PT, thank for the very detailed description of the entire story surrounding the supposed Russian hack of the DNC emails.

I always find myself screaming at the T.V. whenever a supposed reporter mentions the supposed Russian hack of the DNC computers as if such an event is settled history.

I came to this summary today after I had turned my T.V. off since all the news is now about the "bombs" being mailed to the Clintons and Obamas. (I was afraid a story line would soon continue that the bombs were from Russia via the White House.

I can no longer feel certain that anything reported in the "news" is true and wonder what part of it is made up from thin air.

And I am sad that such a huge number of American citizens simply no longer care what is true or what is not true. They believe only what they want to believe.

Mostly I am sad that Seth Rich lived and died and few seem to want to know the facts surrounding his death.

"the news is now about the "bombs" being mailed to the Clintons and Obamas."

Did anyone else notice that the stamps were not cancelled?

Which makes it a lie that they were "mailed" from Florida!

There is a local angle to the Seth Rich murder story I have not seen discussed. Consider:

But the circumstances and facts surrounding the murder were strange.
Seth was shot in the back. Nothing was taken from his body—not his
watch, not his wallet and not his credit cards.

The story promulgated by the MSM and Wikipedia is that the Washington DC MPD believe the crime was a botched robbery.

But attempted robberies are not normally a unique event.
If it was a botched robbery, it seems almost certain that the perpetrator(s) would, having failed in this attempt, try again to execute a robbery.
And use the same MO (modus operandi).
But I have seen no reports of other such homicide/robbery combinations.
If this was truly a unique event, how would that be possible?
Is it really plausible that the perps would kill one person, fail to get anything of value from the homicide, then say "Oh shucks, that didn't work, won't do that again."?
There certainly are reports of serial robberies in Washington.
Very hard to believe this is an exception.

Yet there is no discussion of this of which I am aware,
and the Wikipedia editors controlling the Wikipedia page for the murder of Seth Rich absolutely prohibit discussion, even on their "Talk Page" of such questions.
E.g., their deletion of the question I asked
here, under the heading "Why the "conspiracy theory" pejorative?"
(which resulted in not only being deleted but a "Sanction" against me for daring to ask the question).

PT,
So is the theory, more or less, that 1. As a Sanders supporter, Rich was appalled by how the DNC screwed Sanders (and maybe some other things he learned also contributed to his decision to engage in espionage against the DNC) 2. Rich decides to expose DNC corruption. 3. Rich downloads the files locally and then passes them to wikileaks. 4. CIA/NSA is already watching wikileaks due to Manning, etc) and "sees' that Rich has passed files. 5. Intel filters up to Obama, Brennan, NSA people, Clinton and others that Rich has passed info to Wikileaks and then wikileaks announces and publishes the material. 6. The DNC + Obama and other leftist deep staters concoct the Russian hacking meme to distract from the content of the material as well as to begin discredit Trump (and perhaps even develop a means of deposing him should he actually be elected). 7. Rich is the wild card. He could confess that he did it all by himself - and he could create a spectacle by explaining why. 8. They kill Rich to remove the only serious threat to their nefarious plot....?

"Now there is new information, courtesy of the National Security Agency aka NSA, that confirms that the NSA has Top Secret and Secret documents that are responsive to a FOIA request for material on Seth Rich and his contacts with Julian Assange."

What's your source?

The source is the letter that the lawyer, Ty Clevenger, received from the NSA. I have seen the letter.

You don't really expect him to tell you, do you?

Letter has been released. http://lawflog.com/?attachm...

Another case of "Arkancide"?

Vince Foster?

The Serb?

There is a connection between Seth and the Pakistani guy who had free rein with a lot of dem congresspeople's computers!!! His protector, Lil Debbie WS!!!

There is a Podesta email where he states something to the effect that the person be taught a lesson as an example, guilty or not!

All,

Ty Clevenger has posted the 4 October letter from the NSA on his ‘LawFlog’ blog.

See http://lawflog.com/?attachm... .

The request related to four categories of material. The first had to do with communications between Rich and a variety of people. It is interesting that the names of three figures with whom it is not suggested he communicated are Included, the precise phrasing being 'David Kendall, Cheryl Mills, and Heather Samuelson are the attorneys who represented Hillary Clinton.'

