If on Monday enough Trump electors decide to cast their votes for someone else -- possibly another Republican -- the presidential selection could go to the House of Representatives where, conceivably, the Republican-controlled chamber could choose someone other than Trump.
In other words, there is an arguable scenario in which the U.S. intelligence community first undercut Clinton and, secondly, Trump, seeking -- however unlikely -- to get someone installed in the White House considered more suitable to the CIA's and the FBI's views of what's good for the country.
Who Did the Leaking?
At the center of this controversy is the question of who leaked or hacked the DNC and Podesta emails. The CIA has planted the story in The Washington Post, The New York Times and other mainstream outlets that it was Russia that hacked both the DNC and Podesta emails and slipped the material to WikiLeaks with the goal of assisting the Trump campaign. The suggestion is that Trump is Putin's "puppet," just as Hillary Clinton alleged during the third presidential debate.
But WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has publicly denied that Russia was the source of the leaks and one of his associates, former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray, has suggested that the DNC leak came from a "disgruntled" Democrat upset with the DNC's sandbagging of the Sanders campaign and that the Podesta leak came from the U.S. intelligence community.
Although Assange recently has sought to muzzle Murray's public comments -- out of apparent concern for protecting the identity of sources -- Murray offered possibly his most expansive account of the sourcing during a podcast interview with Scott Horton on Dec. 13.
Murray, who became a whistleblower himself when he protested Britain's tolerance of human rights abuses in Uzbekistan, explained that he consults with Assange and cooperates with WikiLeaks "without being a formal member of the structure."
But he appears to have undertaken a mission for WikiLeaks to contact one of the sources (or a representative) during a Sept. 25 visit to Washington where he says he met with a person in a wooded area of American University. At the time, Murray was at American University participating in an awards ceremony for former CIA officer John Kiriakou who was being honored by a group of former Western intelligence officials, the Sam Adams Associates, named for the late Vietnam War-era CIA analyst and whistleblower Sam Adams.
Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern, a founder of the Sam Adams group, told me that Murray was "m-c-ing" the event but then slipped away, skipping a reception that followed the award ceremony.
Reading Between Lines
Though Murray has declined to say exactly what the meeting in the woods was about, he may have been passing along messages about ways to protect the source from possible retaliation, maybe even an extraction plan if the source was in some legal or physical danger.
Murray has disputed a report in London's Daily Mail that he was receiving a batch of the leaked Democratic emails. "The material, I think, was already safely with WikiLeaks before I got there in September," Murray said in the interview with Scott Horton. "I had a small role to play."
Murray also suggested that the DNC leak and the Podesta leak came from two different sources, neither of them the Russian government.
"The Podesta emails and the DNC emails are, of course, two separate things and we shouldn't conclude that they both have the same source," Murray said. "In both cases we're talking of a leak, not a hack, in that the person who was responsible for getting that information out had legal access to that information."
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