The British Declare, Yet Again, ‘We Run the Coup’ Against Donald Trump

by Barbara Boyd

[Print version of this article]

July 18—On Monday night, July 13, Roger Stone appeared on Hannity to thank President Trump for commuting his prison sentence, and to thank God and many others for saving his life. In the course of the interview, Stone uttered the truth about the most significant coverup in Russiagate, the thing which the mainstream media and the National Security State agree must never be made fully conscious to the American public.

Stone said:

And thirdly, we don’t even know that Guccifer 2.0 is a Russian asset. Just because John Brennan said something is true, he said the Steele dossier was real, too. So, just because they assert something doesn’t mean it’s true. I could have proved at trial using forensic evidence and expert testimony from fellows like Bill Binney, former NSA counterintelligence expert, and Ray McGovern, that no one hacked the DNC [Democratic National Committee], that there was no online hack of the DNC, that the information based on the download times was downloaded to a portable disk and taken out the back door. But I wasn’t allowed to present that defense because Judge Jackson would not allow it. [Emphasis added.]

Stone’s sentence was commuted by Donald Trump on July 10, accompanied by a scathing press release from the White House declaring that Stone was a victim of the complete intelligence hoax known as Russiagate.

None other than Robert Mueller himself took to the pages of the Washington Post the very next day, July 11, to declare that Stone’s conviction of lying to Congress about his contacts with WikiLeaks was righteous, emphasizing that Stone had spoken with the internet persona, Guccifer 2.0, who Mueller claims, in the fantastic and false novel he has foisted on the public, is a Russian GRU intelligence officer. On July 14, in the New York Times, the man who actually ran the Mueller inquisition, the thug Andrew Weissman, went even further, calling for Stone to be called before a Grand Jury based on the same bogus Russiagate claims.

The furor and the freakout is not about Roger Stone, per se. It is about the unraveling of the Russiagate myth, peddled fiercely here since July of 2016. That myth has two pegs. The first is the alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election by hacking the Democratic National Committee and John Podesta, and collaborating with WikiLeaks to publish the results, along with an alleged low-budget social media campaign to “sow discord.”

The second is the dirty fake dossier about Trump and Russia by MI6’s Christopher Steele, sponsored and vouched for by the highest figures in British intelligence, which formed the backbone of all of the investigations of Trump, up through Robert Mueller’s inquisition. It is no accident that James Comey referred to the Steele dossier as “the Crown Materials,” or that John Brennan, in his Congressional testimony, said that British intelligence demanded that Trump be targeted for perceived friendliness to Russia, threatening the end of the “special relationship” if the Americans did not follow through.

Christopher Steele’s Demise
—But Only in the United States

The Steele dossier has garnered significant investigative interest and has now been proved to be entirely bogus. As of January 2017, its main source had told FBI agents that it was largely fabricated. Senator Lindsey Graham has just released the declassified memo of the FBI debriefs in January 2017 of Steele’s main source, which show him denouncing the dossier as nothing but serial rumors and fabrications.

Knowing, as of January 2017, that Steele’s claims were nothing but an unhinged opposition research and information warfare project, conducted by the trans-Atlantic intelligence community to elect Hillary Clinton—the FBI, and the Department of Justice, still used Steele’s bogus claims to legitimize massive spying on the Trump campaign and transition. To cover that up, they regurgitated the same knowingly false claims as the predicates for Robert Mueller’s illegal investigation of the President and those who associated themselves with him, a witch hunt which lasted over two years and massively polarized the American public.

On July 11, the British did throw some renewed punches at their designated fall guy, Christopher Steele, with a British court declaring that Steele had deliberately lied in those parts of his dirty dossier about the three Russian owners of Alfa Bank, Mikhail Fridman, Petr Aven, and German Khan, and awarding damages to the Russians to be paid by Steele’s firm, Orbis Business Intelligence. But, at the same time, British intelligence continued to blow money and sugar Steele’s way, peddling a new dirty dossier he helped author against China, entitled “China’s Elite Capture.”

When Trump won the election, Steele destroyed all of his notes, according to his testimony in the London case, while the British government hurried to inform the incoming White House that Steele was a rogue agent deemed unreliable by the British government. The head of the British spy agency GCHQ, Robert Hannigan, unexpectedly resigned on January 23, 2017, with most sentient observers attributing it to GCHQ’s role in operations against the Trump campaign and the need to permanently bury any record of it.

