From: Virus Guy <Virus@Guy.C0M>

By the way, what ever happened to the "ShadowBrokers" and Anonymous 
hacking group?

=============================

Did Sen. Warner And Comey 'Collude' On Russia-gate?

Mon, 07/02/2018

Authored by Ray McGovern vi ConsortiumNews.com

The U.S. was in talks for a deal with Julian Assange but then FBI 
Director James Comey ordered an end to negotiations after Assange 
offered to prove Russia was not involved in the DNC leak...

An explosive report by investigative journalist John Solomon on the 
opinion page of Monday's edition of The Hill sheds a bright light on how 
Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) and then-FBI Director James Comey collaborated 
to prevent WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange from discussing ôtechnical 
evidence ruling out certain parties [read Russia]ö in the controversial 
leak of Democratic Party emails to WikiLeaks during the 2016 election.

A deal that was being discussed last year between Assange and U.S. 
government officials would have given Assange ôlimited immunityö to 
allow him to leave the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he has been 
exiled for six years. In exchange, Assange would agree to limit through 
redactions ôsome classified CIA information he might release in the 
future,ö according to Solomon, who cited ôinterviews and a trove of 
internal DOJ documents turned over to Senate investigators.ö Solomon 
even provided a copy of the draft immunity deal with Assange.

But Comey's intervention to stop the negotiations with Assange 
ultimately ruined the deal, Solomon says, quoting ômultiple sources.ö 
With the prospective agreement thrown into serious doubt, Assange 
ôunleashed a series of leaks that U.S. officials say damaged their cyber 
warfare capabilities for a long time to come.ö These were the Vault 7 
releases, which led then CIA Director Mike Pompeo to call WikiLeaks ôa 
hostile intelligence service.ö

Solomon's report provides reasons why Official Washington has now put so 
much pressure on Ecuador to keep Assange incommunicado in its embassy in 
London.

The report does not say what led Comey to intervene to ruin the talks 
with Assange. But it came after Assange had offered to  ôprovide 
technical evidence and discussion regarding who did not engage in the 
DNC releases,ö Solomon quotes WikiLeaks' intermediary with the 
government as saying.  It would be a safe assumption that Assange was 
offering to prove that Russia was not WikiLeaks' source of the DNC emails.

If that was the reason Comey and Warner ruined the talks, as is likely, 
it would reveal a cynical decision to put U.S. intelligence agents and 
highly sophisticated cybertools at risk, rather than allow Assange to at 
least attempt to prove that Russia was not behind the DNC leak.

The greater risk to Warner and Comey apparently would have been if 
Assange provided evidence that Russia played no role in the 2016 leaks 
of DNC documents.

Missteps and Stand Down

In mid-February 2017, in a remarkable display of naivetΘ, Adam Waldman, 
Assange's pro bono attorney who acted as the intermediary in the talks, 
asked Warner if the Senate Intelligence Committee staff would like any 
contact with Assange to ask about Russia or other issues. Waldman was 
apparently oblivious to Sen. Warner's stoking of Russia-gate.

Warner contacted Comey and, invoking his name, instructed Waldman to 
ôstand down and end the discussions with Assange,ö Waldman told Solomon. 
  The ôstand downö instruction ôdid happen,ö according to another of 
Solomon's sources with good access to Warner.  However, Waldman's 
counterpart attorney David Laufman, an accomplished federal prosecutor 
picked by the Justice Departent to work the government side of the 
CIA-Assange fledgling deal, told Waldman, ôThat's B.S.  You're not 
standing down, and neither am I.ö

But the damage had been done.  When word of the original stand-down 
order reached WikiLeaks, trust evaporated, putting an end to two months 
of what Waldman called ôconstructive, principled discussions that 
included the Department of Justice.ö

The two sides had come within inches of sealing the deal.  Writing to 
Laufman on March 28, 2017, Waldman gave him Assange's offer to discuss 
ôrisk mitigation approaches relating to CIA documents in WikiLeaks' 
possession or control, such as the redaction of Agency personnel in 
hostile jurisdictions,ö in return for ôan acceptable immunity and safe 
passage agreement.ö

On March 31, 2017, though, WikiLeaks released the most damaging 
disclosure up to that point from what it called ôVault 7ö ù a treasure 
trove of CIA cybertools leaked from CIA files.  This disclosure featured 
the tool ôMarble Framework,ö which enabled the CIA to hack into 
computers, disguise who hacked in, and falsely attribute the hack to 
someone else by leaving so-called tell-tale signs ù like Cyrillic, for 
example. The CIA documents also showed that the ôMarbleö tool had been 
employed in 2016.

Misfeasance or Malfeasance

Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, which includes among our 
members two former Technical Directors of the National Security Agency, 
has repeatedly called attention to its conclusion that the DNC emails 
were leaked ù not ôhackedö by Russia or anyone else (and, later, our 
suspicion that someone may have been playing Marbles, so to speak).

In fact, VIPS and independent forensic investigators, have performed 
what former FBI Director Comey ù at first inexplicably, now not so 
inexplicably ù failed to do when the so-called ôRussian hackö of the DNC 
was first reported. In July 2017 VIPS published its key findings with 
supporting data.

Two month later, VIPS published the results of follow-up experiments 
conducted to test the conclusions reached in July.

Why did then FBI Director Comey fail to insist on getting direct access 
to the DNC computers in order to follow best-practice forensics to 
discover who intruded into the DNC computers?  (Recall, at the time Sen. 
John McCain and others were calling the ôRussian hackö no less than an 
ôact of war.ö)  A 7th grader can now figure that out.

Asked on January 10, 2017 by Senate Intelligence Committee chair Richard 
Burr (R-NC) whether direct access to the servers and devices would have 
helped the FBI in their investigation, Comey replied:  ôOur forensics 
folks would always prefer to get access to the original device or server 
that's involved, so it's the best evidence.ö

At that point, Burr and Warner let Comey down easy. Hence, it should 
come as no surprise that, according to one of John Solomon's sources, 
Sen. Warner (who is co-chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee) 
kept Sen. Burr apprised of his intervention into the negotiation with 
Assange, leading to its collapse.

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-07-01/did...
ia-gate
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