I challenged the Atlantic Council, Ukrainian Diaspora, and some of their affiliated publications that designed the Russian hacking and Russian influence narrative to falsify the proof in the articles I presented.  I walked through exactly why Robert Mueller’s indictment of 13 Russian nationals in February and 12 Russian nationals in July 2018 are political rubbish. Both Mueller indictments prove Fancy Bear was Ukrainian Intel.

The Atlantic Council’s publisher at large Michael D. Weiss must have taken it seriously, the Daily Beast turned out two stories within a day of my article’s publication. As part of their proof, the Daily Beast insist Fancy Bear hacked itself and that is what proves they are Russian hackers. Well, they don’t say it quite like that, but they should make an effort to understand what they are reading before blindly agreeing with my position.

We’ll get to that in a minute but I want to present a different idea on the entire Russian influence and Russian hacker saga. I call it the “sour milk argument” and it’s another way of proving Fancy Bear is Ukrainian Intel.

Sour Milk the Story of Russian Influence and hacking

The premise goes like this-When you take a liter of milk out of the fridge that’s questionable, the first thing you do after asking-“honey, is the milk bad?” Is to smell it and look at the expiration date. Once you’ve done both, you know the truth. If it smells bad and it’s after the expiration date, it might be a Mueller indictment.

How can the hackers have an expiration date? If the Fancy Bear Hackers are FSB and GRU, they need to be under Russian command, use Russian infrastructure, and serve Russian interests. Remember, they are Fancy Bear hacking and influencing the 2016 US elections for Russia, not anyone else.

Could the Russian GRU and FSB Russian Fancy Bear hackers hack the DNC and influence the 2016 US elections if they were in Ukraine, using Ukrainian infrastructure, under Ukrainian command, and serving Ukrainian interests? Keep in mind, before you answer this question, Ukraine claims to be at war with Russia since 2014. That’s four years and still going.

Robert Mueller indicted Shaltai Boltai for the DNC hacks and claiming they are Russian agents working for the Russian government who have the X-Agent and other signature Fancy Bear tools.

For Mueller’s indictment to hold up, the hackers had to be working for Russia during 2016. The expiration of service date for the hackers(when they stopped working for Russia)  has to show they did all the DNC hacks and exerted influence on the 2016 election sometime before they left Russian government employment and entered Ukrainian government employment.

Shaltai Boltai’s expiration date is first hinted at in the Guardian. They did an interview with Shaltai Boltai aka Anonymous International in Aug 2014. Shaltai Boltai hacked Russian Prime Minister Dimitry Medvedev’s twitter account. They fabricated the Info Operation which evolved into the Russian influence narrative while on the run as fugitives from the Russian government.

During the interview with the Guardian, they made three things very clear. They supported Ukraine, stood against Russia, and they were in it for the money. By Aug 2014 they had been out of Russian employment for a while and they were trying to hurt and embarrass Russia.

According to Stratfor, “In a 2015 interview, the leader of Shaltai Boltai, code-named “Lewis,” said his group was driven purely by money, not ideology… The narrative linking Shaltai Boltai to the FSB officers came just three days after the initial stories suggesting the FSB officers were the sources of leaks to U.S. intelligence.”

In 2015, Shaltai Boltai was delivering spreadsheets to Ukrainian Intel which it claimed were official Kremlin worksheets showing which bloggers the Kremlin trusted, which were neutral, and which were opposition. The official groups that make up the Ukrainian government Intel agency which took the docs were CyberHunta, Cyber Alliance, InformNapalm, and Stopfake.

By 2016, as I’ve shown through overwhelming evidence in previous articles, Shaltai Boltai was still on the run from the Russian government. Because of their activities working for and with Ukrainian Intel against the Russian government, they were arrested, tried, and convicted of treason in late 2016-2017.

For Robert Mueller’s indictment not to smell like sour milk, the only reasonable expiration date when Shaltai Boltai had an opportunity to do any DNC hacking and 2016 election influencing while working for the Russian government was in the late winter or very early spring of 2014.

If you want the truth, I’m being generous with that. People don’t just wake up one morning, decide to betray their country then hit that project running. Everything they did after late winter in 2014 was for the Ukrainian government and to enrich themselves.

All of this information is from Ukrainian Intel groups CyberHunta, Cyber Alliance, Inform Napalm, StopFake, RFE/RL, the Guardian, and Stratfor. All the sources are Ukrainian nationalist approved and Ukrainian friendly.

