As most of us know the DNC have blamed the Russians for their email leaks starting back in June 2016 after a supposed Russian hacker called Guccifer 2.0 initially released a few of them online. New evidence and research from the internet suggests Guccifer 2.0 was actually just an invention made up by the DNC or someone within the DNC to detract us from the real source of the leaks, Seth Rich. Why would the DNC pretend to be a Russian hacker I hear you ask. Well if the DNC already knew they had been compromised by an insider (Seth Rich), and that Wikileaks were about to release their emails then rather than admitting it was one of their own that leaked the documents they instead fabricated the Guciffer 2.0 and Russian story. This shows there is a great deal of circumstantial evidence revealing illegal activity that goes all the way up to the Obama administration, and provides new motive for why Seth Rich was murdered.
History
First off understanding the order in which the events happened will be important to understanding how it was the DNC could have manufactured the Russian campaign.
| Date | Event | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 06/14/2016 | The DNC releases a statement stating they have been hacked. | Washington Post |
| 06/15/2016 | Crowdstrike (cybersecurity firm) releases reports suggesting the DNC was hacked by Russians | Crowdstrike |
| 06/15/2016 | Guccifer 2.0 publishes first DNC email documents and claims he has sent them to Wikileaks.Guccifer insists he is not Russian. | Guccifer 2.0 blog |
| 06/16/2016 | Vice publishes article titled "'Guccifer 2.0' Is Likely a Russian Government Attempt to Cover Up Its Own Hack." Other media outlets follow suit calling Guccifer a Russian government job | Vice |
| 07/10/2016 | Seth Rich's murder | Wikipedia |
| 07/22/2016 | Wikileaks releases the DNC email documents | Wikileaks |
| 07/27/2016 | Trump makes infamous "Russia: If you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing" joke that starts allegations of Russian collusion | Politico |
DNC announces they've been hacked. The day after, a hacker calling themself Guccifer 2.0 claims responsibility for the hack and announces they'll be giving the documents to Wikileaks. Guccifer 2.0 denies being a Russian hacker which they deny throughout their activity. With the Crowdstrike report and the metadata in Guccifer 2.0's documents the MSM start start saying Guccifer 2.0 is a Russian agent. Eventually Wikileaks releases the DNC documents a month after Guccifer 2.0 did.
Guccifer 2.0
Guccifer 2.0 has a Wordpress site where the DNC documents could be publicly downloaded. June 15th was the date of the first Guccifer 2.0 leak; further leaks would continue thereafter. This research only focuses on the first leak, as they contain the metadata which is essential to proving it was a DNC operation. Guccifer 2.0 leaked a total of 10 Office documents from the DNC in the first batch (many more would come, but none contain the same "mistakes" as the ones detailed below).
Microsoft Office 2007 Meta Data
All Microsoft Office documents have metadata entries which contain attributes about the document itself such as the user that created them, the user that modified them, and so on. This metadata is usually hidden from users but can be viewed with a raw text editor like Notepad. It would be unusual for a leaker to modify the metadata, but Guccifer 2.0 did, claiming that it was his "watermark."
In Office, the metadata includes the owner of the Office application who created the file and the owner of the Office application who modified the file. Here is a table of the document names having metadata values for original author & modified author:
| Document name | Original author | Modified author |
|---|---|---|
| 1.doc | Warren Flood | Феликс Эдмундович |
| 2.doc | Warren Flood | Феликс Эдмундович |
| 3.doc | Warren Flood | Феликс Эдмундович |
| 4.doc | Blake | |
| 5.doc | jbs836 | Феликс Эдмундович |
Феликс Эдмундович translates to Felix Edmundovich. The full name is assumed to be Фе́ликс Эдму́ндович Дзержи́нский which translates to Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky
He was a member of several revolutionary committees such as the Polish Revkom as well as several Russian and Soviet official positions. Dzerzhinsky is best known for establishing and developing the Soviet secret police forces, serving as their director from 1917 to 1926. Later he was a member of the Soviet government heading several commissariats, while being the chief of the Soviet secret police.
So initially it appears Warren Flood, Blake, and jbs836 were the original authors but we can cross-reference the actual authors from the Wikileaks dump to check. 1.doc is in the "verified" Wikileaks release as the attachment which can be downloaded here. This has the original author of Lauren Dillon. Lauren Dillon was the DNC Research Director in charge of GOP/Trump research.
Each of these documents had a creation date of June 15, and were modified by "Феликс Эдмундович" a few minutes later.