President Trump responded to the British court decision against Steele by demanding that Steele be extradited to the United States and held for trial on criminal charges.

The Russian Hack Retooled

While Steele’s full-spectrum information warfare operation against the Trump Campaign and Presidency has received deserved investigation and public outrage here, the first pillar of the coup, the Russia hack charge, has been left largely unscathed and untouchable, despite the fact that it is similarly, provably, and outrageously false. Stone’s reference to that proof is at the center of the freakout about what his commutation portends. So, the British have moved, as you would expect, to shore up this bogus claim in a new strategic context.

On Thursday, July 16, Britain’s National Cyber Security Centre announced that the very same Russian GRU unit which, they claimed, hacked the Democratic National Committee’s computers in the Spring of 2016 and then turned their bounty over to WikiLeaks for publication, was at it again. This time, the Brits claimed, the GRU unit was trying to hack private companies developing vaccines for COVID-19 in the United States, Britain, and Canada. Not that they succeeded, they were just trying.

Caitlin Johnstone, writing in Consortium News, described the new Russiagate claims as “arguably the single dumbest Russiavape story of all time, against some very stiff competition.” Johnstone notes that the incessant Russiagate propaganda seems aimed at “turning people’s brains into guacamole.” Yet, as Shakespeare proclaimed in Macbeth, once the full picture comes into view, this is truly a case where “Guilt spills itself, for fear of being spilt.”

The immediate strategic trigger for this new British bilge, is the need to reinforce the Big Lie about Russian hacking and to prevent any investigation of those involved in foisting it on the public, an investigation which would actually go to the very heart of the present National Security State, starting with the bellicose Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo.

Pompeo trotted himself out on Friday, July 17, and spoke with great fervor about APT28 and 29, the alleged Russian GRU malware used to hack both the DNC and dedicated vaccine researchers in three countries. Now, does anyone seriously really believe that the Russian military, deemed by all to be sophisticated cyberwarriors, would use the same malware over the course of four years for traceable hacking operations? Really? Pompeo knows better. Former NSA Technical Director Bill Binney briefed him personally about the fact that the DNC documents which ended up at WikiLeaks were not hacked by the Russians and that his own CIA personnel were lying to him. Pompeo covered it up, deep-sixed Binney’s briefings to protect the actual operation against the President.

The renewed British claims about Russian hackers are also directly aimed at President Putin’s idea of a September summit of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council—the United States, Russia, Britain, China, and France—to plan a unified approach for defeating COVID worldwide and to create a sound basis for rescuing the world’s economy.

Again, the Russia Hack That Wasn’t:
What Is Now Known

On May 23, 24, and 26 of 2016, someone with access to the Democratic National Committee’s servers downloaded a trove of documents to a thumb drive or similar storage device and the files ended up at WikiLeaks. These files were not transmitted over the internet to WikiLeaks for publication. The WikiLeaks files themselves reveal that they are in a FAT file format, the type of format found in thumb drives and other data storage devices. Forensic testing of the download speeds for these files also reveals that the speeds are consistent with downloads onto a storage device or thumb drive, but not transmission over the internet to WikiLeaks.

On July 5, 2016, a hack of the DNC was conducted by the internet persona Guccifer 2.0, with crude Russian-language trace elements injected into Guccifer’s releases such that the attack would be blamed on Russia, particularly by the stupefied amateur-hour sleuths internationally who call themselves journalists. The documents Guccifer 2.0 released, when compared with the same documents published by WikiLeaks, demonstrate that the persona inserted the crude Russian traces into the documents, among other manipulations of the files. Guccifer 2.0’s download speeds are also too fast for the web but consistent with a download from a thumb drive.

This much was demonstrated by actual forensic studies of the WikiLeaks DNC files and Guccifer 2.0’s releases by former NSA Technical Director Bill Binney and a similarly-skilled forensics team working with him. Binney said as much in a Declaration submitted in Roger Stone’s case in support of Stone’s Motion to Suppress, and in an explosive series of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity memoranda published in Consortium News on July 14, 2017, March 13, 2019, and April 16, 2019.

The Binney group’s 2017 findings created a firestorm. When renowned journalist Patrick Lawrence published them in The Nation magazine, the so-called liberal journal launched an internal review. Otherwise, the only person who dared to listen was Donald Trump, who ordered Mike Pompeo, then Director of the CIA, to meet with Binney to get the facts. As noted above, Pompeo covered up what Binney said—deep-sixed it.

