WikiLeaks Founder Julian Assange’s Ally Debunks U.S. Intelligence Reports, Claims DNC Hacks Were Carried By ‘Insiders,’ Not Russians

Amid the onslaught of U.S. media reports that Russians meddled with the U.S. presidential elections, former British ambassador and Julian Assange’s ally, Craig Murray, has debunked American intelligence sources and made the audacious claim that the DNC hacks were not carried out by foreign attackers, but in fact the emails were “leaked” by DNC insiders.

This claim flies in the face of the narrative dominating American media ever since The Washington Post broke the story last Friday that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had strong evidence to believe that Russian hackers were behind the DNC leaks that rocked Hillary Clinton’s Democratic campaign earlier in the year. 19,252 emails and 8,034 attachments from the Democratic National Committee’s servers were released by WikiLeaks on July 22, 2016, consequently revealing DNC’s complicity with Hillary Clinton and her team in helping undermine and even berate rival Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign, which his supporters believed proved ultimately crucial in Clinton’s victory over the Vermont Senator.

On the same day The Washington Post broke the story, the New York Times reported that Russian hackers had in fact breached into the databases of the Republican National Committee’s servers also, but refrained from handing over those to WikiLeaks.

The inference was that Kremlin, under the heavy-handed guidance of president Vladimir Putin, had orchestrated the leaks in such a way that only DNC’s weaknesses were exposed, directly helping Trump and his campaign. While U.S. intelligence sources had no doubt that Russia was behind the hacks, the full intent and extent of the meddling would only become clear with an investigation. The Post story revealed that the CIA had asked a group of key senators in a closed-door meeting to push for a full-blown investigation into Russia’s role in the 2016 presidential election earlier this year, but it was not pushed ahead by the Obama administration because it feared such a move could be deduced as an act of partisanship during the election, with Democrat Hillary Clinton being in the fray for the president back then.

U.S. officials say Putin was personally involved in U.S. election hack https://t.co/h219RqHLPx pic.twitter.com/V5G6kIDDIu

— NBC News (@NBCNews) December 14, 2016

Just last night, in another breakthrough story, NBC News quoted U.S. intelligence officials saying that evidence existence within the intelligence community that Vladimir Putin was personally involved with directing the leaks, and that his reasons were multi-faceted.

“What began as a ‘vendetta’ against Hillary Clinton morphed into an effort to show corruption in American politics and to ‘split off key American allies by creating the image that [other countries] couldn’t depend on the U.S. to be a credible global leader anymore.'”

Needless to add, the report has further strengthened the narrative that Putin-directed Russia had infiltrated the 2016 U.S. elections at a scale which is unprecedented in the history of the two nations and spells an extremely dangerous moment for the future of American democracy.

But now a close Julian Assange ally and former British ambassador, Craig Murray, has made a claim, which, if true, could be even more dangerous for the well-being of American democracy. According to Murray, the DNC emails were handed over to WikiLeaks not by Russians, but by DNC “insiders,” whom he knew personally. Speaking to the Guardian (via Daily Express), Murray rubbished U.S. intelligence reports which claimed that Putin had meddled with the U.S. elections on account of his antagonistic relationship with Hillary Clinton, saying that it was, in fact, Clinton and the Democratic establishment who were still trying to put the blame for her embarrassing loss on the Russians.

“I know who leaked them.

I’ve met the person who leaked them, and they are certainly not Russian and it’s an insider. It’s a leak, not a hack; the two are different things.

As Julian Assange has made crystal clear, the leaks did not come from the Russians. As I have explained countless times, they are not hacks, they are insider leaks – there is a major difference between the two.”

He further claimed that he met a “disgusted” DNC insider during a hand-off back in September, after which a steady stream of Clinton’s campaign manager John Podesta’s emails dominated the news media, helping Trump ramp up the pressure on Clinton during the final stretches of the presidential campaign. Yet, Murray claimed that Clinton was herself responsible for her team’s actions and that it was a member of her team who was responsible for the leaks.

“And it should be said again and again, that if Hillary Clinton had not connived with the DNC to fix the primary schedule to disadvantage Bernie, if she had not received advance notice of live debate questions to use against Bernie, if she had not accepted massive donations to the Clinton foundation and family members in return for foreign policy influence, if she had not failed to distance herself from some very weird and troubling people, then none of this would have happened.”

It is a view which has been echoed by Russia, who called the U.S. intelligence reports “absolute nonsense.” Putin himself claims that the American media is promoting baseless stories “only to distract the attention of the American people from the substance of what hackers had put out,” adding that the ultimate aim of U.S. news media was to create a sort of “hysteria” among its people, to stop them from trusting their new President-elect Donald Trump.

While several U.S. intelligence officials, and even GOP senators, have expressed serious concerns about the intent of the Russians, some other intelligence experts still sit in the other bracket, who claim that WikiLeaks received the email bounty from insiders, and not Russian hackers.

Ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern told RT that Russians could not have hacked into DNC servers without the National Security Agency (NSA) first knowing about it. He claims that U.S. is only trying to distort the “leaks” and make it into a story about Russian meddling because it is too embarrassing for the American government.

“The whole notion that the Russians have been hacking is belied by the fact that they could not hack without the NSA knowing about it… What we have here is not a hack, we have leaks. It is too embarrassing for them to realize they had a leak,” he said.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has himself maintained that his organization received the emails from DNC insiders and not Russians. While the American public might still not be much closer to the truth, these contesting voices certainly shed an important and conflicting light from what we have been hearing in many sections of the American media — that the Russians were directly and unequivocally responsible for Donald Trump defeating Hillary Clinton in the presidential election.

Whether you believe that is up to you, but it definitely cannot be as simple as that.

[Featured Image by Richard Frazier/Shutterstock.com]