A whistleblower report declassified last week suggests that Hillary Clinton’s campaign efforts to manufacture evidence tying Donald Trump to alleged Russian hacking in 2016 were deeper than previously known – as were Obama administration efforts to conceal them.
According to the report, a former seniorU.S. intelligence analyst who investigated alleged Russian attempts to breach state voting systems during the 2016 election suspected the breaches may have been “related to activities” of the computer contractors involved in the Alfa Bank hoax,who were accused of manipulating Internet traffic data.
In that well-publicized case, a Clinton campaign lawyer worked with federal computer contractors and the FBI to create suspicions that Russia was communicating with Donald Trump through a secret server shared by Alfa Bank of Russia and Trump Tower in Manhattan.
The anonymous whistleblower – who served as the deputy national intelligence officer for cyber issues in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence from 2015 to 2020 – told Special Counsel John Durham he stumbled onto “enigmatic” data while leading the investigation of alleged Russian cyber activity for the Intelligence Community Assessment on Russian meddling in the 2016 election. He said that his discovery took place in December 2016 when President Obama ordered the ICA.
After examining state-reported breaches of election networks, the whistleblower said, “It seemed only brief interaction was occurring – in some cases, no unauthorized access, or even attempted access, was detected on ‘victim’ systems.” Though the suspicious activity initially was attributed to Russian actors, further analysis raised doubts.
But when he brought his findings to his boss, ODNI’s national intelligence officer for cyber issues, he was ordered to stop investigating and not include his findings in the final ICA draft.
“After being directed to conduct analysis of Russian-attributed cyber activity for the ICA, I had been abruptly directed to abandon further investigation,” the whistleblower analyst said.
He added that his boss, whose name was blacked out in the whistleblower statement, “directed me to abandon analysis of these events, stating reports of Russia-attributed cyber activity were ‘something else.'”
Hellbound and Down 
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