(I sent you an email, but I guess it wound up in spam?)

I would like to address a number of lies you’ve been repeating on your show for the past three years regarding Russiagate—specifically, the hacking side of Russiagate. Some of these are:

1. That CrowdStrike are somehow linchpins of the investigation and are furthermore untrustworthy, which invalidates everything else.

2. That Bill Binney showed that the data was a leak and not a hack.

3. That therefore RUSSIAGATE IS ALL LIES!!!!!!

But first, an apology of my own…

Feel free to skip this part, but there’s a reason I feel so deeply and angrily about this issue. Truth is, I probably played a part in providing ammunition to some of the conspiracy theorists. In fact, I know I did.

I too was once a Russiagate skeptic.

It all kicked off when CrowdStrike made their attribution, followed shortly by the appearance of this Guccifer2.0 character. And then came the deliberately added Russian metadata appended to G2’s files, and then the IC social media mouthpieces began squealing like stuck pigs about it, and nobody else was pointing out how wrong the whole thing was, so I wrote a series of technically sound, yet geopolitically naive articleson the subject.

I knew there was something deeply wrong with this clearly deliberately added Russian metadata Guccifer2.0 had tainted their files with, but I also knew there was something deeply wrong with how obviously that data had been added. It was not a mistake, but it also wasn’t a clever frame-up.

It’s very easy to fake metadata. It takes extra trouble to make it look so deliberately faked. File creation dates and edit dates and time zone metadata and language stylesheets had all been changed, deliberately and LOUDLY. One would not do this if one truly wanted to frame the Russians.

I came up with a series of unsatisfactory possibilities for these inclusions but never reached a concrete conclusion. When I gradually saw how the right-wing conspiracy theory mill were warping the facts using some of my research, I deleted my medium page in disgust.

Moreover, these conspiracy theorists had been deliberately trying to reach out to fringe media figures—such as yourself, Jimmy—to spin the story into a fully crystallized ‘the Dems framed Russians’ narrative, which I was never willing to go along with; because their so called proof used the very same faked metadata. DNC inclusions as well as the Russian ones were in the metadata, and the conspiracy theorists were cherry-picking which ones they believed to be non-deliberate in an early attempt to spark Ukrainegate using said cherry-picked garbage metadata. The narrative these conspiracy theorists decided to run with was clearly one-track, dishonest, and manipulative.

So I deleted my medium page, and backed the fuck away.

Presently, the best reasons I can think of for Guccifer2.0’s over-the-top metadata alterations are: they were put there to obfuscate the origin of the material in order to disguise which hack the materials originated from (said files were probably from Podesta attachments, but they probably wanted Crowdstrike to think they hadn’t been successfully booted from the DNC, so added some half-arsed DNC related metadata to some of the files), while simultaneously feeding conspiracy theories and dickwaving at the intelligence community and CrowdStrike (the clearly deliberate Cyrillic inclusions), that yes, the subtext is they were Russians and that ‘fuck you FBI and CrowdsStrike if you think you got rid of us’.

They would later send a similar message, but far more explicitly, with the WADA hack after the entire Russian Olympic team were booted from the Olympics.

In the words of Phineas Fisher: "In the news we often see attacks attributed to groups of governmental hackers ('APTs'), because they always use the same tools, leave the same footprints, and even use the same infrastructure (domains, emails, etc.). They're negligent because they free to hack without any legal consequences." Fisher knows a lot about APTs, but that's another story for another day.

Now, back to the chief points at hand: The conspiracy theories and lies you yourself have kept kept on heroically peddling for the past three years.

Issue One: The CrowdStrike Linchpin Theory

Firstly, and most tiresomely, you do not need to believe CrowdStrike at all to agree with most of their claims.

Forget about the single server they imaged.

We don’t need it.

Forget about their claims about Guccifer 2.0.

Throw it all out.

I’ll explain the hacking side of Russiagate to you without a single piece of CrowdStrike derived evidence, thus exposing the largest and most oft repeated of your lies. But more on that later.

Issue Two: William Binney and the VIPS memo

Bill Binney and VIPS were fundamentally wrong in ways even you, Jimmy, should be able to grasp.

I know, I know, he’s the greatest hacker of all time, and the bestest most smartest most technicalist ex-spook ever in the history of the United States of America… Or so you like to say.

