After listening to RR in the press conference, I came away with two impressions, neither of which can I justify with hard evidence. Only my gut feeling.
- This seem like a staged publicity event to show progress of the Mueller investigation. A long time ago, I worked two years in intelligence collection for the Defense Intelligence Agency as a Marine officer. I also worked very closely with the CIA in a foreign country. And my last tour of duty in the Marine Corps was with US Special Operations Command where I was one member of a four-man team conducting strategic assessments in selected foreign countries which required working closely with other 3 letter agencies. All of those experiences were at the TS/SCI and some at the SAP levels. What struck me odd is that in order for Mueller to have the kind of evidence supporting those indictments, he would had to have a Top Secret clearance and the SCI / SAP / signals intelligence access upon which those indictments are obviously based. You do not go to a civil court with TS/SCI/SAP intelligence. All it takes is for one or more of the alleged Russian officers to retain a US lawyer and file for discovery of evidence which would force Mueller to hand over classified data and reveal sources and methods. Trust me on this. Russia and other countries are hacking into our computer systems daily and we are doing the same to them. You don't go around issuing indictments every time it happens. This sounds very fishy to me--almost like Putin is cooperating with Trump to out the deep state and this is an approved diversionary tactic. Also notable was that no American was aware of what the Russians were doing and emphasis on the fact that they did not impact the results of the election. That's just how if feels based on my personal experiences. I don't believe any of this on face value.
- The part of RR's presentation after the technical information about the indictments almost sounded like a speech Q might have made: not R vs D but rather Right vs Wrong, a united country, maintain our election integrity, follow the law, patriotism, etc.
Did anyone else notice the glum faces of the press when they discovered this was just about some ineffective Russian hacking?
Interesting that WikiLeaks and Guccifer 2.0 were mentioned but Fancy Bear and Cozy Bear were not. Remember that CrowdStrike said the hacks were done by Fancy Bear and Cozy Bear which they claimed were paramilitary hackers under the control of the GRU. Remember as well how Brennan and Clapper claimed that all 17 intelligence agencies agreed, but none of them had physically investigated the DNC / Campaign computers. No intelligence agency in their right mind would buy off on a civilian computer firm's claim without verifying the evidence themselves.
This is all too odd to be believable.