PLEASE SHARE: 2016 ELECTION ATTACK: ‘An Unprecedented Situation’ — How the GRU and US Traitors Pulled Everyone’s Strings
Third in a series on 2016 election interference, this investigation focuses on Mueller’s GRU indictment charging 12 members of Russian military intelligence for aiming to bring down Clinton’s campaign
***Since I removed paywalls from my archives, I am republishing key reports — this investigation was originally published on January 23, 2024. Please share with your networks and please support my work with a paid membership.***
‘An Unprecedented Situation’
Helsinki, Finland, July 16, 2018
Trump, standing next to Vladimir Putin, agrees with Putin over his own intelligence agents that Russia did not attack the 2016 US election.
Washington DC, July 13, 2018, three day earlier
The Department of Justice today announced that a grand jury in the District of Columbia returned an indictment presented by the Special Counsel’s Office. The indictment charges twelve Russian nationals for committing federal crimes that were intended to interfere with the 2016 U.S. presidential election. All twelve defendants are members of the GRU, a Russian Federation intelligence agency within the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Russian military. These GRU officers, in their official capacities, engaged in a sustained effort to hack into the computer networks of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the Democratic National Committee, and the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton, and released that information on the internet under the names "DCLeaks" and "Guccifer 2.0" and through another entity.
According to the allegations in the indictment, Viktor Borisovich Netyksho, Boris Alekseyevich Antonov, Dmitriy Sergeyevich Badin, Ivan Sergeyevich Yermakov, Aleksey Viktorovich Lukashev, Sergey Aleksandrovich Morgachev, Nikolay Yuryevich Kozachek, Pavel Vyacheslavovich Yershov, Artem Andreyevich Malyshev, Aleksandr Vladimirovich Osadchuk, Aleksey Aleksandrovich Potemkin, and Anatoliy Sergeyevich Kovalev were officials in Unit 26165 and Unit 74455 of the Russian government’s Main Intelligence Directorate.
In 2016, officials in Unit 26165 began spearphishing volunteers and employees of the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton, including the campaign’s chairman. Through that process, officials in this unit were able to steal the usernames and passwords for numerous individuals and use those credentials to steal email content and hack into other computers. They also were able to hack into the computer networks of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) through these spearphishing techniques to steal emails and documents, covertly monitor the computer activity of dozens of employees, and implant hundreds of files of malicious computer code to steal passwords and maintain access to these networks.
The officials in Unit 26165 coordinated with officials in Unit 74455 to plan the release of the stolen documents for the purpose of interfering with the 2016 presidential election. Defendants registered the domain DCLeaks.com and later staged the release of thousands of stolen emails and documents through that website. On the website, defendants claimed to be “American hacktivists” and used Facebook accounts with fictitious names and Twitter accounts to promote the website. After public accusations that the Russian government was behind the hacking of DNC and DCCC computers, defendants created the fictitious persona Guccifer 2.0. On the evening of June 15, 2016 between 4:19PM and 4:56PM, defendants used their Moscow-based server to search for a series of English words and phrases that later appeared in Guccifer 2.0’s first blog post falsely claiming to be a lone Romanian hacker responsible for the hacks in the hopes of undermining the allegations of Russian involvement.
Members of Unit 74455 also conspired to hack into the computers of state boards of elections, secretaries of state, and US companies that supplied software and other technology related to the administration of elections to steal voter data stored on those computers.
To avoid detection, defendants used false identities while using a network of computers located around the world, including the United States, paid for with cryptocurrency through mining bitcoin and other means intended to obscure the origin of the funds. This funding structure supported their efforts to buy key accounts, servers, and domains. For example, the same bitcoin mining operation that funded the registration payment for DCLeaks.com also funded the servers and domains used in the spearphishing campaign.
The indictment includes 11 criminal counts.
Broward County, Florida, August 8, 2016, two years earlier
Roger Stone telling the Southwest Broward County Republican Organization that he communicated directly with Julian Assange, who muled the GRU stolen data through Wikileaks.
Miami, Florida, July 27, 2016, two weeks earlier
Trump invites Russia to break into presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s computer servers.
On that same date, July 27, 2016, according the Mueller indictment charging 12 Russian nationals working for Russian military intelligence for committing federal crimes intended to interfered with the 2016 US presidential election, “the Russians spearfished for the first time email accounts of a domain hosted by a third-party provider and used by Clinton’s personal office. At or about the same time, they also targeted seventy-six email addresses at the domain for the Clinton campaign.”