In the Office 2007 format specification, there is a certain stylesheet template which dictates overall formatting for the document. In three of the documents by Warren Flood, we find the identical metadata.
{\s108\ql \li0\ri0\widctlpar\wrapdefault\aspalpha\aspnum\faauto\adjustright\rin0\lin0\itap0\contextualspace\rtlch\fcs1\af1\afs20\alang1025\ltrch\fcs0\f1\fs20*lang1049\langfe1049\cgrid\langnp1049\langfenp1049\sbasedon0\snext108\slink107\sqformat\spriority1*styrsid11758497**}
The above line appears across all three of Warren Flood's documents. styrsid11758497 is a unique identifier that is author-associative. The fact that it does not appear in the other documents indicates it's associated with Warren Flood and not Феликс Эдмундович.
The langfe1049 portion is a setting that tells Microsoft Office the Russian language should be used by the default in the document template. Had Феликс Эдмундович been setting the "watermark," it would be the same across all documents. But instead, distinct watermarks were created for each document creator, suggesting inconsistent application or three different creators applying their own watermark. In other words, document creators set the document properties to use Russian language and created three distinct so-called 'watermarks' in doing so.
Cross-referencing the same Wikileaks docs shows that Warren Flood did not author any of the documents. And given that the timestamps are all June 15th, this seems to be the sequence of events:
- A worker using a computer registered to Warren Flood opens a DNC document, copies it, and pastes it as a new document to his computer.
- A worker using a computer registered to Warren Flood sets the theme language to Russian in some way (this process is different for all authors).
- A worker using a computer registered to Warren Flood modifies the document's author to Феликс Эдмундович.
- The modified document is then uploaded to the Guccifer website and publicly published a short time thereafter.
Warren Flood
His about page states he worked for Obama in 2012.
I’m Warren. I’m a lucky guy. I’ve had a series of dream jobs I never knew I wanted or could ever attain. What started as a single hour of volunteer work in 2007, turned into data analytics jobs in President Obama’s 2008 and 2012 campaign headquarters. Oh, and in between I worked in the White House as Vice President Biden’s Technology Director.
Now, I spend the majority of my days doing mostly campaign-related work as an independent consultant.
His Facebook page explains in further detail his employment history.
Interestingly he speaks Українська (Ukrainian) and Русский (Russian)
Looking at his website we see he's posted a single blog post titled Why big data is good for the little guy posted on March 22, 2015. But was originally published January 21, 2013 by The Hill Times. This date is noteworthy as it was the day after the Second inauguration of Barack Obama. I guess this was when his contract would've ended. As he wouldn't have been needed after the elections.
Any mention of the words “big data”, “analytics”, or “micro-targeting” in political conversation today runs the risk of conjuring up frightful images of an Orwellian Big Brother spying on citizens’ every move....
Warren Flood doesn't appear in any Wikileak searches, this could mean he's either a third party as far as the DNC email leaks are concerned or he didn't work for the DNC during the 2016 election at all. Other than his (professional Internet) profile, he is a virtual social media ghost.
The pertinent point is that: the metadata forensic proof is irrefutable that Warren Flood, or someone who used a copy of Word registered to Warren Flood, shoehorned in obvious "Russian" fingerprints all over the documents.
It has been suggested that it wasn't Warren Flood that doctored the documents but someone using Microsoft Word software registered to him, possibly for the express purpose of creating rationale for unmasking. In hindsight, we now know that Obama administration unmasking of US campaign officials on the pretext of "Russian interference" started in June 2016, same date as when Guccifer 2.0 began. Illegal unmasking of Trump campaign officials over Russian interference began June 2016. Was this to affirm Russian interference with the DNC hacks? If so, this means that the leaks not only implicate DNC and plague President Trump himself, but also implicates Obama administration officials and all the involved intelligence agencies.
Guccifer 2.0 is none other than a botched DNC creation to create a false flag for Russia.
Crowdstrike
The metadata described above can be independently verified by a non-technical person with access to any text editor. It does not require special forensic analysis to identify. There are only two explanations: staggering incompetence, or DNC collusion.
Bears in the Midst: Intrusion into the Democratic National Committee | CrowdStrike - 06/15/2016
CrowdStrike stands fully by its analysis and findings identifying two separate Russian intelligence-affiliated adversaries present in the DNC network in May 2016. On June 15, 2016 a blog post to a WordPress site authored by an individual using the moniker Guccifer 2.0 claimed credit for breaching the Democratic National Committee. This blog post presents documents alleged to have originated from the DNC.
