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(…) New emails obtained by Racket through the Freedom of Information Act, however, suggest there is more to the story. Cyber researchers at Georgia Tech who were indirectly working with the Clinton campaign and Fusion GPS to produce the Alfa Bank claims, also appear to have influenced Special Counsel Mueller’s investigation of the DNC hack.
Racket previously covered the September 2022 letter the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, sent to Senator Grassley, in which DARPA confirmed the cyber researchers authored a DNC hack attribution analysis on August 7, 2016. In relation to other emails and reporting suggesting the cyber researchers also had a hand in assisting Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, DARPA at the time suggested their work was solely “retrospective”:
DARPA identified the analysis as relating to the indictment, but the Agency’s letter never squared with representations by the cyber researchers that suggested materials were flowing “via DARPA” to the Department of Justice and Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Now we know why. DARPA was either lying or uninformed, and not for the first time.
A FOIA request for emails in the account of Angelos Keromytis, the head of the Enhanced Attribution program for DARPA, shows Keromytis in direct contact with Heather Alpino and providing materials relating to “DCLeaks”, a website associated with the 2016 DNC hack:
Angelos Keromytis was noted throughout emails obtained through Open Records requests to Georgia Tech, where Keromytis was employed after his time at DARPA, which showed that Special Counsel Durham’s team spoke to Keromytis during their investigation about his ties to the Alfa Bank cyber researchers as well as the National Security Division of the Department of Justice.
DOJ attorney Heather Alpino was part of the Special Counsel Mueller team by 2018, detailed to the team from her role inside the National Security Division’s Counterintelligence and Export Control Section, which signed memoranda of understanding with DARPA’s Enhanced Attribution program — a program for which Georgia Tech was awarded a contract in 2016 to develop the science of cyber attribution. An email further down the new email chain suggests that Alpino understood the materials were coming from “performers” in the Enhanced Attribution program, i.e. Manos Antonakakis and David Dagon:
The reference to “domains”, along with additional FOIA pages obtained that list Russian domain names, could indicate that the analysis corresponds to a “Mueller List” of domains and indicators of APT-28, the Russian intelligence group accused of the hack, referenced in an email from David Dagon’s attorneys:
There are strong indications that the same cyber researchers who were working with the Clinton campaign went on to work with the Special Counsel Robert Mueller team on the DNC hack investigation and the indictment of Russians. There’s no doubt the government understood the connection to Clinton attorney Michael Sussmann, Sussmann was the one who had delivered the Alfa Bank allegations on thumb drives that the Clinton campaign paid for. (Read more:Racket News, 8/13/2024) (Archive) h/t @seacaptim