Apparently Clevenger has been trying, so far unsuccessfully, to get the trio investigated in relation to the deletion of e-mails from the secret server.

(See https://www.washingtontimes... .)

The second category relates to material concerning phone calls involving Rich on the day he died and the previous day, the third to possible financial transactions involved him and an interesting range of people.

The fourth category covers correspondence involving people in or involved with Congress.

The NSA response refers to an earlier reply dated 7 November 2017 in relation to the first three categories. So far I cannot trace this, but I would assume that this refused access to the material – if it did not there would clearly be rather more than fifteen documents with 32 pages. So these presumably all relate to communications involving Congress.

Another important thread in all this relates to the 10 May 2016 meeting between George Papadopoulos and Alexander Downer. Information has been trickling out about what the former said in his interview with members of the House Judiciary and House Oversight Committees on Thursday. And the episode is dealt with in a book by the ‘Washington Post’ reporter Greg Miller, released earlier this month.

The sequence appears to have been that Papodopoulos was quoted in an interview in the ‘Times’ on 4 May 2016 saying that our then Prime Minister, David Cameron, should apologise for calling Trump ‘divisive, stupid and wrong’. Two days later, an Australian embassy official who knew him suggested that Papadopoulos meet Downer.

According to the version restated by Miller, the FIB ‘Crossfire Hurricane’ investigation opened on 31 July, following the ‘WikiLeaks’ publication of the DNC emails on 22 July – with supposedly a belated communication from Downer about the Papadopoulos meeting being an important trigger. If you work for the ‘Washington Post’, you will of course take all this on trust. Serious journalists would not.

While the complications of the role of the mysterious Maltese Joseph Mifsud still do not seem adequately ironed out, the suggestion that he told Papadopoulos that he had learned that the Russian government had ‘dirt’ on Clinton in the form of ‘thousands’ of her emails may well be true. Moreover, it would not necessarily be part of an entrapment operation.

It is perfectly possible that Mifsud did actually retail what he had heard in Moscow, and while this could have been inaccurate gossip, it could also have been accurate.

As I have said before, if there was anything I would find more surprising than the notion that the DNC material came to ‘WikiLeaks’ from the Russians, it would be that these could not penetrate the obviously appallingly lax security not just of Clinton’s server but of the whole Democratic network. (People who could hire the Awan clan are obviously either totally inept at security or totally unconcerned about it.)

(For updates from the ‘Daily Caller’ on the Papadopoulos interview and Miller book, see https://dailycaller.com/201... and https://dailycaller.com/201... .)

At that point, one comes up against the question of how much substance there is in the claims by Yaacov Apelbaum about the central role in ‘Russiagate’ of the Hakluyt/Holdingham group, with which Downer was certainly involved.

See https://apelbaum.wordpress....

A possible scenario then would be that, some time in late April or early May, the kind of surveillance on Assange and figures known to be associated with him which we can be reasonably confident was being carried out both by GCHQ and MI6 alerted people to the fact that there had been a leak of material from the DNC.

The accident of Cameron’s – characteristically foolish – statement and the Papadopoulos interview could then have led on to his meeting with Downer being set up, at almost exactly the time when ‘CrowdStrike’ was beginning to work on the DNC servers.

What could have been a piece of accurate gossip out of Russia – although of course it could have been inaccurate gossip or indeed planted disinformation – then encouraged the notion that the leak could be treated as a hack.

Having gone down that route, the possibility of Seth Rich talking obviously became acutely dangerous to all kinds of people.

An accurate account of what was happened was finally passed to ‘Fox News’, sourced in substantial measure from figures involved with Assange, but the company ‘chickened out’ in the face of pressure.

The Malia Zimmerman story, incidentally, can be viewed at http://www.raidersmerciless... .

If the FOIA request is authentic then it would be in the FOIA logs of the agency which are themselves FOIA-able (in general anyway).

I would speculate that the material might show that they rooted around for stuff like this, due to the media attention, and thus, some records exist about the idea.

Also re the metadata timing, while the idea of fast copies is reasonable, it is also possible to write a small script which would calculate a fresh set of datetime values at a different rate than the original, wouldn't this be less than 30 lines? (like they could have simply overwritten the metadata date values, from slower copying to an illusion of faster copying.)

On the metadata, NO. I checked with Bill Binney.

