by Matt Taibbi at Racket News
For over eight years, the world has been told that the United States government relied on a private firm called Crowdstrike to investigate the hack of the Democratic National Committee. Both former FBI Director James Comey and Special Counsel Robert Mueller referred to Crowdstrike as a primary source that Russian “conspirators hacked the DNC.”
That narrative was troubling enough and the subject of questions at Congressional hearings. Attempts by members of the public to obtain Crowdstrike’s analysis through FOIA have been shot down time and again owing to corporate “trade secrets” involved, and with Special Counsel Mueller’s July 2018 indictment of those 12 Russians who are unlikely to ever be apprehended, key facts about their investigation were set to be sealed for decades.
New emails obtained by Racket through the Freedom of Information Act, however, suggest there is more to the story. Cyber researchers at Georgia Tech who were indirectly working with the Clinton campaign and Fusion GPS to produce the Alfa Bank claims, also appear to have influenced Special Counsel Mueller’s investigation of the DNC hack.
Racket previously covered the September 2022 letter the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, sent to Senator Grassley, in which DARPA confirmed the cyber researchers authored a DNC hack attribution analysis on August 7, 2016. In relation to other emails and reporting suggesting the cyber researchers also had a hand in assisting Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, DARPA at the time suggested their work was solely “retrospective”:
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