Opuscula DISGRACEFUL ! Russians hack DNC U.S. tastes own medicine

IF THE RUSSIANS HACKED the Democrat (not “Democratic”) National Committee's anti-Sanders/pro-Clinton emails, then they learned the lesson from Obama’s own people,

A quick search of the WWW for obama funded anti-netanyahu campaign turned up the following headlines:

Obama admin. sent taxpayer money to campaign to oust Netanyahu (Washington Times)

NGO connected to Obama’s 2008 campaign used U.S. tax dollars trying to oust Netanyahu (Washington Post)

State Dept.'s funding of anti-Netanyahu campaign out of line and hypocritical (The Hill)

Bipartisan report finds Obama campaign advisor used federal money to build anti-Netanyahu campaign organization (American Enterprise Institute)

Obama State Dept: $350K For Campaign Infrastructure Used Against Netanyahu In Israel Election (CNSnews)

Google reported “about 809,000 results in 0.44 seconds.”

The two Washington (DC) sites are at opposing political poles; the Post is left; the Times is right.

On Tuesday, July 12, 2016 the Washington Times reported: The State Department paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxpayers grants to an Israeli group that used the money to build a campaign to oust Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in last year’s Israeli parliamentary elections, a congressional investigation concluded Tuesday.

Some $350,000 was sent to OneVoice, ostensibly to support the group’s efforts to back Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement negotiations. But OneVoice used the money to build a voter database, train activists and hire a political consulting firm with ties to President Obama’s campaign — all of which set the stage for an anti-Netanyahu campaign, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations said in a bipartisan staff report.

The Washington Post ran a press release from the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (PSI) on July 12, 2016 that reads, in part: Within days after the grant period ended, however, the group (OneVoice) deployed the campaign infrastructure and resources created, in part, using U.S. grant funds to support a political campaign to defeat the incumbent Israeli government known as V15. That use of government-funded resources for political purposes after the end of the grant period was permitted by the grant because the State Department failed to adequately guard against the risk that campaign resources could be repurposed in that manner or place limitations on the post-grant use of resources.

On August 16, 2016, The Hill leads off: The recent revelation that the Obama administration awarded U.S. taxpayer dollars to a group that helped a campaign to defeat Israel's sitting prime minister in last year's elections is reminiscent of the president's long list of dubious and ill-advised attempts to cause leadership change in other sovereign nations.

The American Enterprise Institute offers an opinion by Marc A. Thiessen which interestingly notes that Amazingly, One Voice had informed the State Department about its plans for an anti-Netanyahu campaign during the federal grant period, but Obama's State Department did nothing. This is supported by the committee report.

CNSnews picked up the Senate release, emphasizing Sen. Bob Portman’s comment that “It is completely unacceptable that U.S. taxpayer dollars were used to build a political campaign infrastructure that was deployed — immediately after the grant ended — against the leader [Netanyahu] of our closest ally in the Middle East. American resources should be used to help our allies in the region, not undermine them.”

“The (Obama) State Department ignored warning signs and funded a politically active group in a politically sensitive environment with inadequate safeguards,” said Portman in a July 12, 2016 press release.

To be fair, Portman is a Republican from Ohio.

Hillary Clinton served as Obama's Secretary of State from January 21, 2009 to February 1, 2013 and was not directly Party
connected to the interference with Israeli elections.

The DNC emails

Wikipedia states that The 2016 Democrat National Committee email leak is a collection of Democrat National Committee (DNC) emails leaked to and subsequently published by WikiLeaks on July 22, 2016. This collection included 19,252 emails and 8,034 attachments from the DNC, the governing body of the United States' Democrat Party. The leak includes emails from seven key DNC staff members, and date from January 2015 to May 2016. The leak prompted the resignation of DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz before the Democrat National Convention. After the convention, DNC CEO Amy Dacey, CFO Brad Marshall, and Communications Director Luis Miranda also resigned in the wake of the controversy.

According to US officials warned DNC of hack months before the party acted Federal investigators tried to warn the Democrat National Committee about a potential intrusion in their computer network months before the party moved to try to fix the problem, U.S. officials briefed on the probe tell CNN.

A person briefed on the DNC's response says the warning from the FBI and other agencies wasn't specific, and that the extent of the problem wasn't clear when the initial warnings came. DNC officials hired outside help after additional indications surfaced that their systems were compromised.

Russians or …

Kassia Halcli, writing for left-leaning PBS on October 26, 2016 acknowledges that Analysts say, however, that the ability to determine who cyber attackers are, where they’re located and sometimes who ordered their operations is rarely definitive and comes in degrees of confidence.

Beyond the Obama government’s headline assertion that Russia is to blame, “it’s important to parse the public statement pretty closely,” said Susan Hennessey, a national security fellow at the Brookings Institution. “They’re being really careful in their word choice.”

Without more definitive statements, it’s difficult for some technical experts to take the government’s word on faith, she and others have said.

“There’s no evidence that this was done by the state itself, only evidence it was done by non-state actors that might be Russian-speaking,” said Jeffrey Carr, CEO of the cyber security consultancy firm Taia Global, referring to the evidence available to the public.

The remaining question

IF the DNC – and Obama — knew or had reason to believe — it had been hacked, why did it and Obama wait until Trump suddenly appeared electable to complain aabout email hacking?

Bottom line: Interfering in ally’s democratic processes is OK for Obama, Clinton, et al, but not when the U.S. Democrat party is the target.

It is OK for Obama’s intelligence agencies — all of whom depend (until Jan. 20) on Obama’s patronage; the heads of these organizations serve at the president’s pleasure -- to blame one of Obama's favorite targets. The story of the emperor's new clothes comes to mind — we believe what we want to believe, and it’s easy to blame Putin & Pals given that Trump apparently respects Russia’s potential.

I’m a little surprised Obama blamed Russia and not Netanyahu and Israel; it’s a smaller, easier target. But like Putin, Netanyahu would fight back.