As it turns out, Russia was listening.
According to the Special Counsel indictment the GRU officers were engaged in a sustained effort to hack into the computer networks of the DCCC, the DNC, and the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton.
The stolen private data was then released on the internet under such pretend names as DCLeaks and Guccifer 2.0.
In revisiting my thread on the GRU indictment, the screenshots I highlighted, and re-reading the full 29-page indictment itself, I laughed out loud at the WordPress blog posted by the GRU posing as Guccifer, that the data theft and release of stolen documents had “totally no relation to the Russian government.” I didn’t laugh because it was funny, I laughed because Trump said the same thing, and when I read it, I heard it in his voice. Like, totally no relation to the Russian government.
But you know who did tell us in 2016 it was the Russians who stole the data to bring down the Clinton campaign to help install Trump?
Seventeen federal intelligence agencies.
“We have 17 — 17 intelligence agencies, civilian and military who have all concluded that these espionage attacks, these cyber attacks, come from the highest levels of the Kremlin. And they are designed to influence our election. I find that deeply disturbing,” Hillary Clinton, October 17, 2016, Las Vegas presidential debate.
The former Secretary of State’s statement came from an October 7, 2016, joint memo on behalf of the Department of Homeland Security and Office of the Director of National Intelligence on behalf of the US Intelligence community, which declared its confidence “that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations. The recent disclosures of alleged hacked e-mails on sites like DCLeaks.com and WikiLeaks and by the Guccifer 2.0 online persona are consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts. These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the US election process. Such activity is not new to Moscow—the Russians have used similar tactics and techniques across Europe and Eurasia, for example, to influence public opinion there. We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia's senior-most officials could have authorized these activities.”
Do you know what else happened on October 7, which happens to be Putin’s birthday and the anniversary of the murder of investigative reporter Anna Politkovskaya? That was the date that the first set of emails were released from the chairman of the Clinton Campaign, which had been stolen by Lukashev and his co-conspirators.
Anyone who actually read the emails stolen by the GRU would have found a staff devoted to Clinton, but that messaging wouldn’t feed the ‘Burn the Witch’ crowd. So instead, conspiracies were concocted. Conspiracies that live on today, that are found in QAnon channels and churches, pushed by US Putinists and dipsomaniacs to a cult willing to believe the worst about Democrats because they’ve been brainwashed by traumatic video, repetitive propaganda at high frequency, the constant drip of comforting lies targeting their vulnerabilities delivered to their exact specifications by data mining that they don’t see but that surely exists.
Thanks to the work of Brent Allpress and Dr. Charles Kriel, we know how the data mining is done and why it is disproportionately impacting churchgoers and military veterans. From one my archived reports:
Central to this strategy is Gloo, a data platform that has been accused of targeting the vulnerable and mentally ill in order to recruit them to US mega-churches which they can then monetise with donations. Gloo is linked to both the radical-right Koch Foundations and to disgraced data firm Cambridge Analytica. Its Chairman of the Board’s and primary funder of GLOO is Intel’s Pat Gelsinger.
A Koch Foundations-funded charity commissioned Cambridge Analytica and Gloo to build a software platform that could be used by churches in order to target vulnerable people. The man who commissioned Cambridge Analytica and put money into Gloo is a member of the CNP.
Gloo partners with an organisation called Cru, which runs a military mission. The latter describes its vision as seeking “God’s help in facilitating movements throughout the global military community so that everyone knows someone who truly follows Jesus.”
The partnership involves an app “designed to help military members grow in their faith and stay connected to God’s people”. The app enables Gloo to harvest data on military personnel – which its clients can then target with their religious-right messaging. Gloo’s focus, academic Brent Allpress told Byline Times, “is on vulnerable active service individuals suffering from deployment and relationship stress, depression, anxiety and PTSD.”
“They have an active veterans programme,” Allpress expanded. “This is a cause for concern given the rise of extremism amongst highly trained veterans. The events on 6th January involved radicalised veteran groups. Any potential links between those organisations and Gloo operations should be investigated.”
