Will the Central Myth of Russiagate Finally Fall? Increasingly That Looks Possible

Dec. 21 (EIRNS)—Former CIA analyst and State Department counterterrorism expert Larry Johnson’s Dec. 20 article on Pat Lang’s “Sic Semper Tyrannis” blog, asserts the likelihood that the Internet personas Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks were created by John Brennan’s CIA—not creations of Russian military intelligence (GRU) as claimed without evidence in Robert Mueller’s final report and the infamous Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA). If Johnson is correct, and we don’t have any reason to doubt his account, the entire fabric of Russiagate is further blown apart.

Johnson points out that John Brennan reorganized the CIA in October 2015 to create a new Division of Digital Innovation. This group immediately produced a program called Vault 7 and associated software called Marble, capable of both conducting major cyber intrusions and then obfuscating their origin in such a way as to attribute what were really CIA activities to foreign actors. In the case of the Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks, these obfuscation activities included inserting Cyrillic characters into the code and creating a trail leading to a Russian name which translated to Felix Dzerzhinsky, the infamous founder of what became the Soviet KGB secret police.

Gullible, or entirely complicit, investigators ate up this “clue” without assessing whether a cyber force as capable as the GRU would really leave such a trail. True to the incompetence of Brennan’s CIA minions, both Vault 7 and Marble were hacked and turned over to WikiLeaks, which published them in 2017, after trying to negotiate with the U.S. government for the opportunity to tell them the actual source of the 2016 DNC and Podesta documents they published, as well as explaining the vulnerabilities which allowed the CIA’s program to be hacked—all in return for immunity for Julian Assange. That negotiation, conducted by high levels of the Justice Department, was blown up by Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) and then-FBI Director James Comey, which is a separate seditious scandal.

Johnson’s piece arrives 24 hours after leaks to the New York Times indicated that U.S. Attorney John Durham is now focusing on Brennan, with CIA cooperation in that investigation, and an article in The Intercept indicating that former NSA Director Mike Rogers is cooperating with Durham and has met with him several times.

The Times reports that Durham is focused on the January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) and its conclusion that Russian President Vladimir Putin directed the Russia hack of the Democratic National Committee and John Podesta to help Trump win election. The Times maintains there was significant debate even within John Brennan’s handpicked team about this “opinion.” The NSA under Mike Rogers said at the time that it had only moderate confidence in this conclusion. According to the Times article (almost certainly the result of a leak by Brennan or FBI officials, similarly under investigation by Durham), the conclusion that Putin ordered the hack to help Trump is not the result of NSA intelligence, rather it relies on a Brennan CIA source alleged to be close to the Kremlin. Other reportage has claimed that Brennan’s “source” is highly dubious. The Times article cites Rep. Chris Stewart (R-UT) as one of those saying that the ICA’s conclusions regarding Putin’s intentions were not justified by the classified intelligence he has viewed.