Excellent summary. How did the author get the info on NSA's response to the FOIA request? - cant find it otherwise online.

If Seth had made no attempt to contact Wikileaks - and if the FBI didn't look at his laptop because "we don't investigate murders", then why does the NSA have 32 pages of secret/top secret memos on him?

This article should have cited the Sy Hersh phone tape - Sy, via Butowsky, is the evident source of the Fox report: https://www.youtube.com/wat...

No, Sy was not the source for the Fox report. Two of the sources are closely tied to Julian's lawyer.

With the leaks already out, if they wanted to make an example, they could have made his life hell and heaped blame on him for them losing the election, they could have made an example out of him without taking needless risks and without leaving anything to ambiguity (so that it would unquestionably deter others from doing the same).

So, even if his death wasn't just him accidentally getting shot twice in the torso during a struggle following a bungled robbery attempt in which nothing was stolen... revenge still would have been a questionable motive.

I'd say more but it's probably best for the sake of self-preservation and to prevent opponents from strawman attacks if I don't. Good luck figuring out who could have had a motive.

I don't think that revenge had anything to do with it. If Seth was the real leaker, he was in a position to blow apart the Guccifer 2.0 scam which was the centerpiece of the "Russia interfered" hoax. The conspirators would be much more secure with him out of the way. Also, I suspect that Shawn Lucas may have been one of the friends of Seth who - according to Sy Hersh's account - had access to Seth's dropbox. So that might explain his very mysterious death - a drug overdose involving multiple drugs in someone never known to use drugs.

Adam Carter,

On the question of who might have had a motive to kill Seth Rich, some aspects of the background are worth bearing in mind.

It is very clear that Hillary Clinton divides opinion, very sharply – actually, in Britain almost as much as in the United States. On the one hand, I have found even people whose judgement I would once have trusted quite extraordinarily reluctant to accept that there was anything reprehensible about her glaring security breaches, let alone about anything else she has done.

On the other, there are many people who loathe her and her husband so much that they will believe any mud that is slung at the pair.

What is clear is that, both from a cybersecurity and other perspectives – the Awan family saga being an obvious instance, and the networks in which Huma Abedin is involved perhaps another – the whole Democratic apparatus in which Hillary was a central figure was as leaky as an old sieve.

In such a situation, if I was for example Vladimir Putin, and none of my intelligence services had been able to supply me with something close to a complete set of Hillary Clinton’s emails, I would have wanted to know why.

But that, of course, emphatically does not mean that the Russians are a likely conduit for material to have reached Assange. And it also means that, if by any chance Putin and General Gerasimov, who has overall responsibility for the Main Directorate of the General Staff, had decided they wanted the material made public, they could have been expected to look for ‘plausible deniability.’

When the ex-GCHQ ‘twerp’ Matt Tait, then supposedly running a consultancy, ‘Capital Alpha Security’, which only ever filed ‘accounts for a dormant company’, and has now been compulsorily wound up, immediately produced evidence backing up the incoherent claims by Dmitri Alperovitch of ‘CrowdStrike’, it was clear that we were dealing with an amateurish cover-up.

The notion that the name and patronymic ‘Felix Dzerzhinsky’ is likely to have been used by the Main Directorate, previously known as the GRU, could only have been dreamed up by people who are totally ignorant of the history of the relations between the General Staff and the ‘Cheka’ in the early Soviet period, or, at least, are relying on the ignorance of others.

In addition to this, we have the fact that the initial memoranda in the dossier published by ‘BuzzFeed’ and – supposedly – authored by Christopher Steele, are both a mess, and contradict the version put out by Alperovitch and Tait. The Ellen Nakashima piece was on 14 June, the first memorandum, which contained the ‘golden showers’ claim, is dated 20 June – which of course may not be accurate.

There is then a pause, until the first treatment of Russian cyber operations, in a memorandum dated ‘26 July 2015.’ This is clearly a mistype for 2016, so that the date, if correct, is more than a fortnight after the murder of Rich, which was on 10 July. This memorandum makes no mention of the GRU, claims that ‘FSB leads on cyber’, and also that there had been ‘limited success in attacking top foreign targets’.

