This piece was reprinted by OpEd News with permission or license. It may not be reproduced in any form without permission or license from the source.
COMEY: Correct.
BURR: Isn't content an important part of the forensics from a counter-intelligence standpoint?
COMEY: It is, although what was briefed to me by my folks -- the people who were my folks at the time -- is that they had gotten the information from the private party that they needed to understand the intrusion by the spring of 2016.
More telling was earlier questioning by House Intelligence Committee member, Rep. Will Hurd (R-TX), who had been a CIA officer for a decade. On March 20, 2017 while he was still FBI director, Comey evidenced some considerable discomfort as he tried to explain to the committee why the FBI did not insist on getting physical access to the DNC computers and do its own forensics:
HURD: So there was about a year between the FBI's first notification of some potential problems with the DNC network and then that information getting on -- getting on Wikileaks.
COMEY: Yes, sir.
HURD: ...when did the DNC provide access for -- to the FBI for your technical folks to review what happened?
COMEY: Well we never got direct access to the machines themselves. The DNC in the spring of 2016 hired a firm that ultimately shared with us their forensics from their review of the system. ...
HURD: ...So, Director FBI notified the DNC early, before any information was put on Wikileaks -- and when you -- have still been never been given access to any of the technical or the physical machines that were that were hacked by the Russians.
COMEY: That's correct although we got the forensics from the pros that they hired -- which again, best practice is always to get access to the machines themselves, but this my folks tell me was an appropriate substitute.
Comey Spikes Deal With Assange
Director Comey's March 20, 2017 testimony to the House Intelligence Committee came at the same time he was scuttling months-long negotiations between Assange and lawyers representing the DOJ and CIA to grant some limited immunity for the WikiLeaks founder. In return, Assange offered to: (1) redact "some classified CIA information he might release in the future," and (2) "provide technical evidence and discussion regarding who did not engage in the DNC releases."
Investigative journalist John Solomon, quoting WikiLeaks' intermediary with the government, broke this story, based on "interviews and a trove of internal DOJ documents turned over to Senate investigators. It would be a safe assumption that Assange was offering to prove that Russia was not WikiLeaks' source of the DNC emails, something Assange has repeatedly said.
That, of course, would have been the last thing Comey would have wanted.
On March 31, 2017, WikiLeaks released the most damaging disclosure up to that point from what it called "Vault 7" a treasure trove of CIA cyber-tools leaked from CIA files. This disclosure featured the tool "Marble Framework," which enabled the CIA to hack into computers, disguise who hacked in, and falsely attribute the hack to someone else by leaving so-called tell-tale signs like Cyrillic, for example.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
3
3
2
