The Perfect Should Not Be The Enemy Of The Good

The same Clinton-campaign-connected researchers who helped generate an infamous fake news story were likely the U.S. government’s source for the initial announcement that Russians hacked the Demcratic National Committee, according to documents produced across years of Open Records requests and congressional letters.

According to a letter recently sent to Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, work on attribution of the hack was done by a “Georgia tech team” who submitted a report on August 7, 2016, titled “Fancy Bear/APT28 Attribution analysis”

That Georgia Tech team was led by researchers David Dagon and Manos Antonikakis, known to be sources for the infamous “Alfa Server” story claiming the Trump team was engaged in a bizarre scheme to beep backchannel secrets to Russia’s Alfa Bank. The never-believable Alfa story has been dismissed by the Justice Department’s Inspector General, and is destined to take a place alongside the “pee tape” and the “secret talks” of Paul Manafort and Julian Assange as one of the most absurd pieces of much-reported, never-happened news from the Trump-Russia period.

That August 7th, 2016 date is an important last piece of confirmation, as DARPA until recently denied being involved with this work. It was turned up by Grassley, who himself was acting in significant part upon information gathered across years of Freedom of Information Act and state Open Records requests. This story is a textbook example of how citizens like this story’s pseudonymous co-author Undead_FOIA and the “Sleuth’s Corner” can use public access laws to uncover important news, when journalists paid to do the job won’t bother. You can read more of their analysis here.

For years, “Collusion” and “Interference” were the biggest stories in the world. Then the Mueller report fizzled, Covid-19 and January 6th arrived, and new details that emerged in no-longer-front-page stories were ignored. A pause now to take a look back reveals a very different picture from what the public remembers.

Dagon, Antonakakis, Clinton attorney Michael Sussmann, and Georgia Tech all declined comment for this story.

On October 7, 2016, in the home stretch of of a paradigm-shifting presidential race between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued a joint announcement.

“The U.S. Intelligence Community,” they wrote, “is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations.”

That October 7th date would turn out to be one of the busiest news days in the recent history of American presidential politics, with the DHS announcement coming just after the infamous Access Hollywood “Grab ‘em by the pussy” tape was released, and hours before Wikileaks put out 20,000 pages of emails involving Clinton’s campaign chair John Podesta.

The government’s decision to publicly claim Russia was responsible for breaches of Democratic Party emails inspired predictably fulminating outrage. The Atlantic declared Donald Trump a “modern Manchurian candidate” and speculated Russia might be planning “interference with registration rolls.” NBC warned of “a broader ‘active measures’ campaign to influence the upcoming U.S. election.” It became bipartisan axiom overnight that the Russian “hack” was an “act of war,” with everyone from former DNC chair Donna Brazile to an incensed Keith Olbermann (“We were invaded!”) to Dick Cheney to Senator John McCain soon agreeing on the basic premise.