The next memorandum in the sequence, which is undated, introduces Paul Manafort and Carter Page into the ‘rogues’ gallery’, and contains some very interesting observations about the cyber side. So ‘Source E’ – described as an ‘ethnic Russian close associate’ of Trump – supposedly explains that the ‘intelligence network’ being used against Hillary Clinton comprises three elements:

‘Firstly there were agents/facilitators within the Democratic Party structure itself; secondly Russian emigre and associated offensive cyber operators based in the US; and thirdly, state-sponsored cyber operatives working in Russia.’

The fourth memorandum, dated 19 July, which if accurate means it would have had to have been written before the second, then makes the accusations about the secret meetings between Page and Sechin.

All this stinks of a hastily-organised cover-up operation, set in motion after it became clear that highly compromising material was going to appear on ‘WikiLeaks’ – but which moved into higher gear after the murder of Rich.

The reference to ‘agents/facilitators within the Democratic Party itself’ reads as though it might well have been intended to provide a basis for a ‘fall-back’ position, if either the problems of the ‘hacking’ story became too glaring, or it became impossible to prevent more information coming out about the role of Rich in supplying material to WikiLeaks.

Also perhaps relevant is the fact that the initial meeting between Carter Page and Stefan Halper occurred at a symposium in Cambridge, UK, entitled ‘2016’s Race to Change the World’, which opened on 11 July, the day after Rich’s death – and was also attended by Sir Richard Dearlove.

All this adds to the strong impression that panic which may well have been materially increased by Rich’s murder could have been one of the reasons why the ‘cover-up’ took off into a kind of stratosphere of absurdity in the period that followed it.

Reverting to the question you raise of possible motives for the murder, precisely what the panic suggests is indeed that it is not obvious that anyone in the Democratic Party apparatus had any incentive to assassinate Rich.

As was very evident at the time from, for example, comments on the ‘MailOnline’ site, very many people who disliked Hillary immediately took for granted that Rich had been ‘Arkancided’, so his death then became further evidence of her innate villainy, and also confirmation that he was, in fact, the source of the ‘WikiLeaks’ material.

However, precisely because of the sieve-like nature of the Democratic Party apparatus, a situation had been created where there were actually a wide variety of people, in a wide variety of places, who could have been taking an intense interest in the kind of material which appeared on ‘WikiLeaks.’

Such people might have been able, through all kinds of routes, to find out a good deal both about what had been leaked, how and why, and what might be leaked in the future.

While I agree that revenge is not the most obvious motive, there are two qualifications. As we have seen with MBS, people can badly misjudge the impact of their actions, which becomes more relevant if one starts casting the net wider in looking for possible suspects. Also, preventing further disclosures could conceivably have been a motive.

Equally, however, it is not entirely beyond the bounds of possibility that someone who was well aware of the conclusions people would draw could have seen having Rich murdered as a way of striking at Hillary.

A regrettable consequence of the way in which it has been possible to use atrocity to shape ‘narratives’, which has been facilitated by the increasingly patent disinterest of the mainstream media in trying to get at the truth, is that there are very many players who, for diverse reasons, could have seen their interests furthered by an assassination of this kind.

How's this for a motive? Imran Awan ran the DNC servers. When it was discovered in May/June that the emails had been downloaded, a search was launched and suspicion fell on Seth. Worried that the Pakistani penetration of the DNC and the Congress might be uncovered, Seth was silenced. I offer this as one possible theory.

PT,

I think it is very much a possible theory. And indeed, reading what Mark McCarty and Eric Newhill wrote, I think I may have greatly underestimated the extent to which people on Hillary’s side could have thought Seth Rich too dangerous to be left alive.

And I also may not have have given adequate weight to the possibility that a not particularly unnatural fear could have overridden the patent dangers involved in following what I should perhaps have seen as an obvious logic.

One point raised by Eric’s comments. It seems to me quite likely that the alarm was in fact raised by monitoring what came in to WikiLeaks, rather than what went out of the DNC. If this was so, however, it would be less likely that the monitoring was done directly by the CIA/NSA. It would be much more likely that this was in the first instance primarily an MI6/GCHQ function.

It may or may not be relevant here that Craig Murray has given a lot of people a lot of grief – not least, in exposing the way that ‘loops of lies’ about ‘SIGINT’ were used in the attempt to use the ‘false flag’ at Ghouta to inveige you and us into another disastrous intervention in the Middle East.