Bill Binney began publicly complaining about the Obama intelligence community’s “assessment” that the Russians hacked the DNC and John Podesta on December 12, 2016. Binney worked for 32 years at the NSA, 22 of those years as the agency’s main analyst on Russia, including responsibility for warning about potential attacks by Russia on the United States during the Cold War. He then designed a surveillance system, Thin Thread, which would have prevented the 9/11 attacks. When that system was turned against American citizens in the wake of 9/11, Binney left the NSA.

He became an endangered whistleblower, speaking out about the emerging surveillance state, engaging in litigation against it, for which he was repeatedly harassed and threatened with prosecution by the Bush Administration. The campaign to defame him continued under Barack Obama. Binney was portrayed as a disgruntled pariah because of his steadfast allegiance to the U.S. Constitution, particularly its Fourth Amendment.

Where is the evidence? Binney asked, in the December 12, 2016 memo sent by the Veterans Intelligence Professionals for Sanity to President Barack Obama. You are smearing both Russia and Trump and starting what appears to be Cold War 2.0 based on vague and completely unproven allegations, the VIPS wrote. Binney pointed out that any Russian “hack” of the DNC would be seen by the NSA and then traced to Wikileaks by NSA’s Five Eyes partners, which includes, of course, GCHQ. Having designed the system which would accomplish these traces, Bill Binney’s point could hardly be doubted. No such evidence has ever been produced, nor is there any reason to believe it even exists.

Binney’s forensics were buttressed by statements from Julian Assange of WikiLeaks, who insisted that the DNC and Podesta WikiLeaks document troves were not the result of actions by a state actor, but by a DNC insider. WikiLeaks raised suspicions that this insider was associated with Seth Rich—murdered in a botched robbery in Washington, D.C. on July 10, 2016—by offering a reward for information in Rich’s murder case.

Craig Murray, a former British Ambassador, says he received a thumb drive containing the WikiLeaks materials from an intermediary in a wooded area next to American University in Washington, D.C. Murray says the documents came from DNC insiders with authorized access who were disgusted at what the documents themselves revealed: that Hillary Clinton was illegally stealing the Democratic primary from Bernie Sanders and that Clinton was a money-grubbing tool of Wall Street. Neither Assange nor Murray was ever interviewed by anyone in the U.S. government about the claimed Russian hack.

In fact, a Justice Department effort in early 2017 to hear what Assange had to say was blown up deliberately by then FBI Director James Comey and Senator Mark Warner. Top levels of the DOJ then proceeded on their criminal investigation of Assange, resulting in a sealed indictment delivered by a Grand Jury in Alexandria, Virginia in late 2017. The indictment came after Mike Pompeo designated Assange and WikiLeaks as a hostile, non-state intelligence agency, and Jeff Sessions, then Attorney General, made Assange’s prosecution a major priority.

The DOJ has since managed to evict Assange from his asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London and have him arrested by the British pending extradition to the United States. The hope is that one of the few direct witnesses concerning the source of the DNC and Podesta documents that WikiLeaks published in July and October of 2016, will die, or go completely mad in the depraved conditions under which he is being held in Britain’s infamous Belmarsh prison.

Shawn Henry’s Explosive Disclosure

The strangest thing of all about the alleged Russian hack of the DNC is the story concocted by both the FBI and the DNC about it. According to their accounts, both the U.S. intelligence community, and CrowdStrike, the firm the DNC hired to mitigate the alleged Russian cyberattack, had been inside the DNC’s servers for some time—the intelligence community from September 2015 through April 2016, and CrowdStrike from late April 2016 forward. If the Russians hacked the DNC in May 2016, the date which appears on the WikiLeaks documents, CrowdStrike was present to observe it and trace it. Similarly, the alleged hack by Guccifer 2.0 in July 2016.

But, in testimony before the House Intelligence Committee on December 5, 2017, Shawn Henry, CrowdStrike’s main cyberwarrior, said that while DNC documents were staged for exfiltration, they had no concrete evidence that they ever left the DNC. This testimony is consistent with a downloaded leak rather than any form of hack, and completely affirms Bill Binney’s scientific investigations. But it only became available when the Intelligence Community declassified it, after a major fight, in May of 2020. Mueller’s indictment of the Russian GRU officers he claims staged the attack, makes no direct reference to this absolutely stunning and inconvenient fact.

