Free Republic

A Clinton campaign aide says that a typo in a March 19 email sent to John Podesta is to blame for opening the campaign chairman’s Gmail account up to Russian cyber hackers. The IT aide, Charles Delavan, tells The New York Times that his error — typing the word “legitimate” instead of “illegitimate” to describe a hacker’s email — continues to haunt him. “This is a legitimate email,” Delavan wrote to Clinton campaign aide Sara Latham after she forwarded him an spear phishing email designed to look like official correspondence from Google. “John needs to change his password immediately,” Delavan...

After their defeat in WW1, Germany developed in the fall of 1918 a conspiracy theory, trying to explain the devastating loss of their seemingly unbeatable military, which presumed that their war efforts had been undermined by secretive domestic forces. In the German language it was called the Dolchstoßlegende or the Stab-in-the back Myth. Historians agree that this legend greatly destabilized the Weimar Republic, and contributed to the rise of National Socialism under the leadership of Adolf Hitler. We are now witnessing as similar onslaught of conspiracy theories developing among the political left, trying to explain the devastating loss of the...

Former 2008 Presidential Candidate Bill Richardson on whether the Electoral College should meet over the alleged Russian hack of the 2016 election.

The liberal media have been playing up a report by the Central Intelligence Agency that hackers aligned with the Russian government had allegedly provided Julian Assange with the hacked emails his website WikiLeaks published during the fall, but a former British ambassador to Uzbekistan is going public again to blow the story out of the water. “As [WikiLeaks founder] Julian Assange has made crystal clear, the leaks did not come from the Russians,” former Ambassador Craig Murray wrote on his blog Monday morning, adding that he had direct access to the original source. “As I have explained countless times, they...

I have watched incredulous as the CIA's blatant lie has grown and grown as a media story – blatant because the CIA has made no attempt whatsoever to substantiate it. There is no Russian involvement in the leaks of emails showing Clinton's corruption. Yes this rubbish has been the lead today in the Washington Post in the US and the Guardian here, and was the lead item on the BBC main news. I suspect it is leading the American broadcasts also. A little simple logic demolishes the CIA's claims. The CIA claim they "know the individuals" involved. Yet under Obama...

The Clinton campaign breaks its silence and demands declassification of the intelligence on Russian election meddling. ■ Donald J. Trump takes to Twitter to deny Russian involvement in his victory. ■ Senator John McCain says there is no doubt about Russian hacking, which he called “warfare.” ■ Carly Fiorina for director of national intelligence? She certainly took the president-elect’s line on China.

Hillary Rodham Clinton’s email scandal didn’t stop the head of the CIA from using his own personal AOL account to stash work-related documents, according to a high school student who claims to have hacked into them. -snip- “I can’t believe he did this to the head of the CIA,’’ the source added. “[The] problem with these older-generation guys is that they don’t know anything about cybersecurity, and as you can see, it can be problematic.” In a series of phone conversations with The Post, the hacker described himself as an American high school student who is not Muslim and was...

Since election day, Democrats have engaged in a panicked attempt to leverage their last couple of weeks in control of the executive branch to delegitimize the Trump presidency.  Obama has even gone so far as to order a "full report" on Russian tampering in the 2016 election cycle to be completed before he leaves office (see "A "Soft Coup" Attempt: Furious Trump Slams "Secret" CIA Report Russia Helped Him Win").  Of course, we should simply ignore the fact that a true investigation of such allegations would take much longer than the one month that Obama has left in office...

Presstitutes such as the New York Times and Reuters continue to hype an alleged CIA finding that Russians hacked Hillary’s emails and used them to influence the election outcome. As a number of experts have noted, there is no evidence whatsoever for the claim, which is in the category of fake news. Julian Assange at Wikileaks, which released the leaked, not hacked, documents, denies that the Russians were involved. William Binney, former top NSA official says that if Russia did it, NSA would have clear evidence. Binney said that “they have failed to prove anything, which suggests they don’t have...

