The Nation left-wing magazine agrees with this blog !

The Nation is a socialist magazine that I read once in a while to see how the "progressives" think. 

A recent The Nation article backs up something I've been saying here since Fall 2016: There's no independent evidence that the Democrat National Committee (DNC) was hacked, the hackers were Russians, and WikiLeaks received hacked eMails (WikiLeaks claimed the eMails came from a DNC insider angry that Bernie Sanders was not being treated fairly, and The Nation agrees!).

I have explained in many posts here (starting November 7, 2016, with a Julian Assange of WikiLeaks interview) why the Russian hacking story was a lie.

I later explained why the Trump-Russian collusion story was a lie too. 

I'm not a political genius -- I just know politicians lie most of the time, and I know Hillary Clinton is a world class liar (by "world class", I mean there's never any punishment). 

Let me add that Donald Trump is a liar too, but his specialty was grossly over promising what he could deliver as President.   

It is now a year since the DNC Email system was compromised, and quickly attributed to Russian hackers acting in behalf of Donald Trump. 

President Trump, members of his family, and people around him, now stand falsely accused of collusion with Russians. 

In my July-August 2017 economics newsletter I said this about Trump's first six months in office: "There is actually anti-RUSSIA bias."

Trump has been unfriendly with the Russians -- he recently signed legislation imposing severe new sanctions on Russia and European companies working with it on pipeline projects vital to Russia’s energy sector. 

In retaliation, Moscow just announced that the United States must cut its embassy staff in Russia by roughly two-thirds. 

All of this started when the DNC’s mail server was violated in 2016, described as a Russian hack on July 5. 

Quotes in red from The Nation with spaces added between sentences:
article written by Patrick Lawrence
https://www.thenation.com/article/a-new-report-raises-big-questions-about-last-years-dnc-hack/

"The evolution of public discourse in the year since is worthy of scholarly study: 

Possibilities became allegations, and these became probabilities. 

Then the probabilities turned into certainties, and these evolved into what are now taken to be established truths.

By my reckoning, it required a few days to a few weeks to advance from each of these stages to the next. 

This was accomplished via the indefensibly corrupt manipulations of language repeated incessantly in our leading media."

" ... we are urged to accept the word of institutions and senior officials with long records of deception."

"Forensic investigators, intelligence analysts, system designers, program architects, and computer scientists of long experience and strongly credentialed are now producing evidence disproving the official version of key events last year."

"There was no hack of the Democratic National Committee’s system on July 5 last year—not by the Russians, not by anyone else. 

Hard science now demonstrates it was a leak—a download executed locally with a memory key or a similarly portable data-storage device. 

In short, it was an inside job by someone with access to the DNC’s system. "

"This article is based on an examination of the documents these forensic experts and intelligence analysts have produced, notably the key papers written over the past several weeks, as well as detailed interviews with many of those conducting investigations and now drawing conclusions from them." 

"Under no circumstance can it be acceptable that the relevant authorities—the National Security Agency, the Justice Department (via the Federal Bureau of Investigation), and the Central Intelligence Agency -- leave these new findings without reply. 

Not credibly, in any case. "

"Qualified experts working independently of one another began to examine the DNC case immediately after the July 2016 events." 

"Prominent among these is a group comprising former intelligence officers, almost all of whom previously occupied senior positions." 

"Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), founded in 2003, now has 30 members, including a few associates with backgrounds in national-security fields other than intelligence." 

"The chief researchers active on the DNC case are four: 

William Binney, formerly the NSA’s technical director for world geopolitical and military analysis and designer of many agency programs now in use; 

Kirk Wiebe, formerly a senior analyst at the NSA’s SIGINT Automation Research Center; 

Edward Loomis, formerly technical director in the NSA’s Office of Signal Processing; and 

Ray McGovern, an intelligence analyst for nearly three decades and formerly chief of the CIA’s Soviet Foreign Policy Branch." 

"Most of these men have decades of experience in matters concerning Russian intelligence and the related technologies." 

"This article reflects numerous interviews with all of them conducted in person, via Skype, or by telephone."

"In a letter to Barack Obama dated January 17, 2017, three days before he left office, the group explained that the NSA’s known programs are fully capable of capturing all electronic transfers of data. 

“We strongly suggest that you ask NSA for any evidence it may have indicating that the results of Russian hacking were given to WikiLeaks,” the letter said. 

“If NSA cannot produce such evidence—and quickly—this would probably mean it does not have any.”

A day after this letter, Obama gave his last press conference as president, and he said: 

“The conclusions of the intelligence community with respect to the Russian hacking were not conclusive.” 

"The group (VIPS) knew that (1) if there was a hack and (2) if Russia was responsible for it, the NSA would have to have evidence of both. Binney and others surmised that the agency and associated institutions were hiding the absence of evidence behind the claim that they had to maintain secrecy to protect NSA programs."

" ... until recently the VIPS experts could produce only “negative evidence,” as they put it: The absence of evidence supporting the hack theory demonstrates that it cannot be so."

"Research into the DNC case took a fateful turn in early July (2017), when forensic investigators who had been working independently began to share findings and form loose collaborations wherein each could build on the work of others. In this a small, new website called www.disobedientmedia.com proved an important catalyst."

"... Binney and the other technical-side people at VIPS had begun working with a man named Skip Folden.  Folden was an IT executive at IBM for 33 years, serving 25 years as the IT program manager in the United States." 

"... first decisive findings, made public in the paper dated July 9, concerned the volume of the supposedly hacked material and what is called the transfer rate—the time a remote hack would require. 

The metadata established several facts in this regard with granular precision: 

On the evening of July 5, 2016, 1,976 megabytes of data were downloaded from the DNC’s server. The operation took 87 seconds. 

This yields a transfer rate of 22.7 megabytes per second."

"These statistics are matters of record and essential to disproving the hack theory. 

No Internet service provider, such as a hacker would have had to use in mid-2016, was capable of downloading data at this speed."

“A speed of 22.7 megabytes is simply unobtainable, especially if we are talking about a transoceanic data transfer,” Folden said. 

“Based on the data we now have, what we’ve been calling a hack is impossible.” 

"Time stamps in the metadata provide further evidence of what happened on July 5. 

The stamps recording the download indicate that it occurred in the Eastern Daylight Time Zone at approximately 6:45 pm." 

"It is not yet clear whether documents now shown to have been leaked locally on July 5 were tainted to suggest Russian hacking ... "

"The Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA), the supposedly definitive report featuring the “high confidence” dodge, was greeted as farcically flimsy when issued January 6. 

Ray McGovern calls it a disgrace to the intelligence profession. 

It is spotlessly free of evidence, front to back, pertaining to any events in which Russia is implicated."

"James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence, admitted in May that “hand-picked” analysts from three agencies (not the 17 previously reported) drafted the ICA."

"The FBI has never examined the DNC’s computer servers—an omission that is beyond preposterous. 

It has instead relied on the reports produced by Crowdstrike, a firm that drips with conflicting interests well beyond the fact that it is in the DNC’s employ. 

Dmitri Alperovitch, its co-founder and chief technology officer, is on the record as vigorously anti-Russian."

"The investigators deserve a response, the betrayed professionals who formed VIPS as the WMD scandal unfolded in 2003 deserve it, and so do the rest of us."

"I concluded each of the interviews conducted for this column by asking for a degree of confidence in the new findings. 

These are careful, exacting people as a matter of professional training and standards, and I got careful, exacting replies."

"All those interviewed came in between 90 percent and 100 percent certain that the forensics prove out (their conclusions are correct)."