On Twitter on April 20, President Donald Trump has said if there’s an upside to the DNC lawsuit against the Trump campaign, Wikileaks and Russia, he said “we will now counter for the DNC Server that they refused to give to the FBI…”
But according to the DNC’s filing, the committee may have destroyed all the evidence of the alleged hack by Russia of the DNC emails: “As a result of the persistence of the Russian state-sponsored infiltration, in order to remove the unauthorized users from its network, the DNC was required to decommission more than 140 servers, remove and reinstall all software, including the operating systems, for more than 180 computers, and rebuild at least 11 servers.”
Which sounds familiar. Anyway, 18 U.S.C. 1519 states, for anyone who still cares, “Whoever knowingly alters, destroys, mutilates, conceals, covers up, falsifies, or makes a false entry in any record, document, or tangible object with the intent to impede, obstruct, or influence the investigation or proper administration of any matter within the jurisdiction of any department or agency of the United States or any case filed under title 11, or in relation to or contemplation of any such matter or case, shall be fined under this title, imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both.”
So here the DNC is alleging in federal court that crimes were committed on its servers, they never let the FBI investigate and they deleted the operating systems on all the affected computers, totaling 180, decommissioned 140 servers and “rebuilt” 11 servers.
And we’re all supposed to just, what? Take their words for it?
What is incredible is that for almost two years, the Justice Department has just been a-okay with that. In testimony on Jan. 10, 2017 before the Senate Intelligence Committee, former FBI Director James Comey stated that “Ultimately what was agreed to is the private company [Crowdstrike] would share with us what they saw… Our forensics folks would always prefer to get access to the original device or server that’s involved, so it’s the best evidence.”
Crowdstrike, which was hired by the same law firm that tasked Fusion GPS to commission the Christopher Steele dossier, Perkins Coie, got the task of investigating the servers in 2016. As an aside, and very interestingly, none of the major allegations by Steele, which the DNC paid for, appear in the DNC lawsuit. Some of the top alleged colluders from the Steele dossier, Trump himself, his lawyer Michael Cohen or one-time foreign policy advisor Carter Page are not named as defendants.
Crowdstrike Co-founder Dmitri Alperovitch in the Washington Post published June 14, 2016 spoke of the lack of evidence as to how it was that somebody got onto the Democratic National Committee (DNC) servers to get the emails that were ultimately published on Wikileaks in July 2016. According to the Washington Post, “CrowdStrike is not sure how the hackers got in. The firm suspects they may have targeted DNC employees with ‘spearphishing’ emails… ‘But we don’t have hard evidence,’ Alperovitch said,” the report stated. Nor was Alperovitch really sure who had hacked the DNC emails: “CrowdStrike is less sure of whom Cozy Bear works for but thinks it might be the Federal Security Service, or FSB, the country’s powerful security agency, which was once headed by Putin.” Not exactly air tight.
On Nov. 17, 2016 former National Intelligence Director James Clapper told the House Intelligence Committee: “As far as the WikiLeaks connection, the evidence there is not as strong and we don’t have good insight into the sequencing of the releases or when the data may have been provided,” adding, “We don’t have as good of insight into that.” Perhaps because they had no idea. Because they never looked at the servers.
In fact, because all the servers have now been decommissioned or rebuilt, and the affected computers erased over, we may never know what really happened. But there should still be an attempt made to find out. Americans for Limited Government President Rick Manning in a statement agreed with President Trump about investigating the servers still, saying, “The President should immediately demand the DNC servers be turned over to his legal team’s own forensic analysis team in order to determine the origins any hack. Given that the DNC failed to provide this basic piece of evidence to the FBI in the past, it will provide the people of the United States the first independent look at what really happened with their servers.”
That is, if there is even any data left.
Robert Romano is the Vice President of Public Policy at Americans for Limited Government.
