Taking Back Our Stolen History
“60 Minutes” Runs Propaganda Cover Piece for Crowdstrike who Concocted the Alleged “Russian Hack”
“60 Minutes” Runs Propaganda Cover Piece for Crowdstrike who Concocted the Alleged “Russian Hack”

“60 Minutes” Runs Propaganda Cover Piece for Crowdstrike who Concocted the Alleged “Russian Hack”

60 Minutes attacks President Donald Trump and The Gateway Pundit in another shoddy hit piece. The news magazine claimed Crowdstrike was correct in assessing that the DNC was hacked by Russians in 2016.  But all they offer as proof is hearsay and weak arguments. 60 Minutes and Crowdstrike are dead wrong AND WE HAVE THE PROOF.

For years now the FBI and Mueller investigation claimed that Russia hacked the DNC during the lead up to the 2016 election.  This is central to the Russia-Collusion narrative.  But the actual evidence shows the Russia collusion scam is one of the biggest lies pushed on the American people in US history.

60 Minutes report, authored by Scott Pelley, was regarding Crowdstrike’s claims that Russia hacked the DNC in 2016 before the Podesta emails were published by Wikileaks.  In their piece the far left media outlet suggested The Gateway Pundit (TGP) pushes conspiracy theories and flashed an image of a 2017 TGP report.

This was a bold move considering the topic of the 60 Minutes segment.  60 Minutes insinuated that what TGP posted in 2017 that was conspiratorial, but our 2017 post shared a chart that was also published by WikiLeaks at that time.

In 2017 TGP correctly reported that the website Cyber Berkut had published links and a chart showing connections between the Ukrainian officials and the Clintons:

Of course 60 Minutes cannot point to any conspiracy with our 2017 post linked to above.   We took the information directly from the Cyber Berkut webpage. 60 Minutes went on to push the discredited Trump-Russia conspiracy.

The segment is the first report that we are aware of where the media actually addresses the fact that the favor President Trump asked of the Ukraine in a recent call was related to Crowdstrike. President Trump only discussed the Bidens on his call with Ukrainian President Zelensky after they were brought up by the Ukrainian President.  60 Minutes says, “Mr. Trump asked for [Crowdstrike] even before his request that Ukraine also investigate the son of Vice President Biden.”

Clearly if you read the call transcript you can see that the President’s request was regarding Crowdstrike and the Bidens only came up after their corrupt actions were noted by the Ukrainian leader. This is a major misrepresentation by Scott Pelley.

Pelley, from 60 Minutes, uses former anti-Trump Ambassador Bill Taylor, from the sham impeachment fiasco, as his expert witness on the Ukraine.  Taylor claims he knows of no connection between Crowdstrike and the Ukraine.

Pelley then shared the following in his report [emphasis added]:

Robert Johnston dealt directly with the FBI as an investigator of the DNC hack for CrowdStrike, a leading cyber security company hired by the Democrats. He told us the FBI didn’t physically examine the DNC servers because CrowdStrike gave the bureau copies of the data from the servers.

“If there is a server or a computer system of any kind that’s involved in the incident you can take an exact bit for bit digital copy of what’s on that system. Now that digital copy is just as good as having the real thing,” Johnston said.

“As far as you know, the FBI got what it needed and what it wanted?” Pelley asked Johnston.

“Exactly and evidence of that is you don’t hear the FBI complaining,” Johnston said.

He’s right. A former senior government official, familiar with the investigation, told us the FBI would have preferred to work alongside CrowdStrike’s investigators, but the Democratic National Committee decided to give the bureau digital copies of its servers instead. The official told us this was “acceptable,” in fact even typical in FBI investigations.

What shameless liars! How pathetic is 60 Minutes in spreading these ridiculous Crowdstrike statements?

Who Is Crowdstrike?

We know that Crowdstike is related to the Ukraine and this is through Ukrainian billionaire and longtime contributor to the Clinton Foundation Victor Pinchuk.   We also know Crowdstrike is connected to James Clapper and the Atlantic Group:

Pinchuk serves on the International Advisory Board of a Washington-based think tank called the Atlantic Council. This group is “connected to Ukrainian interests through its “Ukraine in Europe Initiative,” which is designed to galvanize international support for an independent Ukraine within secure borders whose people will determine their own future.” Also serving on the International Advisory Board of the Atlantic Council is James Clapper, who served as Obama’s Director of National Intelligence. Funnily enough, Bongino discovered that the Chief Technology Officer of “the only company that investigated the hacking of the DNC’s servers and quickly determined it was the Russians, is a nonresident senior fellow in cybersecurity” at the Atlantic Council. His name is Dmitri Alperovitch (owner of CrowdStrike).”

We know that in July 2015 Google invested $100 million into Crowdstrike –

Google Capital, the two-year-old growth equity arm of search giant Google (GOOG), announced its first security investment on Monday morning.

The fund has pumped $100 million into cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike. It was joined by cloud computing company Rackspace (RAX), which is a customer, and the firm’s existing investors Accel and Warburg Pincus. The new infusion represents a Series C round for the Irvine, Calif.-based company, bringing its total funding raised to date to $156 million.

Holes in Crowdstike’s Claims –

There are many holes with the ‘Russia hacked the DNC emails’ claim, much of what has already been posted here at TGP. Several individuals previously shared they have sources who claim that the DNC servers were never examined by Crowdstrike:

It was also uncovered in the Roger Stone case that CrowdStrike gave the US government three “draft reports” on the so-called hack by Russia which were full of redactions and the FBI just took their word for it.  It was also reported that the DOJ never received the unredacted copies of Crowdstrike’s reports:

Former NSA whistleblower Bill Binney previously reported he has evidence the DNC emails were not hacked but copied most likely on to a flashdrive or something similar.

