colfax_m
Diamond Member
- Nov 18, 2019
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A prosecutor could indict a ham sandwich. There is no indictment that will result in a Court determining whether or not the Russians hacked the DNC, and that's because they cannot prove in Court that they did.No. It's completely true. You can't walk into court without accusations like this and no examination of the hard drives.
Of course you can. Especially when you have mountains of corroborating evidence. Server logs. Traffic reports. Intelligence from other countries. You honestly think they physically having the hard drive is necessary? Why?
Here, use this copy made by a Hillary Clinton Campaign Vender, you know, like Christopher Steele was a Hillary Campaign Vender, the copy is just a good!
You’re dodging the question. A forensic copy is a bit by bit copy of the server including their configuration, caches and activity. It’s better than the physical drives in some cases. What do you need the actual hardware for?
That's not evidence, that's an explanation for the LACK of evidence.
You asked the question. I gave you the answer.
The report’s use of that one word, “appear,” undercuts its suggestions that Mueller possesses convincing evidence that GRU officers stole "thousands of emails and attachments" from DNC servers. It is a departure from the language used in his July 2018 indictment, which contained no such qualifier:
That’s a really pathetic stretch. The evidence was sufficient for a grand jury to indict.
The report also concedes that Mueller’s team did not determine another critical component of the crime it alleges: how the stolen Democratic material was transferred to WikiLeaks. The July 2018 indictment of GRU officers suggested – without stating outright – that WikiLeaks published the Democratic Party emails after receiving them from Guccifer 2.0 in a file named "wk dnc linkI .txt.gpg" on or around July 14, 2016. But now the report acknowledges that Mueller has not actually established how WikiLeaks acquired the stolen information: "The Office cannot rule out that stolen documents were transferred to WikiLeaks through intermediaries who visited during the summer of 2016."
What relevance is this?
So how did we get here?
No one can prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Russia is guilty of hacking the Democratic National Committee and prominent Democrats.
Russian Cyberespionage: Does Mueller Have Proof beyond a Reasonable Doubt? | National Review
This was always a farce. We have always known that no one can establish to the required standard of proof that Russia conducted an espionage attack on the election, so it is also impossible to prove that anyone conspired with Russia to do so. There never was a criminal case, EVER.
That's why a special counsel was appointed without specifying any crimes that the Justice Department is purportedly too conflicted to investigate (as the pertinent regulations require). This infirmity was papered over by calling the probe a “counterintelligence” investigation — which is not a criminal investigation but an information-gathering exercise.
No crime was identified, because they didn't have one. There are two reasons for this, contacts between Trump associates and the Russian regime do not prove they conspired together in an espionage scheme. That simply shows that they never had a case. The more basic problem is that they never COULD have a case. A Russia espionage operation could not be proved beyond a reasonable doubt, so it would never be possible to prove the Trump campaign colluded in one.
What is the proof that Russia conducted a cyberespionage operation against the 2016 election?
The premise that Russia interfered in the election has never, and will never be proved in court. Instead, it is based on an intelligence judgment by three agencies, the FBI, CIA and NSA, announced under the auspices of a fourth, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
All four agencies were run by Obama appointees. The Obama administration had a history of politicizing intelligence to serve administration narratives, and the intelligence judgment in question cannot be divorced from politics because it was announced just as Obama’s party was fashioning a narrative that Russian espionage had stolen the election from Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton. Now let's consider the nature of intelligence judgments — to contrast them with courtroom findings.
The objective of a criminal investigation is a prosecution, not a national-security judgment. In a prosecution, each essential element of the offense charged must be proved beyond a reasonable doubt. It was never possible to establish, to this standard of proof, that Russia is guilty of cyberespionage — at least in the absence of an accomplice witness involved in the hacking, which we have no evidence for, despite one of the most exhaustive of investigations.
The intelligence agencies may claim to have high confidence in their judgment about Russian espionage. But that does not mean this judgment could ever be proved in a criminal prosecution. In fact, the intelligence agencies’ own January 6 report on “Russia’s Influence Campaign Targeting the 2016 Presidential Election” flatly states: “Judgments are not intended to imply that we have proof that shows something to be a fact.” (Report, p. 13, Annex B, explaining “Estimative Language.”)
Let that sink in.
If a prosecutor presenting an indictment were to say, “This allegation is not intended to imply that we have proof that shows the allegation to be a fact,” the jury would say, “Not guilty.” Indeed, the judge would dismiss the case before it ever got to jury deliberations.