Shaltai Boltai is composed of Russians that worked in Ukrainian Intelligence groups CyberHunta and Cyber Alliance during 2014, 2015, and 2016. Both groups work for the Ukrainian Information Ministry which handles propaganda, information war, hacking, information operations, and fills out the death lists for their hit-for-hire-contractors.  They are in prison for treason against the Russian government because they were working for Ukraine.

Was this group available for Russia to use for hacking and influence operations against the US?

Within a day of proving Mueller’s indictment shows Ukrainian guilt over the 2016 DNC hacking and election interference, Michael Weiss’ Daily Beast headlined “Mueller Finally Solves Mysteries About Russia’s Fancy Bear Hackers.”

For some reason, senior editor Weiss published this work of fantasy to shore up all of the propaganda websites he has creative control over.

About X-Agent which is a signature Fancy Bear tool the Daily Beast says ” X-Agent was used in the 2016 DNC hack, but its history stretches back years before. It comes out at the tail end of what the security world calls the “cyber kill-chain.” After the hackers have reconnoitered a target, squirmed their way onto a computer and made the decision that the machine is worth keeping, the final step is to install persistent malware that will let them monitor and control the computer indefinitely.”

What’s kind of cool about this is this is almost exactly how the Ukrainian nationalist hacker RUH8 describes the special tool they used on the Russian government in 2016. RUH8 and the Ukrainian hackers are the only known groups with this tool other than Dimitry Alperovich.

Now, what’s wrong with the Daily Beast’s description is the tool X-Agent was first identified in 2015, not years earlier. Most of what they write agrees with Robert Mueller’s indictment of Shaltai Boltai.

A  glaring example of where they step into unconsciously accusing Ukrainian hackers of being Fancy Bear because it is done in the same dull copy and paste methodology as the rest of the article. The author attempts to quote ESET’s report about Fancy Bear which also gives a list of the hacking group’s exploits. This is a positive step except for the part where ESET lists hacking Shaltai Boltai as one of Fancy Bears exploits that happened in late October 2016.

As noted in the Fancy Bear article, this was precisely the hack completed by Shaltai Boltai’s workgroup of CyberHunta and the Ukrainian Cyber Alliance that cemented this entire group as the Fancy Bear hackers. This hack was noted by Ukrainian propagandists for some reason as a triumph for Ukraine.

Within a day the data hacked by Fancy Bear was released through Ukrainian channels to the Atlantic Council.

All the other information Weiss or his colleagues peppered into the article are in agreement with the Mueller on Shaltai Boltai. Just like the sampling above, their narrative falls on the wrong side of the expiration date.

Here’s the problem. Even with something as basic as setting up a timeline and showing who is involved, all of the experts got it wrong. This is willful illiteracy among paid for INFOSEC and CYBERSEC experts and even MSM. They consistently got the facts wrong. Dead wrong.

The only thing needed to find the real group of hackers and influencers was a willingness to ignore current wisdom and investigate using normal nontechnical means. What I’ve found is the experts that are pushing the narrative for some strange reason don’t have the faintest idea about what happened.

So far this year, or decade, this is the biggest story to emerge. Russian influence and hacking in the 2016 election brought us to hot points at different times where we thought conflict to be the next real evolution. At least for right now what could be larger than that?

This is the year for Alternative Media news and four of the biggest stories of the year including finding the Fancy Bear hackers was broken at Washingtonsblog and OpEdNews. I know a little about those.

Just this should be enough to end the Russian influence and hacking saga. This should stop US and EU funding of Ukraine and its war on Donbass dead in its tracks. The lies coming from the Atlantic Council are killing hundreds of thousands in Syria, Yemen, and Ukraine.

There is one part of the indictment story I left out on purpose. On top of everything else, it would add unneeded stress. It needs its own article space. This is how knowing all the things I’ve shown above, how Mueller could bring any form of an indictment about Russian hacking or influence into a court of law. I’ll cover that in a couple weeks if no one picks up on it.

Over the last 4 years I’ve researched and written many stories that are still breaking in other media today. I’ve written stories from the front lines in Ukraine as well as showing snapshots of what life is like here.  I broke the story about Fancy Bear and Intel for Hire outfits like Bellingcat getting their information from Ukrainian Intel.

If you want to support investigative research with a lot of depth, please support my Patreon  page. You can also support my work through PayPal as we expand in new directions over the coming year. For the last 4 years, it’s been almost entirely self-supportive effort which is something when you consider I live in Donbass.

As you can see I’m lousy at fundraising.

Next up– A circumstantial evidence article that will be the article of a lifetime. In my view it holds twice the import of anything I’ve written or could hope to write again.