Unsealed documents shed new light on efforts to verify Trump-Russia case



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A report from a retired officer who was working for the FBI cyber division and presented as an expert testimony in a civil trial, presented new evidence on how Russian intelligence services could have exploited a private web hosting company by misleading the main democratic goals by giving them their passwords. The fruits of these hacks were the basis of WikiLeaks messaging email messages that disrupted the race.

The controversial case had accused Russian hackers of using these companies, Webzilla and its parent company XBT, as part of their ploy to meddle in the presidential election. The memos, written by retired British spy Christopher Steele, also claimed that Russian entrepreneur Aleksej Gubarev had witnessed cyber-attacks "under duress" by Russian intelligence agencies.

Gubarev vehemently denied the charges and sued BuzzFeed for defamation after the case was released. This prompted BuzzFeed to order the report of the expert witness to Anthony Ferrante of FTI Consulting, who is also a contributor to CNN. A federal judge dismissed the complaint in December and ordered that dozens of documents be made public this week. The judge ruled on the reasons for the first amendment and did not evaluate the allegations of piracy.

BuzzFeed's efforts to prove one aspect of the case to defend itself in court shed new light on the accuracy of Steele's conclusions about the nature of Russia's attempts at interference during the election The report was funded by Democrats who sought to reveal information about Republican candidate Donald Trump.

Report Details

The FTI report concluded that one of the hyperlinks created by the Russians to get Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman, John Podesta, to give up his e-mail password had been created at a Internet protocol address owned by Root SA, a subsidiary of XBT.

In his testimony, Ferrante, a retired FBI cyber-official, admitted that the evidence did not conclusively prove that XBT was aware of Russia's campaign against the Democrats.

"I'll add that, aside from the fact that XBT employees have done virtually nothing to detect, stop, and prevent this important malicious activity, I have no evidence that they sit behind a keyboard, "he said.

Russian oligarch suing the United States for sanctions

The Gubarev team claimed that an Internet hosting company could not be held responsible for the activities of the users of its services.

A rebuttal in the name of Gubarev, filed by a former CIA cybersecurity expert, Eric Cole, pointed out that he and his staff often did not know the specific activity being conducted on his servers.

"XBT / Webzilla is not responsible for every bit of data that a bad actor transmits to his infrastructure, nor is a post office responsible for the acts of the Unabomber," Cole wrote.

"Special advocate Robert Mueller has indicted the 12 Russians responsible for the hacking, they are the perpetrators, not us," Gubarev's lawyer, CNN Evan Fray-Witzer, told CNN. The indictment against these pirates, established in July 2018, did not mention Webzilla or XBT.

BuzzFeed News called the report a justification for its decision to publish the Trump-Russia dossier. "We already knew that publishing the file was in the public interest," spokesperson Matt Mittenthal told CNN. "Now that BuzzFeed News has published the record, we are learning more about the facts of foreign influence in the 2016 presidential election."

Dissect the file

Gubarev sued BuzzFeed in 2017 and claimed damages for defamation. As part of the court process, some of the key players in the case saga have been filed, including Steele.

The court unveiled a page of this testimony, which took place last year in London. Steele said he had tried to verify the charges against Gubarev by conducting, among other things, an "open source search", which would likely include clippings and public archives.

Steele has years of experience as a British spy in Moscow and is a trusted source for the FBI. The allies of Democratic candidate Clinton funded Steele's investigation in 2016. But his findings worried him so much that he shared his note with senior US and British officials.

According to Mueller, the former head of the Trump campaign continues to help

In his decision to file the case, the judge confirmed that BuzzFeed had received the file of an associate of Republican Senator John McCain in December 2016, a few weeks after the elections.

The memos were circulating in Washington and CNN quickly revealed that senior US intelligence officials had informed President-elect Trump and President Barack Obama of some of the unverified allegations. A few hours later, BuzzFeed published the complete file online.
The most salacious claims in the case remain untested to date. But the claims that make up the bulk of the memos have persisted over time, or at least have proven to be partially true.

This includes Steele's assertion that Russian President Vladimir Putin has overseen an effort to interfere in the 2016 elections. He also understands allegations of secret contacts between the Trump team and the United States. the Russians during the campaign. Steele collected this breathtaking information several months before the Russian intervention campaign was publicly confirmed by US intelligence agencies and the special advice of his lawyer, Robert Mueller.

Kevin Collier, cybersecurity journalist for CNN, previously worked for BuzzFeed News.

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