(Binney is brilliant.  See the documentary on Binney entitled: “A Good American” – it will astound you.)

Binney has proof for his assertion but Crowdstrike and the DNC to date have provided no support that it was Russia who hacked the DNC. 

Binney also claims that the Mueller gang wouldn’t even look at his data because they knew it would show something different than what they presented in their final bogus report (i.e. Mueller’s dossier as referred to by Devin Nunes).

Apelbaum’s Argument

Cyber expert Yaacov Apelbaum says the 60 Minutes and Crowdstrike claims are completely false:

If Crowdstrike gave the FBI any data it was drive images (we don’t even know which ones). This did not include memory dumps, network pocket captures, firewall activity, etc.  This type of data is crucial and should have been examined in real-time by the FBI. If indeed any drive images were given to the FBI, these would have been contaminated because they continued to use these drives for weeks after the alleged hack.

Crowd Strike was completely wrong (most likely intentionally) about the Russian hack of the Ukrainian Artillery allegation. And we know for a fact that they used the same forensic techniques to reach that conclusion as they did on the DNC hack.

Apelbaum posted a report in January 2019, with information basically proving that the DNC was not hacked by the Russians.  Apelbaum’s first argument is this –

According to the WaPo (using CrowdStrike, DOJ, and their other usual hush-hush government sources in the know), the attack was perpetrated by a Russian unit lead by Lieutenant Captain Nikolay Kozachek who allegedly crafted a malware called X-Agent and used it to get into the network and install keystroke loggers on several PCs. This allowed them to see what the employees were typing and take screenshots of the employees’ computer.

This is pretty detailed information, but if this was the case, then how did the DOJ learn all of these ‘details’ and use them in the indictments without the FBI ever forensically evaluating the DNC/HRC computers? And since when does the DOJ, an organization that only speaks the language of indictments use hearsay and 3rd parties like the British national Matt Tait (a former GCHQ collector and a connoisseur of all things related to Russian collusion), CrowdStrike, or any other evidence lacking chain of custody certification as a primary source for prosecution?

A second point by Apelbaum is –

… that three of the Russian GRU officers on the DOJ “Wanted by the FBI” list were allegedly working concurrently on multiple non-related projects like interfering with the 2016 United States elections (both HRC and DNC) while at the same time they were also allegedly hacking anti-doping agencies (Images 2-3).

Above are pictures of the individuals the FBI says were working on both the DNC/HRC email hacking and the Olympic doping projects.

The same guys were working on both projects which is all but impossible. (Do we really know if they’re even real or even Russians?)

Apelbaum argues –

The fact that the three had multiple concurrent high impact and high visibility project assignments is odd because this is not how typical offensive cyber intelligence teams operate. These units tend to be compartmentalized, they are assigned to a specific mission, and the taskforce stays together for the entire duration of the project.

Next Apelbaum questions the Mueller gang’s assertion that the ‘hacker’ named Guccifer 2.0 was a Russian –

Any evidence that Guccifer 2.0 is Russian should be evaluated while keeping these points in mind:

He used a Russian VPN service to cloak his IP address, but did not use TOR. Using a proxy to conduct cyber operations is a SOP [Standard Operating Procedure] in all intelligence and LEA [Law Enforcement Agency] agencies. [i.e. Russia would have masked their VPN service]

He used the AOL email service that captured and forwarded his IP address and the same AOL email to contact various media outlets on the same day of the attack. This is so overt and amateurish that its unlikely to be a mistake and seems like a deliberate attempt to leave traceable breadcrumbs.

He named his Office User account Феликс Эдмундович (Felix Dzerzhinsky), after the founder of the Soviet Secret Police. Devices and accounts used in offensive cyberspace operations use random names to prevent tractability and identification. Why would anyone in the GRU use this pseudonym (beside the obvious reason) is beyond comprehension.

He copied the original Trump opposition research document and pasted it into a new .dotm template (with an editing time of about 2 minutes). This resulted in a change of the “Last Modified by” field from “Warren Flood” to “Феликс Эдмундович” and the creation of additional Russian metadata in the document. Why waste the time and effort doing this?

About 4 hours after creating the ‘Russian’ version of the document, he exported it to a PDF using LibreOffice 4.2 (in the process he lost/removed about 20 of the original pages). This was most likely done to show additional ‘Russian fingerprints’ in the form of broken hyperlink error messages in Russian (Images 4 and 5). Why bother with re-formatting and converting the source documents? Why not just get the raw data out in the original format ASAP?

Apelbaum next discusses Guccifer 2.0 –

In June 21, 2016, Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai from Vice Motherboard interviewed a person who identified himself as “Guccifer 2.0”. During their on-line chat session, the individual claimed that he was Romanian (see transcript of the interview below). His poor Romanian language skills were later used to unmask his Russian identify.

…I’m not a scientific linguist nor do I even know where to find one if my life depended on it, but I’m certain that you can’t reliably determine nationality based on someone impersonating another language or from the use of fake metadata in files. This elaborate theory also has the obvious flaw of assuming that the Russian intelligence services are dumb enough to show up to an interview posing as Romanians without actually being able to read and write flaunt Romanian.

After providing a couple more examples of why the Russian story doesn’t stick, Apelbaum closes with this –