The charges brought from the Grand Jury to federal court on Friday for the first time directly implicate the Russian government, not just Russian companies and individuals, in a conspiracy to interfere in a United States election. This may not seem like news, considering that this has been the expressed analysis of the FBI, CIA, NSA and other intelligence agencies since before Trump took office. However, the indictments show that this evidence has been collected with the detail and confidence required to move forward in a court of law. That’s a big thing. It not only provides a kick to the teeth for those who, like Trump, were still mouthing Russian denials, it lays a foundation for adding additional names and organizations to that conspiracy.
(GRU), the main foreign intelligence agency of the Russian government, were directly dedicated to stealing information from the Democratic Party and the Hilary Clinton campaign. And, as the indictments make clear, that effort was not a single incident or dependent on some momentary lapse in security by the DNC. It was a dedicated effort, by professional intelligence operatives, using a variety of techniques from spearfishing to malware to more direct network intrusion in order to gain access to systems, steal information, capture screenshots, and plant spyware that monitored Democratic actions on a keystroke by keystroke level over an extended period. This was an intense, prolonged effort to obtain information about an American presidential candidate and about the actions of an American political party. Despite efforts to protect and cleanse systems, Russia was still tapping into DNC computers up to within a month of the election. Russians even managed to access information and services hosted on supposedly highly-secure, cloud-based servers from a third party provider.
A second unit of the GRU was positioned to disseminate this information. That including creating false organizations, like DC leaks, and false identities, like Guccifer 2.0, in order to communicate under the pretense of being “whistleblowers” or “individual hackers.” These false fronts allowed Americans, either unknowingly or knowingly, to communicate directly with Russian intelligence, and to conspire in the effort to alter the outcome of American election. That includes people like Republican strategist Aaron Nevins, who worked with Russian forces to better exploit the results of their cyberwar intrusion. And it includes Trump advisor Roger Stone, who has repeatedly lied about his meetings with Wikileaks and his conversations with the Russian operatives. And it definitely includes this other guy, whose timing when it came to Russian operations seemed to be unusually good....
Nevins: Basically if this was a war, this is the map to where all the troops are deployed.
Nevins, the former chief of staff for a Republican senator in Florida and head of a pair of GOP consulting firms, made sure the Russians found that map and recognized its value—while also saying that he didn’t care if it was the Russians, because “their interests aligned.” That information allowed both Republicans (and Russians working for another division of the GRU) to target advertising and other actions directly to the points which Democrats had already identified as the most important.