Whether or not this posting is part of a Russian Intelligence disinformation campaign, we are exploring the documents’ authenticity and origin. Regardless, these claims do nothing to lessen our findings relating to the Russian government’s involvement, portions of which we have documented for the public and the greater security community.
Russian government hackers penetrated DNC, stole opposition research on Trump | Washington Post - June 14, 2016
"It’s the job of every foreign intelligence service to collect intelligence against their adversaries,” said Shawn Henry, president of CrowdStrike, the cyber firm called in to handle the DNC breach and a former head of the FBI’s cyber division.
Also interesting to note the co-founder and CTO, Dmitri Alperovitch, is a senior fellow with the Atlantic Council.
He is a Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council think tank and was named in December 2013 as one of Foreign Policy's Top 100 Leading Global Thinkers, along with Angela Merkel, John Kerry, Ben Bernanke and Jeff Bezos
Guess who's on the board of directors of the Atlantic Council? Susan Rice
Top Obama Adviser Sought Names of Trump Associates in Intel | Bloomberg - 03/03/2017
White House lawyers last month learned that the former national security adviser Susan Rice requested the identities of U.S. persons in raw intelligence reports on dozens of occasions that connect to the Donald Trump transition and campaign, according to U.S. officials familiar with the matter.
The pattern of Rice's requests was discovered in a National Security Council review of the government's policy on "unmasking" the identities of individuals in the U.S. who are not targets of electronic eavesdropping, but whose communications are collected incidentally.
Did the DNC leak their own documents?
In Guccifer 2.0’s blog it states:
The main part of the papers, thousands of files and mails, I gave to Wikileaks. They will publish them soon.
Assuming they knew they had been compromised and that their documents were being released by Wikileaks the DNC wanted to make sure they could blame it on a Russian hacker instead of one of their own. It’s hard to imagine them knowing without assistance from intelligence agencies – and indeed unmasking of campaign officials started in June 2016.
In addition to hosting them on the official Wordpress website, DNC documents were sent directly by Guccifer 2.0 to media outlets such as The Hill (despite Guccifer 2.0 himself claiming hatred of these very same media outlets accusing him of being Russian). What Guccifer 2.0 sent was not always the same as what was on the official Guccifer 2.0 website. This leads us to speculate that Guccifer 2.0 revised the documents to remove the metadata, then sent the corrected documents to media outlets. Guccifer 2.0 couldn't do the same on the Wordpress site without drawing attention to the mistake.
Who leaked the DNC emails to Wikileaks?
All circumstantial evidence points to Seth Rich. Seth Rich was killed on July 10, after the Guccifer 2.0 released a handful of documents and before the Wikileaks releases. Wikileaks offered a $20,000 reward for information on Seth Rich’s death. Craig Murray, a British national connected to Wikileaks, claims a disgusted Democrat insider was the leaker and he personally flew overseas to meet one of those connected.
The Russian Bear Uses a Keyboard | Craig Murray.org.uk - 12/14/2016
I am about twenty four hours behind on debunking the “evidence” of Russian hacking of the DNC because I have only just stopped laughing. I was sent last night the “crowdstrike” report, paid for by the Democratic National Committee, which is supposed to convince us. The New York Times today made this “evidence” its front page story.
EXCLUSIVE: Ex-British ambassador who is now a WikiLeaks operative claims Russia did NOT provide Clinton emails - they were handed over to him at a D.C. park by an intermediary for 'disgusted' Democratic whistleblowers | Daily Mail - 21-14/2016
A Wikileaks envoy today claims he personally received Clinton campaign emails in Washington D.C. after they were leaked by 'disgusted' whisteblowers - and not hacked by Russia.
Craig Murray, former British ambassador to Uzbekistan and a close associate of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, told Dailymail.com that he flew to Washington, D.C. for a clandestine hand-off with one of the email sources in September.
'Neither of [the leaks] came from the Russians,' said Murray in an interview with Dailymail.com on Tuesday. 'The source had legal access to the information. The documents came from inside leaks, not hacks.'
Here is a reply Craig Murray made on his own website to a comment referencing the Daily Mail article.
Was Seth Rich murdered by the DNC?
We are getting in speculative territory here. The circumstances of his death are suspicious. Nothing was stolen from Seth on the night of his murder. Furthermore, Seth was on the phone with his girlfriend at the time of his death and allegedly ended the conversation with "I have to go," which is an unusually calm thing to say at a gunpoint robbery.