(See https://www.craigmurray.org... .)

Be that as it may, it seems to me a reasonable hypothesis that an enormous amount of effort – including both ‘HUMINT’ and ‘SIGINT’ – has been deployed by British intelligence agencies to ensure that all channels by which information could pass to and from Assange are monitored.

Of particular interest could have been the kind of covert means of organising payments which may have been used to transfer money to Seth Rich and his brother.

One might then be some way towards a better explanation of some of the absurd incoherencies in the stories told by and about ‘CrowdStrike’, which struck a lot of us quite early.

It is perfectly possible that 7 May is the actual date on which the company was called in. However, this would not have been because a problem with the DNC computer systems had been identified by that organisation – but because a receipt of information by ‘WikiLeaks’ had been identified, and probably by the British.

At that point, it is perfectly possible that Alperovitch et al identified many ‘hacks’ into the servers, some of which could indeed have been by organisations and individuals which could perfectly possibly be linked to the Russians (but with the fact not being palpable, because these would have looked for ‘plausible deniability.’)

Quite rapidly, the ‘real’ investigation, of which that by ‘CrowdStrike’ could have been a part, but only part, would have identified Rich. But this would only have happened in time for him to stop sending material originating later than 25 May. The search for a ‘cover story’ would have begun at some time during this period.

The first stage in this would have involved the instruction to leave all laptops in the office on 10 June. Thereafter, the attempts to create a ‘cover story’ developed rather rapidly.

It would then becomes unsurprising that a former GCHQ person – Matt Tait – should have played an important role, but also that the integration of the different parts of the story was, to put it mildly, imperfect.

Part of this, however, is also likely to have had to do with the fact that both Glenn Simpson and Christopher Steele are, quite patently, incompetent.

Unfortunately, I was ‘away from base’, celebrating a birthday with old friends, with limited internet access, when the Colonel informed us that he had used ‘Our Man in Havana’ as a teaching aid.

But it has become clear to me that an enormous amount of damage has resulted from the fact that MSM journalists have read too much of the productions of David John Moore Cornwell (aka John Le Carré), and not enough Graham Greene.

I am still trying to think this through, but another Graham Greene novel – ‘The Quiet American’, of which the films are unfortunately awful, by contrast with that of ‘Our Man in Havana’ – comes into the picture.

A key point about this is that ‘tails wag dogs.’

So, having been persuaded that I had underestimated the likelihood of people in the Hillary camp deciding that they had no realistic option but to remove Seth Rich from the picture, it also occurs to me that a corollary of your suggestion is that a lot of other people – among them, people involved with the Awans not in the United States – might have thought that they had an overriding interest in so doing.

Moreover, they could realistically have calculated that – as with Alden Pyle when General Thé escalates his ‘false flags’ – those who had thought they were in control would then have had no realistic option but to cover up.

To digress, it seems to me likely that this is the premise on which MBS has operated – and also, that a lot of people have given him every reason to think his confidence was justified.

However, sometimes, when the ‘tails’ have been able to wag the ‘dogs’ for a very long time, it goes to their head.

After contemplating the likely intelligence and propaganda efforts of HMG over the last 15 years or so I am puzzled as to motivation. Why? Why? The UK is now a regional power for which events in places like Syria would seem to have little to do with the welfare of Britain. Why? I suppose that the same question can be asked for the US and I have. In re "Our man in Havana" I think there are many issues raised in the work that apply directly to the trade of espionage.

Colonel Lang,

The question why? is a very interesting but also very dispiriting one, but also one which it is quite hard to get one’s head round. I hope to have something more coherent to say about it.

Among many reasons, however, there has been a kind of intellectual disintegration.

If I had the talent and energy, I might write a sequel to the ‘Quiet American’, to be entitled ‘The Noisy Englishmen.’ It would feature a series of inept conspiracies, involving ludicrous means used in support of preposterous ends, necessitating one ham-fisted cover-up after another.

The central characters might be loosely based on Christopher Steele, Matt Tait, Eliot Higgins, and our former UN Ambassador Matthew Rycroft, author of the July 2002 Downing Street memorandum, in which Sir Richard Dearlove was quoted explaining how, in Washington, ‘the intelligence and the facts were being fixed around the policy.’

