The First Big Leak, December 9, 2016
Origin of the Russiagate ICA - Part 5
Washington Post
In the evening of December 9, 2016, Entous, Nakashima and Miller published one of the two or three most important stories in the entire Russiagate corpus. Using the same URL as their morning story on the ICA announcement, their entirely new evening article [1] reported that “the CIA has concluded in a secret assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win the presidency, rather than just to undermine confidence in the U.S. electoral system”. This was also the first (or one of the first) articles in which (questionable) Russiagate narratives were promoted by leaking “officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity”.
This leaked “information” would subsequently become the most publicized finding in the ICA and its impact lingers to this day.
The Washington Post article also strongly indicates that the mystery information in the November 29, 2016 CIA briefing (and presumably the redactions in Clapper testimony) was the assessment that “Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Trump win” and not just to “undermine confidence”.
With the leak being made public, the White House-CIA-SSCI choreography was more or less complete.
Another important claim in the Washington Post article has disappeared from view, but attracted attention at the time: they stated that intel agencies had “identified individuals with connections to the Russian government who provided WikiLeaks” with the DNC emails; that the individuals were said to be “actors known to the intelligence community” and “‘one step’ removed from the Russian government, rather than government employees”; and that the intel agencies did not have “specific intelligence showing officials in the Kremlin ‘directing’” the transfer to Wikileaks:
Intelligence agencies have identified individuals with connections to the Russian government who provided WikiLeaks with thousands of hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee and others, including Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, according to U.S. officials. Those officials described the individuals as actors known to the intelligence community and part of a wider Russian operation to boost Trump and hurt Clinton’s chances….
…
A senior U.S. official said there were minor disagreements among intelligence officials about the agency’s assessment, in part because some questions remain unanswered. For example, intelligence agencies do not have specific intelligence showing officials in the Kremlin “directing” the identified individuals to pass the Democratic emails to WikiLeaks, a second senior U.S. official said. Those actors, according to the official, were “one step” removed from the Russian government, rather than government employees. Moscow has in the past used middlemen to participate in sensitive intelligence operations so it has plausible deniability.
Within a few weeks, intelligence agencies purported to identify GRU as the agency responsible for passing DNC emails to Wikileaks and to have specific intelligence that the operation was not only directed by “officials in the Kremlin”, but specifically authorized by Putin himself. In substantial contradiction to the December 9, 2016 nattarive.
New York Times
In the evening of December 9, 2016, like the Washington Post, the New York Times substituted an entirely new article at the URL used for its commonplace morning announcement of the ICA.[2]
They reported that a key element in the intel agency assessment that Russia was promoting Trump’s candidacy was their assessment that Russia had also hacked the RNC computer system, but hadn’t released information from that hack. However, the RNC denied that the RNC had been similarly hacked.
American intelligence agencies have concluded with “high confidence” that Russia acted covertly in the latter stages of the presidential campaign to harm Hillary Clinton’s chances and promote Donald J. Trump, according to senior administration officials.
They based that conclusion, in part, on another finding — which they say was also reached with high confidence — that the Russians hacked the Republican National Committee’s computer systems in addition to their attacks on Democratic organizations, but did not release whatever information they gleaned from the Republican networks.
Seven years later, we still don’t know the basis for the damaging intel assessment that Russia supposedly preferred Trump: is it possible that the assessment depended on something as flimsy as the non-hacking or non-release of RNC emails?
Contemporary Commentary
Glenn Greenwald, then at The Intercept[3], acidly observed that nothing in the WaPo or NYT articles constituted evidence.
There is still no such evidence for any of these claims. What we have instead are assertions, disseminated by anonymous people, completely unaccompanied by any evidence, let alone proof. As a result, none of the purported evidence — still — can be publicly seen, reviewed, or discussed. Anonymous claims leaked to newspapers about what the CIA believes do not constitute proof, and certainly do not constitute reliable evidence that substitutes for actual evidence that can be reviewed. Have we really not learned this lesson yet?
Greenwald’s criticism remained valid even after the ICA was published, as it too consisted of assertions and did not provide supporting evidence for its key claim that Russia
Marcy Wheeler, who was closely following these events in real time, commented[4] immediately that the leaked story, which she attributed to CIA and/or Democrat Senators [on the SSCI], was “designed to make the White House-order review more urgent and influence the outcome”:
This story was leaked within hours of the time the White House announced it was calling for an all-intelligence community review of the Russia intelligence, offered without much detail. Indeed, this story was leaked and published as an update to that story.
Which is to say, the CIA and/or people in Congress (this story seems primarily to come from Democratic Senators) leaked this, apparently in response to President Obama’s not terribly urgent call to have all intelligence agencies weigh in on the subject of Russian influence, after weeks of Democrats pressuring him to release more information. It was designed to both make the White House-ordered review more urgent and influence the outcome.
Wheeler immediately drew attention to the reporting that there were (supposedly) “minor disagreements” within the agencies, acidly pointing out the previous bad history of such disagreements being papered over in the Iraqi WMD assessment. She noted that the assessed linkage depended critically on showing that the documents received by Wikileaks originated from the hack attributed to GRU (rather than a parallel leak or hack from the poorly secured DNC server):
Another senior US official (or maybe the very same one) says there are “minor disagreements.”
Remember: we went to war against Iraq, which turned out to have no WMD, in part because no one read the “minor disagreements” from a few agencies about some aluminum tubes. A number of Senators who didn’t read that footnote closely (and at least one that did) are involved in this story. What we’re being told is there are some aluminum tube type disagreements.
Let’s hear about those disagreements this time, shall we?
This is the part that has always been missing in the past: how the documents got from GRU, which hacked the DNC and John Podesta, to Wikileaks, which released them. It appears that CIA now thinks they know the answer: some people one step removed from the Russian government, funneling the documents from GRU hackers (presumably) to Wikileaks to be leaked, with the intent of electing Trump.
Seven years later, Wheeler’s original questions remain unresolved. They were unresolved in the ICA. And the relevant section in the 2020 SSCI Report was entirely redacted. Further, the description of the persons who had supposedly been identified by the CIA as having transferred emails to Wikileaks (“‘one step’ removed from the Russian government, rather than government employees”) was inconsistent with the Mueller indictment of two GRU employees alleged to have been responsible for transferring the emails under the Guccifer.
[1] The replacement of one story with the other is documented in successive versions at archive.org: https://web.archive.org/web/20161211005730/https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/obama-orders-review-of-russian-hacking-during-presidential-campaign/2016/12/09/31d6b300-be2a-11e6-94ac-3d324840106c_story.html; https://archive.is/qRbm8
[2] http://newsdiffs.org/diff/1314767/1314800/www.nytimes.com/2016/12/09/us/obama-russia-election-hack.html; https://archive.is/hSeD8
[3] https://theintercept.com/2016/12/10/anonymous-leaks-to-the-washpost-about-the-cias-russia-beliefs-are-no-substitute-for-evidence/
[4] https://www.emptywheel.net/2016/12/09/unpacking-new-cia-leak-dont-ignore-aluminum-tube-footnote/