The White House strongly suggested Monday that Donald Trump was the beneficiary of Russian meddling in the US election, saying it was the President-elect who praised Vladimir Putin on the campaign trail. "The emails that had been hacked and leaked by the Russians, these were emails from the (Democratic National Committee) and John Podesta, not from the (Republican National Committee) and Stephen Bannon," said White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest. "It was the President-elect who over the course of the campaign indicated that he thought that President Putin was a strong leader," Earnest added. He said members of Congress should...

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on Monday said he “strongly” condemned any Russian efforts to influence the US presidential election, adding that he backed a congressional investigation into Russia”s involvement in the hacking of emails from US political organizations. “Obviously, any foreign breach of our cybersecurity measures is disturbing and I strongly condemn any such efforts,” he said at a press conference. […] “The Russians are not our friends,” he added, saying President Barack Obama’s administration attempted to reset Russian relations and “sat back” as the country expanded its “sphere of influence.” …

Ultimately, even if Russia is to blame for these leaks, Democrats seem eager to ignore the biggest issues. It’s questions pertaining to foreign donors and preferential treatment (in addition to the inner workings of Democratic politics) being exposed to the American public and it’s this corruption that adversaries can use to their advantage. If Clinton was an honest politician, or the DNC didn’t undermine Bernie Sanders, there’d be nothing for Putin (assuming Clinton’s propaganda is correct) to use against Democrats.

The Sunday Talk Shows are filled with various left-wing punditry using two media reports from the Washington Post and New York Times claiming anonymous, albeit transparently political, “intelligence officials” who state the Russian government “hacked the U.S. election“.

What started as simple Election Denial in the Democrat-servile media is morphing into acute Electile Dysfunction (ED). There is no known remedy. ED was on full public display today (Dec 11) on NBC’s Meet the Press as Chuck Todd browbeat Reince Priebus over alleged Russian interference in the election. Todd wasted a full 8 minutes trying to extract a “gotcha” admission from Priebus that preferential hacking by the Russians delivered the election to Donald Trump. He failed, ending with his usual “We have to leave it there because of time.” Of course, the implication that Trump somehow stole the election...

President Barack Obama has ordered a full review into hacking by the Russians designed to influence the 2016 election, White House Homeland Security and Counterterrorism Adviser Lisa Monaco said Friday. “The President has directed the Intelligence Community to conduct a full review of what happened during the 2016 election process. It is to capture lessons learned from that and to report to a range of stakeholders,” she said at a Christian Science Monitor breakfast with reporters. “This is consistent with the work that we did over the summer to engage Congress on the threats that we were seeing.” Monaco said...

The incoming Trump administration is being advised to train 100,000 hackers. The new president should also make an effort to develop international norms for hacking, essentially drawing red lines to avoid cyber warfare or even armed conflict. President Obama's special Commission on Enhancing National Cybersecurity released its long-awaited report Friday night. In it, the panel outlines a challenging to-do list that makes clear cybersecurity is a top national priority. Computer hacking is now commonplace and more dangerous than ever....

A single search warrant, multiple computers. The FBI and other law enforcement agencies will be able to search multiple computers across the country with a single warrant thanks to a controversial rule change that takes effect on Thursday.

Locked out of the government system for several hours, Syrian officials turned to Facebook to deny any attack against Assad and update viewers on his current condition.

Hackers gained access to sensitive information, including Social Security numbers, for 134,386 current and former U.S. sailors, the U.S. Navy said on Wednesday. It said a laptop used by a Hewlett Packard Enterprise Services employee working on a U.S. Navy contract was hacked. Hewlett Packard informed the Navy of the breach on Oct. 27 and the affected sailors will be notified in the coming weeks, the Navy said. "The Navy takes this incident extremely seriously - this is a matter of trust for our sailors," Chief of Naval Personnel Vice Admiral Robert Burke said in a statement. Burke said the...

(CNN)Hillary Clinton's campaign is being urged by a number of top computer scientists to call for a recount of vote totals in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, according to a source with knowledge of the request. The computer scientists believe they have found evidence that vote totals in the three states could have been manipulated or hacked and presented their findings to top Clinton aides on a call last Thursday. The scientists, among them J. Alex Halderman, the director of the University of Michigan Center for Computer Security and Society, told the Clinton campaign they believe there is a questionable trend...