The DNC hired CrowdStrike in April 2016, the same month that Christopher Steele’s U.S. affiliate, Fusion GPS, was hired by the DNC to investigate Trump. CrowdStrike is a firm with multiple connections to British-inspired anti-Russian operations, most prominently through the Atlantic Council and the Obama State Department’s Ukraine coup. Shawn Henry of CrowdStrike was the former head of FBI cyberoperations under Robert Mueller.

According to the DNC and the FBI, the FBI had been warning the DNC, based on tracking from the “intelligence community,” that the alleged Russian operation, Cozy Bear, also known as APT29, was inside its computers and spying, as of September of 2015. An FBI agent, August Hawkins, began talking to the DNC tech man, Yared Tamene, about this infiltration in September and kept talking to him about this repeatedly, giving him clues as to what to look for and meeting with him personally.

Despite the fact that Hawkins was claiming that the Russians were spying on a major U.S. political organization in the midst of a presidential campaign and the U.S. intelligence community had allegedly identified the Russian entity responsible, nothing was done about this from September of 2015 through April of 2016, except for the frequent Hawkins/Tamene conversations about it. In late April, the DNC handed over its computer server logs to the FBI and a concerted attack, attributed by CrowdStrike to Fancy Bear, or APT28, hit the DNC’s computers simultaneously. At that point, DOJ veteran and DNC lawyer Michael Sussman who had worked directly with Shawn Henry while at DOJ, “recommended” that CrowdStrike be hired to investigate. Parenthetically, Christopher Steele testified in the London case that Sussman was the source of his bogus claims about Alfa Bank’s owners.

Thus, the FBI completely relied on CrowdStrike’s “forensics” to establish the “crime” for which Robert Mueller indicted several GRU officials in a false narrative which was sold throughout the world. They never examined the actual DNC servers and, as revealed in the Roger Stone case, relied solely on an incomplete and “draft” CrowdStrike report to reach their conclusions.

The sheer weirdness of this DNC/FBI story, waiting for months to mitigate a cyberattack, then experiencing apparent new hacks during mitigation, with the FBI never coming to the scene of the crime, induced immediate ridicule from cyber security experts internationally. To buttress these claims, CrowdStrike released a report in December 2016 claiming that the Russians hacked into a Ukrainian artillery application in July and August of 2014, resulting in heavy losses of howitzers in Ukraine’s civil war pitting Joe Biden’s neo-Nazi brigades of the “liberated” West against the historically Russian separatists of the Donbas and the South. CrowdStrike claimed that Fancy Bear was responsible for this attack and had left a similar trail to that left in the DNC’s computers.

But that tack blew up almost immediately. The Ukrainian government said the attack described by CrowdStrike never happened. The British International Institute for Strategic Studies also denounced the claim, noting that CrowdStrike erroneously used IISS data as proof of an intrusion which never happened. These denunciations occurred following Trump’s election and frantic attempts by both Ukraine and the British to distance themselves from illegal operations they conducted against the Trump campaign.

Who Done What?

The fact that John Brennan at the CIA was the prime mover in the Obama Administration’s early surveillance activities against Trump and other candidates who might challenge Hillary Clinton, dating from 2015, and that the CIA Vault 7 Marble Framework provides all the tools necessary to foment a false flag attack, has been a primary investigative interest of the VIPS, and would explain why Mike Pompeo was so involved in attempting to deep six what Bill Binney told him. If the VIPS are correct in their suspicions, Pompeo’s own shop at the CIA was actually a central player in the fake effort to attribute the WikiLeaks disclosures to a Russian hack, inclusive of ownership of the fake persona Guccifer 2.0.

It is also now well known that almost all of the players in Russiagate had a major role in the disastrous Ukraine coup of 2014 conducted by the British, NATO, and the U.S. State Department and CIA. That coup placed neo-Nazis in major military and security positions in Ukraine and installed Joe Biden as, effectively, a colonial proconsul. The cast of Russiagate characters up to their ears in the coup includes Christopher Steele, CrowdStrike’s Dmitri Alperovitch, the Atlantic Council, and John Brennan.

As the journalist George Eliason keeps emphasizing, the Ukrainian cyberwar groups, CyberAlliance and CyberHunta (including Shaltai Boltoi), have repeatedly used APT28 and APT29 in their cyberattacks, including massive attacks on the Russian government. They claim intellectual ownership of these cyberwar tools. These hacking groups work for Ukrainian intelligence, which worked directly with the DNC’s Alexandra Chalupa, and Joe Biden’s fake whistleblower national security aide in the White House, in operations against Donald Trump dating from early 2016 through the transition.