Bigger than Watergate: The Russian-orchestrated DNC email hack places our national sovereignty at stake; Salon, 7/27/16

Bob Cesca, Salon; Bigger than Watergate: The Russian-orchestrated DNC email hack places our national sovereignty at stake:

"As of this writing, further details along with the chain-of-evidence is still being established by journalists, security experts and the FBI. (By the way, before anyone kneejerks to the “crazy conspiracy theory” conclusion, it’s worth noting that everyone from the former U.S. ambassador to Russia, to A-list reporter Richard Engel, along with The Daily Beast, ABC News, NBC News, Yahoo! News, Slate, TPM, Vice and The Washington Post have been uncovering new and frightening aspects of this story going back to June and culminating with the past 48 hours.) According to investigative journalists at Vice’s “Motherboard,” in particular, a security firm hired by the DNC discovered the existence of “two sophisticated adversaries” that had infiltrated the Democratic Party’s internal email network. Known as “APT 28″ and “APT 29,” the handles are used by both the Russian intelligence service, the FSB (formerly the KGB) and the Russian military intelligence agency, the GRU. Later, using a front handle known as the aforementioned “Guccifer 2.0,” the agencies announced back in June that it had given Wikileaks “thousands of files and mails.”

Regarding the content of some of the emails, bear this in mind: according to conservative author and former NSA analyst, John Schindler, who, by the way, is no fan of Hillary Clinton, part of the FSB’s tradecraft is to fabricate intelligence and toss it into a cocktail of legitimate documents. In other words, it’s fair to speculate, based on Russia’s modus operandi, that the questionable emails were doctored, if not manufactured for impact, while exculpatory emails might’ve been scrubbed from the tranche. We have to question everything here, given the tenacity of Putin’s propaganda efforts...

One last thing: if you’re only looking at this story as an internal DNC scandal, you’re missing the despotic forest for the trees. We can’t emphasize enough: this story is bigger than Bernie or Hillary. It’s bigger than Trump. It speaks directly to the sovereignty of our electoral process. The sooner it’s treated this way, the better off we’ll be."