Binney’s central argument was that “the data had been transferred to an external storage device, such as a thumb drive, ” therefore it was a leak and not a hack.

Even if the files’ metadata were trustworthy, the metadata says nothing about the initial way in which the data was exfiltrated, even though Bill Binney claims it does, but it doesn’t because this is why:

Little Jimmy hacks into porn dot com, downloads a big old porno video onto his “portable laptop” device over the “information superhighway” with his trusty “56k dial-up modem” using an old “AOL free trial Compact Disc” using an “acoustic coupling device” on the library pay phone bay while blasting ‘Zeroes and Ones’ by Jesus Jones through his portable cassette tape Sony Walkman.

He copies the files onto a USB stick or another filesystem in his laptop, then zips the files (preserving their timestamps through any subsequent copy-pasting/uploading).

To the great wizard genius of the mighty Bill Binney, it seems that now the files have USB grade copy speeds.

The Binney/VIPS memo says: “A defense attorney could easily use the forensics to argue that someone copied the DNC files to a storage device like a USB thumb drive and got them physically to WikiLeaks — not electronically via a hack.”

Yes, a defense attorney could argue this. And a good prosecutor would say, ‘whether it was later copied to a USB or not is irrelevant to the question of whether the data was originally downloaded from a hacked server or not’.

Even if the metadata were trustworthy (remember, Guccifer2.0’s copies of the files, at least, had their metadata deliberately obfuscated) ALL OF THE TIMESTAMPS COME FROM THE LAST STEP OF THE COPY PROCESS BEFORE ZIPPING.

In conclusion, Binney’s assumption that a USB transfer equals a leak rather than a hack is garbage. All it does is tell us that a final drive to drive copy was the last step before the files were archived.

Do ya get it yet, Jimmy?

And from the work the FBI did, especially the counterintelligence work, it seems there were two teams: one doing the hacking, one doing the packaging and media related work. The most likely scenario is that the hackers downloaded the hacked data which was then put on an external drive and handed over to the packaging/information operations team. From that point the drive could have been handed to a cutout for in-person delivery to Wikileaks or uploaded directly.

Issue Three: Russiagate Hacking Attribution

CROWDSTRIKE UNTRUSTWORTHY THEREFORE RUSSIAGATE LIES!!!! AND GUCCIFER WAS A SET UP AND LEAKS NOT HACK.

First of all, before any attribution of WHO Guccifer2.0 is, lets tie public knowledge plus some sweet FBI subpoenas on a cryptocurrency account and a url shortening account, neatly into a package containing Guccifer2.0, dcleaks, the DNC hack, the DCCC hack, and the Podesta hack.

The first knot to tie our package together comes from Journalists. ACTUAL, Journalists, Jimmy.

You see, Guccifer2.0 shared passwords with journalists to secret folders inside of dcleaks.com, suggesting that G2 and DCleaks.com were working together. This is not the only evidence of a link, it’s just some very public evidence (where you don’t need to trust even the FBI derived evidence that they are probably the same entity).

Now we’ll turn to the FBI with some fairly straight forward and wholesome (for the FBI) type sleuthing. Turns out dcleaks.com was registered using bitcoin, and those bitcoin came from a crypto service that had been registered using the same email address that was ALSO used to register a url-shortening account used to Phish John Podesta’s gmail account.

Furthermore:

“[with said bitcoin] The Conspirators opened [a] VPN account from the same server that was also used to register malicious domains for the hacking of the DCCC and DNC networks.” Source

“On or about July 6, 2016, the Conspirators used the VPN [used to lease dcleaks.com] to log into the @Guccifer_2 Twitter account.”

Oh, wait, there’s another fairly wholesome link between Guccifer2.0 and dcleaks (wholesome as in not from some shady NSA unmentionable spy method).

So now we have a neat little chain connecting Guccifer2.0 to DCLeaks.com and the john356gh phishing url, as well as a set of malicious domains linked to the hacking of the DNC and DCCC. Wait. That’s all three of the leaks! Who IS this Guccifer guy?

If you cast your mind back you will remember that DCLeaks released materials hacked from the republican party as well.

This rules out the possibility of DNC insiders pretending to be Guccifer2.0 and just releasing their own files.

