Michael van Landingham (Credit: cyberwarcon.com)
Russiagate continues to survive like a science fiction monster resilient to bullets.
The latest effort at rehabilitating it is an interview by Adam Rawnsley in the current issue of Rolling Stone magazine of one Michael van Landingham, an intelligence analyst who is proud of having written the first draft of the cornerstone “analysis” of Russiagate, the so-called Intelligence Community Assessment.
The ICA blamed the Russians for helping Trump defeat Hillary Clinton in 2016. It was released two weeks before Trump assumed office. The thoroughly politicized assessment was an embarrassment to the profession of intelligence.
(…) The tale that Russia hacked the Democratic National Committee in 2016 was then disproved on Dec. 5, 2017 by the head of CrowdStrike’s sworn testimony to Congress. Shawn Henry told the House Intelligence committee behind closed doors that CrowdStrike found no evidence that anyone had successfully hacked the DNC servers.
But it is still widely believed because The New York Times and other Democrat-allied corporate media never reported on that testimony when it was finally made public on May 7, 2020.
Enter Michael van Landingham
Rolling Stone’s article on July 28 about van Landingham says he is still proud of his role as one of the “hand-picked analysts” in drafting the discredited ICA.
The piece is entitled: “He Confirmed Russia Meddled in 2016 to Help Trump. Now, He’s Speaking Out.” It says: “Trump viewed the 2017 intel report as his ‘Achilles heel.’ The analyst who wrote it opens up about Trump, Russia and what really happened in 2016.”
Without ever mentioning that the conclusions of the ICA were proven false, by Henry’s testimony and the conclusions of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation that found no evidence of Trump-Russia “collusion,” Rolling Stone says:
“The 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA), dubbed ‘Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent U.S. Elections,’ was one of the most consequential documents in modern American history. It helped trigger investigations by the House and Senate intelligence committees and a special counsel investigation, and it fueled an eight-year-long grudge that Trump has nursed against the intelligence community.”
Rawnsley writes in Rolling Stone the following as gospel truth, without providing any evidence to back it up.
“When WikiLeaks published a tranche of [John] Podesta’s emails in late October, the link between the Russian hackers and the releases became undeniable. The dump contained the original spear phishing message that Russian hackers had used to trick Podesta into coughing up his password. News outlets quickly seized on the email, crediting it for what it was: proof that the Russians were behind the campaign.”
Because Rawnsley didn’t tell us, it’s not clear how this “spear phishing message” provides “undeniable” proof that Russia was behind it. Consortium News has contacted Rawnsley to provide more detail to back up his assertion.
Craig Murray, the former British ambassador to Uzbekistan and close friend of Julian Assange, suggested to Scott Horton on Horton’s radio show in 2016 that the DNC leak and the Podesta leak came from two different sources, neither of them the Russian government.
“The Podesta emails and the DNC emails are, of course, two separate things and we shouldn’t conclude that they both have the same source,” Murray said. “In both cases we’re talking of a leak, not a hack, in that the person who was responsible for getting that information out had legal access to that information.”