranian Press TV propaganda channels, Madsen has also alleged that Barack Obama and/or his family members had CIA connections. He highlights the work of his grandmother in his bio, calling her “a newspaper reporter and editor for Land og Folk as well as a novelist.” Land og Folk was a Danish language communist newspaper. One of Madsen’s admitted journalism icons is I.F. Stone, exposed as a Soviet agent of influence.

Madsen’s story tried to link Cruz’s father to JFK assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, a pro-Marxist member of the “Fair Play for Cuba Committee,” which had links to the Communist Party USA and the Socialist Workers Party.

Continue reading

01/14/16

A Russian Spy in the NSA: A True Story of Espionage

By: Cliff Kincaid
America’s Survival

Before Edward Snowden, there was Robert Lipka. He spied for the Russians at the NSA. Rather than flee to Moscow, Lipka moved to Pennsylvania and used the money he was paid by the Russians to bet on horse races. It took 32 years to bring Lipka to justice, and we may never know all of the state secrets he betrayed. Former FBI agent John Whiteside, discusses his book about the case, Fool’s Mate. He also addresses current security measures in the federal government and whether Barack Obama could pass an FBI background check.

Fools Mate