This will really be a quick word from me, different from the longer articles I usually write. What is known so far about the ‘hacking’ affair, is basically that individuals with connections to the Russian state who are known to the western intelligence community, gained persistent access to the DNC and RNC computer systems. These actors then apparently exfiltrated all the information. Following that, spear-phishing and other tailored access operations were also conducted against specific DNC and RNC figures, which allowed the individuals to pivot out of the party political systems and into things like getting the username and password for John Podesta’s Gmail account, and so on.

The DNC information was passed to WikiLeaks by those Russia-connected actors. WikiLeaks, acting as it does whenever it receives information from activists, then dutifully sorted through it, catalogued it, and made it public as they tend to do whenever information is leaked to them. WikiLeaks did not need to actually know that there was a Russian operation happening for this to be beneficial to Russia.

The RNC information was not passed to WikiLeaks and was retained by the Russia-connected actors. It would not be far fetched to surmise that the Russia-connected actors would have passed the RNC information to the Russian state. This is because the Russian state would probably have liked to know more about the people who they were hoping to end up working with over the course of the next four to eight years, but they wouldn’t want the whole world to know that information since in such a case it would lose most of its operational value. That is where the significance of the hacking event is to be found.

But I have been seeing a narrative going around in which the notion that a Russian operation has been taking place, is something that people think is ‘disputable’ in some way.

Here is a typical example of people trying to dispute it:

The New Observer, ‘“Russia & Trump”: More Fake News’, 11 Dec 2016 (emphasis added):

[...]

“The CIA presentation to senators about Russia’s intentions fell short of a formal U.S. assessment produced by all 17 intelligence agencies,” the Washington Post confessed—ten paragraphs into its story.

“For example, intelligence agencies do not have specific intelligence showing officials in the Kremlin ‘directing’ the identified individuals to pass the Democratic emails to WikiLeaks, a second senior U.S. official said,” that newspaper added in the eleventh paragraph.

The paper went on to say that current president Barack Obama had now commissioned a “report” into the matter, and wanted it completed before he leaves office on January 20.

[...]

To shed some sunlight on that, let me just say that the ‘second senior U.S. official’ is Mitch McConnell. Yes, I said it. Mitch McConnell is basically running interference and has been doing this from since before the election, using that talking point.

McConnell probably will not acknowledge that Russian-connected actors exfiltrated the DNC and RNC information, unless there is literally publicly available footage of Vladimir Putin himself laughing conspiratorially while on the phone with 1990s-era Adidas tracksuit-wearing Dridex Group members in Brazil or wherever they are, who of course also would need to be captured on video footage. After that, Putin would probably need to then issue a formal statement saying “Yes, it was me, I did this”, and at that point McConnell would reluctantly admit that maybe Russia had something to do with all this.

Mitch McConnell is motivated to pretend to be an idiot and demand the impossible so as to discredit the direction that intelligence findings are pointing so far, because his own political party benefits from the events which have transpired. And he has also been pre-emptively rewarded for his rhetorical interference by Donald Trump in the form of his wife, Elaine Lan Chao, being given a nice position in the transition team which will become the cabinet.

The demand being made for ‘specific intelligence showing Kremlin officials directing the identified individuals’, is simply an absurd demand. Arguments based on the idea that it is possible to just simply go out and get that are retarded, and the people who are sincerely making such arguments should feel retarded. Unfortunately, the Dunning–Kruger effect probably deprives them of that capacity.