Since before the election, President Donald Trump has been bedeviled by accusations that the Russians hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) to help him get elected. But a recent report may put those allegations to rest.
A July 24 open memo to Trump from a group of former intelligence officers called Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) uses forensic evidence to show the emails were not hacked, and lays out a theory to explain why fake evidence was used to create the impression that the Russians had hacked the DNC’s emails.
Key to the VIPS case is the distinction between leaking (physically downloading files onto a data storage device, such as a flash drive, and conveying them to others) and hacking (removing files remotely from a computer through the internet). In VIPS’s account of the DNC emails case, there are two significant instances of data being leaked, with forensic evidence that shows each case was not a Russian hack.
The first leak of DNC files was announced by Julian Assange of WikiLeaks, who said on June 12, 2016, that he had “emails related to Hillary Clinton which are pending publication.”
The second leak took place on July 5, 2016, and, according to VIPS, was undertaken to distract from the content that Assange was presumed to have, redirecting attention toward Russian interference.
On July 22, three days before the Democratic National Convention, Assange published DNC emails that showed the committee was biased toward Hillary Clinton and against her opponent, Bernie Sanders.
According to VIPS, the DNC was waiting for this shoe to drop, and in preparation for it, the case that the Russians were behind the June 12 leak had been swiftly established.
