Forget Collusion. Was "Interference" Also Fake News?

Open records investigations suggest the same academic researchers responsible for the infamous Alfa Server hoax were likely also the government's initial source that Russia did the "DNC Hack"

Clinton Attorney Michael Sussmann on trial

The same Clinton-campaign-connected researchers who helped generate an infamous fake news story were likely the U.S. government’s source for the initial announcement that Russians hacked the Demcratic National Committee, according to documents produced across years of Open Records requests and congressional letters.

According to a letter recently sent to Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, work on attribution of the hack was done by a “Georgia tech team” who submitted a report on August 7, 2016, titled “Fancy Bear/APT28 Attribution analysis”:

That Georgia Tech team was led by researchers David Dagon and Manos Antonikakis, known to be sources for the infamous “Alfa Server” story claiming the Trump team was engaged in a bizarre scheme to beep backchannel secrets to Russia’s Alfa Bank. The never-believable Alfa story has been dismissed by the Justice Department’s Inspector General, and is destined to take a place alongside the “pee tape” and the “secret talks” of Paul Manafort and Julian Assange as one of the most absurd pieces of much-reported, never-happened news from the Trump-Russia period.

That August 7th, 2016 date is an important last piece of confirmation, as DARPA until recently denied being involved with this work. It was turned up by Grassley, who himself was acting in significant part upon information gathered across years of Freedom of Information Act and state Open Records requests. This story is a textbook example of how citizens like this story’s pseudonymous co-author Undead_FOIA and the “Sleuth’s Corner” can use public access laws to uncover important news, when journalists paid to do the job won’t bother. You can read more of their analysis here.

For years, “Collusion” and “Interference” were the biggest stories in the world. Then the Mueller report fizzled, Covid-19 and January 6th arrived, and new details that emerged in no-longer-front-page stories were ignored. A pause now to take a look back reveals a very different picture from what the public remembers.

Dagon, Antonakakis, Clinton attorney Michael Sussmann, and Georgia Tech all declined comment for this story.