The 'Guccifer 2.0' Gaps in Mueller's Full Report
April 18, 2019
Like Team Mueller's indictment last July of Russian agents, the full report
reveals questions about Wikileaks' role that much of the media has been
ignoring, writes Daniel Lazare.
By Daniel Lazare
Special to Consortium News
As official Washington pores over the Gospel According to Saint Robert, an
all-important fact about the Mueller report has gotten lost in the shuffle.
Just as the Christian gospels were filled with holes, the latest version is
too - particularly with regard to WikiLeaks and Julian Assange.
The five pages that the special prosecutor's report devotes to WikiLeaks are
essentially lifted from Mueller's indictment last July of 12 members of the
Russian military intelligence agency known as the GRU. It charges that
after hacking the Democratic National Committee, the GRU used a
specially-created online persona known as Guccifer 2.0 to transfer a
gigabyte's worth of stolen emails to WikiLeaks just as the 2016 Democratic
National Convention was approaching. Four days after opening the encrypted
file, the indictment says, "Organization 1 [i.e. WikiLeaks] released over
20,000 emails and other documents stolen from the DNC network by the
Conspirators [i.e. the GRU]."
Barr holding press conference on full Mueller report, April 18, 2019.
(YouTube)
Attorney General William Barr holding press conference on full Mueller
report, April 18, 2019. (YouTube)
Mueller's report says the same thing, but with the added twist that Assange
then tried to cover up the GRU's role by suggesting that murdered Democratic
National Committee staffer Seth Rich may have been the source and by telling
a congressman that the DNC email heist was an "inside job" and that he had
"physical proof" that the material was not from Russian.
All of which is manna from heaven for corporate news outlets eager to pile
on Assange, now behind bars in London. An April 11, 2019, New York Times
news analysis, for instance, declared that "[c]ourt documents have revealed
that it was Russian intelligence - using the Guccifer persona - that
provided Mr. Assange thousands of emails hacked from the Democratic National
Committee," while another Times article published shortly after his arrest
accuses the WikiLeaks founder of "promoting a false cover story about the
source of the leaks."
But there's a problem: it ain't necessarily so. The official story that the
GRU is the source doesn't hold water, as a timeline from mid-2016 shows.
Here are the key events based on the GRU indictment and the Mueller report:
.June 12: Assange tells Britain's ITV that another round of Democratic Party
disclosures is on the way: "We have upcoming leaks in relation to Hillary
Clinton, which is great. WikiLeaks is having a very big year."
.June 14: The Democratic National Committee accuses Russia of hacking its
computers.
.June 15: Guccifer 2.0 claims credit for the hack. "The main part of the
papers, thousands of files and mails, I gave to WikiLeaks ," he brags.
"They will publish them soon."
.June 22: WikiLeaks tells Guccifer via email: "Send any new material here
for us to review and it will have a much higher impact than what you are
doing."
.July 6: WikiLeaks sends Guccifer another email: "if you have anything
hillary related we want it in the next tweo [sic] days prefable [sic]
because the DNC [Democratic National Convention] is approaching and she will
solidify bernie supporters behind her after."Replies Guccifer: "ok . . . i "
.July 14: Guccifer sends WikiLeaks an encrypted file titled "wk dnc
link1.txt.gpg."
.July 18: WikiLeaks confirms it has opened "the 1Gb or so archive" and will
release documents "this week."
.July 22: WikiLeaks releases more than 20,000 DNC emails and 8,000 other
attachments.
According to Mueller and obsequious news outlets like the Times, the
sequence is clear: Guccifer sends archive, WikiLeaks receives archive,
WikiLeaks accesses archive, WikiLeaks publishes archive. Donald Trump may
not have colluded with Russia, but Julian Assange plainly did. [Attorney
General Will Barr, significantly calling WikiLeaks a publisher, said at his
Thursday press conference: "Under applicable law, publication of these types
of materials would not be criminal unless the publisher also participated in
the underlying hacking conspiracy."]
Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein announcing in 2018 a grand jury
indictment of 12 Russian intelligence officers for hacking offenses related
to the 2016 U.S. presidential election. (Wikimedia Commons)
Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein announcing in 2018 the grand jury
indictment of 12 GRU agents. (Wikimedia Commons)
Avoiding Questions
The narrative raises questions that the press studiously avoids. Why, for
instance, would Assange announce on June 12 that a big disclosure is on the
way before hearing from the supposed source? Was there a prior
communication that Mueller has not disclosed? What about the reference to
"new material" on June 22 - does that mean Assange already had other
material in hand? After opening the Guccifer file on July 18, why would he
publish it just four days later? Would that give WikiLeaks enough time to
review some 28,000 documents to insure they're genuine?
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"If a single one of those emails had been shown to be maliciously altered,"
blogger Mark F. McCarty observes, "Wikileaks' reputation would have been in
tatters." There's also the question that an investigator known as Adam
Carter poses in Disobedient Media: why would Guccifer brag about giving
WikiLeaks"thousands of files" that he wouldn't send for another month?
The narrative doesn't make sense - a fact that is crucially important now
that Assange is fighting for his freedom in the U.K. New Yorker staff
writer Raffi Khatchadourian sounded a rare note of caution last summer when
he warned that little about Guccifer 2.0 adds up. While claiming to be the
source for some of WikiLeaks' most explosive emails, the material he
released on his own had proved mostly worthless - 20 documents that he "said
were from the DNC but which were almost surely not," as Khatchadourian puts
it, a purported Hillary Clinton dossier that "was nothing of the sort,"
screenshots of emails so blurry as to be "unreadable," and so forth.
John Podesta at the spin room of the second presidential debate of 2016.
(Voice of America via Wikimedia Commons)
John Podesta: Target of a phishing expedition. (Voice of America via
Wikimedia Commons)
While insisting that "our source is not the Russian government and it is not
a state party, Assange told Khatchadourian that the source was not Guccifer
either. "We received quite a lot of submissions of material that was
already published in the rest of the press, and people seemingly submitted
the Guccifer archives," he said somewhat cryptically. "We didn't publish
them. They were already published." When Khatchadourian asked why he
didn't put the material out regardless, he replied that "the material from
Guccifer 2.0 - or on WordPress - we didn't have the resources to
independently verify."
No Time for Vetting
So four days was indeed too short a time to subject the Guccifer file to
proper vetting. Of course, Mueller no doubt regards this as more
"dissembling," as his report describes it. Yet WikiLeaks has never been
caught in a lie for the simple reason that honesty and credibility are
all-important for a group that promises to protect anonymous leakers who
supply it with official secrets. (See "Inside WikiLeaks: Working with the
Publisher that Changed the World," Consortium News, July 19, 2018.)
Mueller, by contrast, has a rich history of mendacity going back to his days
as FBI director when he sought to cover up the Saudi role in 9/11 and
assured Congress on the eve of the 2003 invasion that Iraqi weapons of mass
destruction pose "a clear threat to our national security."
Mueller with President George W. Bush on July 5, 2001, as he is being
appointed FBI director. (White House)
Mueller with President George W. Bush on July 5, 2001, as he is being
appointed FBI director. (White House)
So if the Mueller narrative doesn't hold up, the charge of dissembling
doesn't either. Indeed, as ex-federal prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy observes
in The National Review, the fact that the feds have charged Assange with
unauthorized access to a government computer rather than conspiring with the
Kremlin could be a sign that Team Mueller is less than confident it can
prove collusion beyond a reasonable doubt. As he puts it, the GRU
indictment "was more like a press release than a charging instrument"
because the special prosecutor knew that the chances were zero that Russian
intelligence agents would surrender to a U.S. court.
Indeed, when Mueller charged 13 employees and three companies owned by
Russian businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin with interfering in the 2016 election,
he clearly didn't expect them to surrender either. Thus, his team seemed
taken aback when one of the alleged "troll farms" showed up in Washington
asking to be heard. The prosecution's initial response, as McCarthy put it,
was to seek a delay "on the astonishing ground that the defendant has not
been properly served - notwithstanding that the defendant has shown up in
court and asked to be arraigned." When that didn't work, prosecutors tried
to limit Concord's access to some 3.2 million pieces of evidence on the
grounds that the documents are too "sensitive" for Russian eyes to see. If
they are again unsuccessful, they may have no choice but to drop the charges
entirely, resulting in yet another "public relations disaster" for the
Russia-gate investigation.
None of which bodes well for Mueller or the news organizations that worship
at his shrine. After blowing the Russia-gate story all these years, why does
the Times continue to slander the one news organization that tells the
truth?