As Donald Trump and his surrogates continue to engage in dangerous denial of Russia's interference in our election and the intelligence community as a whole, one expert who knows of what he speaks made an appearance on Wolf Blitzer's show yesterday to knock a huge hole in Trump's arguments.
Trump has long dismissed the reports of Russian interference as ridiculous, going so far as to say it was maybe China or some 400-pound creepy guy in his mother's basement. Anything he can do to distract from Russia's interference, he's done.
But Dmitri Alperovitch, employed by Crowdstrike, the security firm hired by the DNC and Clinton campaign to come in and deal with the hack, begs to differ, and he's got the goods to prove it.
Right out of the gate, Alperovitch tells Wolf Blitzer that his firm "did catch the Russians in the act when the DNC hired us back in May."
He continued to explain, "We deployed our technology and we watched these adversaries for a number of days and weeks as we were preparing to kick them out."
When Blitzer asked him to name the adversaries, Alperovitch pointed to two independent working groups. One is associated with the GRU, which he identifies as the "little green men" in Ukraine working to annex Crimea.
He went on to describe what they saw.
"We deployed our Falcon technology and picked up a trace of these two attackers. We saw them going after e-mail community servers, stealing e-mails from the DNC for a period of nine months going back to 2015, and then going after sensitive documents that the campaign was preparing on Donald Trump and other Republican candidates that were running for the primary," Alperovitch explained.
Those "sensitive documents" included the entire opposition research file on Donald Trump, as well as other emails which were subsequently published to Wikileaks.
Alperovitch also pooh-poohed John Bolton's ridiculous "false flag" theory.
"You can never discount that, but the evidence here is overwhelming. We looked at all the forensic evidence, we had the FBI and the intelligence community confirm it publicly in October, independently, that they believe the Russians were behind the attack," he said.
He continued, "And the thing you have to understand is that we've been tracking these intelligence agencies for years. One of them, the GRU, has been active since mid 2000. we have over ten years of history of their campaigns, hundreds of intrusions into different organizations."
He also went on to mention the more minor releases of Colin Powell's emails by Guccifer 2.0 and others, along with confirming that Republican operatives had also been hacked by Russian hackers, though nothing really significant was ever released from those intrusions.
At any rate, Mr. Alperovitch laid the idea to rest that any entity besides Russia could have been responsible for these attacks, and he also laid waste to Trump's claims that they can't be traced and they weren't observed.
So when is it that Congress opens their full investigation into this foreign meddling in our elections again? Tomorrow? Today?
Get on it, Republicans. Time is of the essence.
(h/t StylistKavin/Twitter)