The agencies’ Russia report admits:
The information on which these judgments are based is often fragmentary and highly sensitive.The conclusions of Intel analysts are often highly debatable or wrong — which is to be expected: The information inputs are of varying quality, so the best output they can give you is often mere probability.
Courtrooms are not in the probability biz. The prosecutor’s remit is to prove facts to a near certainty because the result of a prosecution is the removal of fundamental freedoms: liberty, property, and in a capital case, even life. This is why evidentiary rules suppress evidence that fails the tests of authenticity and reliability (while intelligence analysts can factor such evidence in, so long as they account for its suspect nature). It is also why the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard is imposed in criminal cases — more demanding than the “preponderance of the evidence” standard in civil cases and the “probable cause” standard that applies to arrests or search warrants, both of which are themselves much more demanding than the supposition that frequently supports intelligence judgments. None of those standards were ever met in the Russian Collusion hoax, just this probability standard made by Obama Appointees, based on claims from a Hillary and DNC contractor.
No one could every prove what the agencies claimed to know. But this limitation is not the half of it.
The most critical physical evidence of Russian cyberespionage is the DNC server system alleged to have been hacked. Inexplicably (given how central the server system is to the controversy that has roiled the nation for a year), the Justice Department never compelled the surrender of this server system to the government so the FBI could conduct a forensic examination. Instead, for this essential analysis, we are expected to rely on CrowdStrike, a private DNC contractor.
Think about that: We’re to expect a jury in a criminal trial would simply accept non-law-enforcement conclusions paid for by the DNC, under circumstances in which
(a) the DNC is invested in the storyline that Russia is the culprit in its effort to steal the election from Mrs. Clinton;
(b) the DNC declined requests by the government to surrender its server system for FBI examination; and
(c) the incumbent Democratic administration’s Justice Department unaccountably refrained from demanding — by grand jury subpoena or search warrant — that the DNC’s server system be turned over to the FBI.
Not likely.
This state of play would not fly in a criminal prosecution — a point that is so obvious that no experienced prosecutors or investigators would be confident that they could make the case without seizing the physical evidence and conducting the government’s own investigation. And you’ll notice that Mueller brought no such case.
Besides the remorseless fact that the intelligence agencies’ judgment is just a probability assessment, not a fact, there are ongoing private investigations that cast doubt on the judgment’s probability.
The best known of these, to date, has been produced by the left-leaning Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), given notoriety by the left-leaning publication The Nation. The VIPS naysayers, who are primarily former NSA officials, contend that the operation against the DNC was a not an overseas hack but an insider theft —
“a download executed locally with a memory key or a similar portable data-storage device.”
This probability assessment is largely based on the transfer speeds of megabytes of DNC data. The speeds have been deduced from analyzing metadata in files published by the persona Guccifer 2.0, who claims to have hacked the DNC and whom our spy agencies conclude is a proxy for two Russian intelligence services.
The point is that our agencies are not offering courtroom-quality proof, as they forthrightly acknowledge. A Criminal case of espionage conspiracy, would have to prove the Russians guilty beyond a reasonable doubt to the unanimous satisfaction of twelve jurors. There simply is no suitable explanation for the government’s failure to inspect the server system. In combination with the inherent uncertainty of intelligence judgments, the government’s inability to produce intelligence sources as witnesses, and alternative theories of what happened posited by competent intelligence professionals (e.g., “It was an insider job, not a hack,” or “It was another hacker, not the Russians”) makes conviction impossible.
Couple this with the fact that everyone else in the equation has denied culpability:
Putin claims the Russians did not hack;If your response to this is to scream at me that none of these sources is credible, you are totally correct about that — but you’re missing the point. In criminal litigation, a prosecutor cannot prove a positive fact solely by a negative inference. You may believe that Putin, Guccifer, and Assange are inveterate liars; nevertheless, the thing they are denying is not proved by their having denied it. There has to be some solid proof that Russia did it; you don’t get there by establishing merely that a bunch of notorious liars say Russia didn’t do it.
Guccifer 2.0 claims no connection to the Russians; and
Julian Assange of WikiLeaks, which disseminated most of the emails for publication, claims his source was not Russia.
And that's the bottom line
There’s so much factual error in this column it’s hard to know where to start.
This was my favorite part:
This state of play would not fly in a criminal prosecution — a point that is so obvious that no experienced prosecutors or investigators would be confident that they could make the case without seizing the physical evidence and conducting the government’s own investigation. And you’ll notice that Mueller brought no such case.
Mueller did indeed bring such a case as he indicted many people for the hacking of the DNC a few months after this column was written.
So the central tenant of this column is factually false.