Unmasking
In 2016 the NSA agreed to almost 2,000 requests from officials within the government to reveal the identities of U.S. persons caught up in foreign surveillance. Consumers of this unmasked data included Obama national security advisor Susan Rice and Obama CIA director John Brennan.
NSA granted nearly 2K 'unmasking' requests in 2016 | The Hill - 05/02/2017
In 1,934 instances, the NSA complied with requests from authorized officials to “unmask” names that had been originally blacked out to protect privacy. The report did not reveal the number of requests that were denied.
That figure is a dramatic increase from 2015, when only 654 were granted.
On top of it all, NSA spy data was allowed to be searched by third parties that had no right to access it, including "private entities."
Declassified memos show FBI illegally shared spy data on Americans with private parties | Circa - 05/26/2017
The FBI has illegally shared raw intelligence about Americans with unauthorized third parties and violated other constitutional privacy protections, according to newly declassified government documents that undercut the bureau’s public assurances about how carefully it handles warrantless spy data to avoid abuses or leaks.
Either Guccifer 2.0 is lying about being the Wikileaks source or they're an insider who doctored documents using Microsoft Office software registered to Warren Flood. Putting all assertion together, Guccifer 2.0 involved a very powerful technological figure who had continuing access to both sensitive DNC data and unmasked IC data, and is likely a foreign national. We also now know that at least one federal contractor had access to NSA spy data.
Imran Awan.
Imran Awan and four of his family members worked exclusively for the Democrats collecting $5 million since 2009. Imran Awan was the IT staffer for Debbie Wasserman Schultz, chair of DNC as of June 2016 who resigned shortly after the Wikileaks release showed collusion to prevent Bernie Sanders from becoming the nominee.
House Democrats fire two IT staffers amid criminal investigation | Politico - 03/01/2017
Two House Democrats this week fired technology staffers linked to an ongoing criminal investigation, more than a month after the couple in question was barred from House computer networks.
As of Wednesday, Awan was still working as a technology adviser for Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), although he’s been blocked from accessing the House computer system since early February. Alvi, Awan and three other House aides, including Abid Awan and Jamal Awan, relatives of Imran Awan, and Rao Abbas, are all linked to the criminal investigation being conducted by the U.S. Capitol Police.
Suspect In House IT Security Probe Also Had Access To DNC Emails | The Daily Caller - 03/09/2017
Imran Awan — the lead suspect in a criminal probe into breaches of House of Representatives information security systems — possessed the password to an iPad used by then-Democratic National Committee Chairperson Debbie Wasserman Schultz when DNC emails were given to WikiLeaks.
He is implicated in data theft of Congressional members, but attention to raise awareness have gone so ignored by Democrats, and their defenses of them go so deep, that it is speculated Democrats were being blackmailed by them.
House IT Aides Fear Suspects In Hill Breach Are Blackmailing Members With Their Own Data | The Daily Caller - 05/21/2017
Congressional technology aides are baffled that data-theft allegations against four former House IT workers — who were banned from the congressional network — have largely been ignored, and they fear the integrity of sensitive high-level information.
Imran Awan and three relatives were colleagues until police banned them from computer networks at the House of Representatives after suspicion the brothers accessed congressional computers without permission.
Debbie Wasserman Schultz
Debbie Wasserman Schultz Threatens Capitol Police Over IT Staffer Investigation | The Daily Caller - 05/24/17
In February 2017, Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s top IT staffer, Imran Awan, was reported as under criminal investigation for the theft of a wide range equipment and data. Awan and several other staffers are accused of accessing congressional computers without permission. Its still unclear what, if any, data was stolen and what the motives for the breach were. In a recent budget hearing with the U.S. Capitol Police, Debbie Wasserman Schultz pushed for the U.S. Capitol police chief to return equipment of hers that was confiscated by the police as part of the investigation after it was discovered hidden in a crevice of a House office building.
Wasserman Schultz then threatened the chief. “I think you’re violating the rules when you conduct your business that way and you should expect that there will be consequences.”
Summary
To summarize the DNC found out Seth Rich had downloaded most of the documents from their web severs and was planning on sending then to Wikileaks. The DNC didn't want to admit the data breach had been from within so they decided to blame it all on the Russians by creating an imaginary hacker and setting up the Guccifer 2.0 Wordpress website hosting intentionally tampered documents that were made to look like they were Russian.
This research was compiled from a mixture of my own research and other research here and here.