Journal Entry #27

A forest of manipulated images.

NEW YORK, NOVEMBER 13— In my last Cú Chulainn entry, I began to set down a few remarks about the compromise of the Democratic National Committee’s mail systems in mid–2016. These were my first comments since I published what turned out to be a quite explosive report on the D.N.C. matter in The Nation last August 9th. That piece described the first solid case demonstrating that what has been officially declared a hack sponsored by the Russian military’s intelligence services was, in fact, a leak executed by someone with direct access to the D.N.C.’s computer servers. Solid as in based on a body of evidence that has to date withstood all challenges.

To say the heavens opened and it poured hard rain for many weeks after The Nation published my column would be to put the point mildly.

My plan was to conclude the remarks begun when Cú Chulainn last stirred—things I wanted to get into the record—with this entry, a “second of two parts,” newspapers say when running a series. Events have intervened. This is the second of three parts, at the least. It does not come in any form I had anticipated.

For reasons I will shortly speculate upon, the theft of the D.N.C’s mail archives in mid–2016 has come back into the news with a roar. These have been a momentous few weeks in this respect. The events have been numerous. Here I will draw them together best I can and try to make some sense of them.

The most significant of these developments can be summarized thus: A challenge to the official narrative of the D.N.C. story has now been presented directly to the administration for the first time. This took place when Michael Pompeo, the C.I.A. director, summoned Bill Binney to his office in Langley on October 24 to ask roughly, “What exactly happened, Mr. Binney? Tell me your version of events.” So far as we can make out, the administration is taking Binney’s reply quite seriously. It would be difficult to overstate the potential importance of this turn in the story.

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