The Central Intelligence Agency will neither confirm nor deny that it fabricated the Russian “fingerprints” in Democratic National Committee emails published in 2016 by “Guccifer 2.0,” and the FBI implicitly acknowledged today that it never reviewed the contents of DNC employee Seth Rich’s laptop despite gaining custody of the laptop after his murder.
The revelations came in two separate Freedom of Information Act lawsuits filed by my clients in the Eastern District of Texas. For those of you who live under a rock, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange strongly implied in a 2016 interview that the leaked DNC emails came from Mr. Rich, while the political / bureaucratic / media establishment has steadfastly maintained that the emails were hacked by agents of Russia.
The latest admissions blow a hole in the government / media narrative, suggesting that federal officials not only ignored Seth Rich’s role in the leaks, but fraudulently shifted the blame to Russia.
In The Transparency Project v. Department of Justice, et al., my client asked to see records indicating whether the CIA or its Directorate of Digital Innovation, its contractors, etc. inserted Russian “fingerprints” into the metadata of the emails that were released publicly. (You can review the entire request by clicking here and reading Paragraph 11).
In a joint report filed today, the CIA informed the court that it intends to assert a Glomar response to the request, i.e., that it “cannot confirm or deny” the existence of such records. To make sure I was not reading too much into that non-response, I contacted one of my investigators, Larry C. Johnson, who retired from the CIA. [Continued on p. 2]