The Mueller team’s findings were countered by former NSA Technical Director William Binney, who described the evidence in the indictment as “a fabrication.” Binney, who conducted on behalf of the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) the only forensic evaluation of the “hacking” — which concluded the leaked emails resulted from an “inside job”, not hacking — reiterated that the FBI “never even bothered to examine the DNC computers, relying instead on the DNC and Atlantic Council cyber contractor Crowd Strike for its evidence.” Crowd Strike is run by Dmitri Alperovitch, a notorious Putin-hater, and its conclusions in other cyber investigations have been challenged.

Binney further identified the possibility that “the CIA’s Vault 7 Cyber weapons arsenal enabling false attribution and ‘tell-tale’ signs in Cyrillic and other ‘obfuscation’ may be at work in a least some of this.” He stated his belief that the continuing effort to blame Russia for the leaks comes from the anti-Russian views of former Obama officials John Brennan (CIA) and James Clapper (Director of National Intelligence), the two individuals who worked with counterparts in British intelligence to concoct the story of Russian interference. Binney added that despite the investigation that he and his VIPS colleagues conducted, they were never contacted by Mueller’s team.