While the short-term goal is to monetise the data to increase far-right wing church wealth and membership, the longer term goal according to special adviser to the UK Parliament on disinformation and co-director of the documentaries Dis/Informed and People You May Know, Dr Charles Kriel, is to identify them so they can be “recruited into the politics of the far-right.”
According to Allpress, who has worked with Kriel on People You May Know, “the explicit ideology of Gloo partner Cru Military is Dominionist. God’s soldiers, Crusaders. Cru is a truncation of Crusade. The mission describes Roman Generals who conquer territory and then take on a Governing role.”
“This absolutely aligns with the politics of white Christian nationalism,” Kriel told Byline Times. “And the optics couldn’t be worse. Recruiting and geotracking the military in the field through an organisation and app named for the Crusades? It’s a very bad look.”
I returned to that 2021 report because these people who are being targeted are being targeted with psychological operations created with material stolen by Russian military intelligence.
Pizzagate is a psychological operation sold as a conspiracy theory based on a Russian military intelligence subversion plot of a US election, one that was effective. It is being rebooted today by the same white supremacist cell that I identified in Part One of this series.
Stone Cold Liars
When the GRU indictment dropped on July 13, 2018, Roger Stone went on a CYA tour. He told anyone who would listen that he was the unnamed individual in the Justice Department's election hacking indictment who communicated with the Russian military intelligence persona "Guccifer 2.0” — used to leak stolen records belonging to Democrats.
The indictment stated that on Aug. 15 and Sept. 9 of 2016, Russian intelligence officers posing as Guccifer "wrote a person who was in regular contact with senior members" of the Trump campaign, and included language that matched Twitter direct messages Stone had previously released.
Despite 17 federal agencies stating Russia military intelligence stole the data to subvert the election, Stone — like Trump — had maintained that Russia, like totally, was not behind the hack.
Stone, however, trafficked the stolen goods, was convicted of lying to Congress, obstructed an investigation into Russian interference, and was convicted of witness tampering.
And then, Donald Trump set him free.
As I always maintain, if a Russian-asset criminal pardons another Russian-asset criminal, that does not negate the pardoned from being a Russian-asset criminal.
In 2020, Stone went on to reboot ‘Stop the Steal’ — his 2016 operation — just in time to help incite a violent insurrection, which he bragged about on film.
Stone, like Trump, is a Roy Cohn acolyte. Both learned to deny, deflect, and accuse others of that of which they are guilty by Cohn — a mob lawyer who repped all five of the organized crime families in the City of New York.
The GRU indictment lays out in granular detail how the Russian officers subverted a US presidential candidate in an attack on a US 2016 election. It’s important to recall they also hacked the RNC, dribbling out some scrubbed emails from the campaigns of such politicians as Lindsey Graham — just enough to put him on notice.
As this series has evidenced, the Russians attacked us in 2016, with the assistance of US traitors at the highest level.
You might recall Charles McGonigal, who was the FBI officer in charge of counterintelligence in the New York City field office when Comey re-opened the Clinton investigation, losing her the election. McGonigal led the investigations into Russian interference in the US 2016 election to aid the Trump campaign, including by Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. McGonigal was just sentenced to 50 months in prison for conspiring with Oleg Deripaska to violate US sanctions on Russia.
“McGonigal is just another Pinocchio for Putin, strung up on Albanian organized crime and easy cash. And while he’ll now spend four years in a cell, pondering how he’ll never be a real boy, it seems rather underwhelming that treasoning nets such a short sentence. Just another Russian spy during a time when Russia was attacking our country.”—High Fidelity, RADICALIZED Truth Survives
We need truth and reconciliation. We can’t get whole without it.
Hillary was right.
October 19, 2016, Presidential Debate, nine days before Comey re-opened the investigation into her emails
"It's pretty clear you won't admit the Russians have engaged in cyber attacks against the United States of America, that you encouraged espionage against our people, that you are willing to spout the Putin line, sign up for his wish list, break up NATO, do whatever he wants to do and that you continue to get help from him because he has a very clear favorite in this race. So I think that this is such an unprecedented situation. We’ve never had a foreign government trying to interfere in our election.”—Hillary Clinton
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To read the first four in the series on the 2016 election attacks, please go here:
To read the first 13 in the American Monsters series, please go here:
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I would argue Roger Stone's first staging of "Stop the Steal" was 2000.
Google the names stone caddy and schlanger simultaneously.