On Monday, President Trump granted credence to Vladimir Putin’s account of the hacks of the Democratic National Committee and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, as well as Hillary Clinton’s campaign servers, had nothing to do with Russia.
On Monday, President Trump granted credence to Vladimir Putin’s account of the hacks of the Democratic National Committee and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, as well as Hillary Clinton’s campaign servers, had nothing to do with Russia. In doing so, he threw his own intelligence agencies under the bus. He has no evidence whatsoever to suggest that his intelligence agencies are wrong — but he does have a question he frequently posits, and that has been repeated ad nauseum by those on the right who question the official story: if the DNC was hacked by the Russians, why didn’t they turn over their servers to the FBI?
Trump explained:
But there’s one problem: the DNC did apparently cooperate with the FBI, according to the FBI. And they didn’t have to “turn over” their servers in order to provide the FBI with the information on the hacking, as is obvious from the Mueller indictment of 12 Russian hackers. How could the FBI have gathered information on those hackers without access to information from the DNC servers?
The Daily Beast has a good look at the underlying information from Kevin Poulson today. Here’s the relevant section:
So the DNC didn’t turn over its physical servers because they were still using those during the campaign — and the FBI had access to the imaging. Former FBI Director James Comey said he wanted direct access to the DNC servers for purposes of accessing the live network — and that’s where the DNC turned the FBI down. That’s not uncommon, apparently:
So the DNC wasn’t covering for a leak of material to the Russians. This is all apparently misdirection. And if it’s not, it would behoove those theorizing that it is to explain how the FBI got access to all the information they needed to indict those 12 Russian citizens.
