TIMELINE OF MAIN EVENTS SURROUNDING U.S. ELECTIONS AND CLAIMS OF «RUSSIAN INTERFERENCE»
1.May 18, 2016-Director of the U.S. National Intelligence James Clapper reported that the American Intel community had found evidence of foreign spy services attempting to hack networks of the DNC.
2.June 14,2016–“The Washington Post” for first time claimed that Russian hackers had penetrated the DNC databases and gained access to internal information, but, as it would become a “tradition”,offering no proof and relying solely on “anonymous sources”.
3.June 15, 2016-“Crowdstrike”, a computer security firm hired by the DNC to investigate the hacking, declared that “Russia was behindthe cyberattack into the DNC servers”. The company representative said that it had identified two sophisticated adversaries -hackinggroups “Cozy Bear” and “Fancy Bear”, “linked to the Russian intelligence services”. There have been no facts proving anti-Russian allegations yet.
4.July 22, 2016-“Wikileaks” released nearly 20 000 DNC internal emails. Eventually, it wouldpublished more than 44 000 e-letters and 17000 attachments, showing the DNC bias in favor of Hillary Clinton and against her contender Bernie Sanders during the 2016 presidential campaign. Despite the absence of evidence and numerous public rebuttals from Wikileaksthe U.S. mass media and politicians can’t stop speculating that Russia was the source of the stolen DNC emails.
5.July 25, 2016 -the FBI confirmed it had opened an investigation into the hacking of the DNC servers (it later became known that the target of the probe had been Russian government’s efforts to interfere in the election and Trump campaign associates who had been allegedly involved in the conspiracy with the Kremlin).
6.July 25, 2016-Republican candidate Donald Trump said: “Russia, if you are listening, I hope you are able to find 30000 emails (-from the DNC) that are missing”. Despite sarcastic manner of this joke the phrase along with his other public promises “to get along with Russia” have been later used by the U.S. mainstream media as“a proof of his conspiracy with the Kremlin”.
7.July 29, 2016-the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee joined colleagues from the DNC and announced that its computer network had also been hacked.
8.October 7, 2016-the Department of Homeland Security and Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued a joint statement saying the U.S. Intelligence community “is confident” that hacks into the email systems of the Democratic Party “were directed by the Russian government”. As usual: there was no evidence.
9.October 31, 2016 -the magazine “Mother Jones” published article summarizing the so-called “Trump dossier” (a setof unverified allegations of conspiracy between Trump’s campaign and the Russian Government), authored by Christopher Steele, a British former MI-6 officer (his name wasn’t disclosed at the time). The dossier was released in full by the news agency “Buzzfeed” on January 10, 2017. It was later revealed that Senator John McCain, who had been given Steele’s memos by former U.S. State Department official David Kramer, delivered them to FBI Director James Comey. Besides, it was reported said that an associate of the Senator passed this “dossier” to the “Buzzfeed”. There remains possibility that the launch of U.S. Intel community probes into Russian interference were based mostly on Steele’s document.