So whoever Guccifer2.0 were they were hackers who broke into the Republican AND the Democrat accounts and servers, and who stole Podesta’s emails.

Let’s continue with the FBI investigation.

DCleaks not only had a website, they had a facebook page, and the people who set up the facebook page kind of fucked up. “The Conspirators accessed these accounts from computers managed by [a guy named ALEKSEY ALEKSANDROVICH] POTEMKIN.” Source Who happened to be in the GRU.

So now we have a neat little chain, linking Guccifer2.0 to DCLeaks.com to the john356gh phishing url, to the DNC and DCCC hacks, to dcleaks social media, to THE ACTUAL GRU.

Back to the FBI. The Feds, unlike CrowdStrike, got access to the DNC’s cloud servers:

“After conducting reconnaissance, the Conspirators gathered data by creating backups, or “snapshots,” of the DNC’s cloud-based systems using the cloud provider’s own technology. The Conspirators then moved the snapshots to cloud-based accounts they had registered with the same service, thereby stealing the data from the DNC.”

There are many more links that strengthen the chain that are laid out in the Indictment of the GRU hackers. Many of these links do not depend upon CrowdStrike’s findings.

And I know how you don’t trust the GCHQ/Black Bag unwarranted wiretaps and such-like, neither do I, so I’ve also left out the parts in the indictment where elements in the GRU packaging/disinformation team performed web searches on how to spell certain very unique phrases that appeared on Guccifer2.0’s wordpress page.

So where does that leave the Seth Rich leaks? We’ve covered the DNC hack, we’ve covered the DCCC hack, we’ve covered the Podesta hack, in fact the only Wikileaks related releases not accounted for in the indictment were the Turkish AKP release although it should have been and the Berat’s Box release, and I’m fairly certain Seth Rich did not work in Turkey.

Furthermore, Dutch Intelligence also observed at least one half of the GRU operation directly through a compromised webcam. Aaron Mate idiotically tweeted that the webcam was compromised in 2014, but the hacks happened in late 2015 to 2016. OMG, DATES DON'T LINE UP. CONSPIRACY.

What he failed to mention was the length of time the webcam had been under Dutch control: for almost two years as stated in the original reporting.

The Nub

Deep down, despite what you’ve claimed in the past, I think you care very much about where Wikileaks got their material, Jimmy. You care a lot about the MemCon whistleblower, for example—not to mention all the other leaks that came out of the White House. You wallow in justified cynicism regarding the NSA, CIA, and FBI, but you also used this to discount the truth when it suits you based on source and motive, just as many Dems were outraged about the source and motive of the 2016 Wikileaks.

I’ve no doubt Wikileaks feel dirty concerning their own sourcing, too. Why else go to such obscene lengths to drag Seth Rich into this?

Wikileaks used a dead man like a corpse marionette and inflicted immeasurable pain upon his family to cover the fact that they coordinated with fascists, racists, and mercenaries (see: The Stone Indictment). Kimdotcom had his chance to offer something concrete regarding Seth, but the fat cunt bottled his feint at the last minute, so fuck him, too.

Julian deserves freedom, but he also deserves a lifetime of ridicule for what he did. Seth Rich and Pizzagate conspiracy theories were covered on Wikileaks’ own website (Seth, and Pizzagate)

You and people like Aaron Mate and Matt Taibbi are so obsessed with the idea that Trump is just as bad as x, y or z, that you go so far as to deem attacks on him contradictory. Since when does the hypocrisy of a subset of people who also indict someone, have anything to do with whether or not that person did something wrong?

Sourcing is everything, but only when it suits you. That’s why you’re so eager to gobble down tainted narratives—just as Dems did with the disinformation riddled Steele Dossier, just as I was so easily taken with Guccifer2.0’s metadata. I know it makes you feel better to assume Wikileaks were being set up, because the source and motive was/is genuinely disturbing, but in doing so you’re lashing out in all the wrong directions, alienating yourself, and making a fool of yourself. This extends to Ukrainegate, of which a whole new 'open letter' could be written about the porkies you've been regurgitating from the Giuliani disinformation mill.

Maybe it's time to shove that marketing communications degree of yours, and to get a journalism one instead? Enough with the hysterical bullshit already.