by WorldTribune Staff, November 10, 2017
The intelligence community was described as shaken by news that CIA Director Mike Pompeo met with a former high-ranking NSA official who contends Democratic National Committee (DNC) staffers, not Russia, stole emails that were leaked during the 2016 presidential election campaign.
William Binney, who Pompeo met with reportedly at the prompting of President Donald Trump, believes a DNC insider stole the emails by downloading them manually from the DNC’s server onto a hard drive.
Binney’s analysis has been vigorously rebutted by much of the intelligence community, which continues to stand by its assessment that Russia was behind the DNC hack.
“This is crazy. You’ve got all these intelligence agencies saying the Russians did the hack. To deny that is like coming out with the theory that the Japanese didn’t bomb Pearl Harbor,” said one former CIA officer.
The Intercept reported that Pompeo met with Binney late last month.
Binney says he conducted an independent analysis of the metadata from the emails with a focus on timestamps that he says indicate a download speed consistent with loading the files onto a thumb drive.
“I was willing to meet Pompeo simply because it was clear to me the intelligence community wasn’t being honest here,” Binney said. “I am quite willing to help people who need the truth to find the truth and not simply have deceptive statements from the intelligence community.”
Former DNC chair Donna Brazile’s revelation in her new book that she feared for her life after DNC staffer Seth Rich was murdered helped shed new light on Binney’s theory.
“Some suspect that Rich wasn’t murdered in a robbery gone awry, like police said, but in a deliberate hit job organized by shadowy elements associated with the DNC and Clinton campaign,” Zero Hedge noted in a Nov. 7 report.
Binney said he mentioned Rich to Pompeo during their meeting.
The Intercept said that Pompeo’s meeting with Binney has revived narratives that were originally dismissed by the mainstream media as “right wing conspiracy theories.”
“Pompeo’s decision to meet with Binney raises the possibility that right-wing theories aired on Fox News and in other conservative media can now move not just from conservative pundits to Trump, but also from Trump to Pompeo and into the bloodstream of the intelligence community,” The Intercept said.
“Some senior CIA officials have grown upset that Pompeo, a former Republican representative from Kansas, has become so close to Trump that the CIA director regularly expresses skepticism about intelligence that doesn’t line up with the president’s views. Pompeo has also alienated some CIA managers by growing belligerent toward them in meetings, according to an intelligence official familiar with the matter.”
Binney said that Pompeo asked whether Binney would be willing to meet with NSA and FBI officials to further discuss his analysis of the DNC data theft, suggesting that there may be some sort of follow-up.
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