Subsequently, of course, he set about colluding in the process. And, sixteen years later, Dearlove is still at it, with ‘Russiagate’ – and the product being actually accepted much more uncritically by the MSM than it was then.

And that is one of the problems – nobody any longer pays any penalty for failure, or indeed feels any sense of shame about it..

DH

I agree with this.

There is a 1990's British historian (whose name I've been trying to rediscover without success) who wrote a sunny book saying Britain should return to its imperialist ways to bring light to the dark and repressive world we live in. It was a great hit with Blair and his henchmen. Blair used its arguments in his notorious 1999 Chicago neo-conservative/liberal interventionist speech.

As the Colonel eloquently asks:

"I am puzzled as to motivation. Why? Why? The UK is now a regional power for which events in places like Syria would seem to have little todo with the welfare of Britain. Why?"

I'd draw attention to "The Brideshead Revisited" generation especially at Oxford in the early 80's. Unashamedly celebrating their wealth and upper middle class privately-educated backgrounds, they viewed themselves as a gilded, golden generation, preened in narcissiam, adept at networking and self-promotion.

They are the generation now in power - politically, financially, in the deep state. Their fantasy of again ruling the world (with American and Zionist aid) has led to a series of catastrophic blunders and overreaches in both foreign and domestic policies. Our economic power - the base of any imperial power - is shrinking daily. All the Oxfordites (chief amongst them Theresa May, Boris Johnson and Michael Gove) are still playing Oxford Union/PPE games and stabbing each other joyously in the back as though there's no tomorrow. It most ressembles the halluciogenic decadence of the court of late Imperial Rome.

(I don't include the Maurice Cowling-ites in this fandango because they strike me as more Little Englanders. Though Peterhouse is of course, shamefully, the HQ of the Henry Jackson Society).

How did the DNC determine that Seth Rich did the download? They killed him on mere suspicion that he could have been the insider stealing data? That seems like an extreme response carried out on mere suspicion. The Awan/Pakistan connection was eventually revealed and it went nowhere; basically fizzled out in the media. On the other hand, if one of our agencies actually knew it was Rich passing info to Wikileaks via a spying program, and that Rich, as a Sanders supporter, was doing so because he harbored deep animosity toward the Clinton campaign and the DNC, then Rich would have to be silenced. This theory would implicate members of the deep state. Perhaps, that is too far fetched or disturbing to consider?

"Accidentally shot" in the back in a city with strict gun control laws at 4 am is rather humorous. How many people are robbed in D.C @ 4am?

Can you please clarify one point. You say Guccifer 2.0's DNC emails released in mid June, 2016 contain "meta data" and then that Binney analyzed "data" from an intrusion on July 5, 2016. Clearly Binney couldn't have analyzed Guccifer 2.0's emails meta data (inconsistent timing) ... and could it be that Guccifer's hack was performed at the slower rate expected over the internet? Thanks

But he went back and analyzed the docs released on 15 June as well. Please focus on the central point--the FBI claims that Guccifer 2.0 is a GRU front but the meta data on the documents don't support the claim that they were obtained via an internet hack.

Maybe there's a typo "Julian Assange insisted that Russia had anything to do with putting the DNC trove into his hands." Perhaps the quote is 'had nothing' or 'did not have anything'.

Thanks. Good catch.

Ellipsis, linguistically? Don't you automatically add what is omitted? ... Russia had(n't) anything ...

Guccifer 2.0 was nothing but an elaborate joke.

When I turn something I am writing into a non sequitur, or worse reverse its meaning, I call it a f*ck up (linguistically), correct it and thank anyone who cared enough to take the time to read me in the first place and to lend me a hand. What I try not to do is to hide behind a misapplied grammatical device. Know what I mean buttercup... ?

The NSA's FOIA response that they have traffic involving Rich and Assange reinforces both Assange's assertion and Binney's analysis that the DNC was not hacked, the data was downloaded. Assange's uncategorical denial that the Ruskies did it is important. It deserves to remain unambiguous and not to be subject to uncontrolled ellipsisical seizure.

Guccifer 2.0 seemed pretty earnest. As yet we don't have much of a clue who he was working for.

PT's info is not from a FOIA request.

When I turn something .... Know what I mean buttercup... ?

No, I am afraid, you are way too sophisticated for me.