Russian hackers who stole DNC emails failed at social media. WikiLeaks helped.

By Craig Timberg
11/12/2019, 10:19:00 p.m.

The Russian military hackers who stole tens of thousands of sensitive Democratic Party documents in 2016 struggled to disseminate their bounty online — at least until anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks joined the effort, according to a report released Tuesday night.

The report, prepared by analyzing data Facebook provided to the Senate Intelligence Committee, found that the Russian military hackers sought to publicize the documents as early as June 14 that year through a post on Facebook that said, “Check restricted documents leaked from Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign staff,” and provided a link to an online trove. But despite the potentially explosive contents, the post on the “DCLeaks” page generated just 11 “likes,” 17 shares and zero comments.

Direct messages to American journalists, made through a fictitious Twitter persona called Guccifer 2.0, generated a spate of news coverage soon after. But that was modest compared to the deluge that came five weeks later, on July 22, when WikiLeaks published the documents and tweeted a link to its 3.2 million followers.

The revelations from the stolen documents, many of which were embarrassing emails showing party officials appearing to favor Clinton over her rival for the presidential nomination, Sen. Bernie Sanders, soon spread widely enough to prompt the Democratic chairwoman to resign on the eve of the party’s national convention.

The hacking campaign’s outreach efforts, executed by the Russian military intelligence agency known as the GRU, underscore how marrying stolen documents with sophisticated social media outreach can generate outsize results. It also underscored the unwitting role American journalists played in a Russian intelligence operation to interfere in a U.S. election.

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For U.S. soldiers, ‘it’s a dagger to the heart’ to abandon the Kurds

By David Ignatius
Columnist
Oct. 14, 2019 at 7:26 p.m. EDT

At a gathering last Saturday night of military and intelligence veterans, one topic shrouded the room: President Trump’s decision to abandon Kurdish fighters in Syria who had fought and died to help America destroy the Islamic State.

“It’s a dagger to the heart to walk away from people who shed blood for us,” one former top CIA official who attended the black-tie dinner told me later. A retired four-star general who was there said the same thing: Trump’s retreat was an “unsound, morally indefensible act” and a “disgrace” to America and the soldiers who serve this country.

This sense of anguish was pervasive among those attending the event, several attendees said. It was an annual dinner honoring the Office of Strategic Services, the secret World War II commando group that was a forerunner of today’s CIA and Special Operations forces. The event celebrated the military alliances that have always been at the center of American power. It was a bitter anniversary this year.

It’s probably impossible for Americans to fully grasp the sense of betrayal felt by the Syrian Kurds, who suffered 11,000 dead and 24,000 wounded in a war that we asked them to fight. But perhaps we can understand the shame and outrage of the Special Operations forces who fought alongside them and now see the Kurds cast aside to face their Turkish enemies alone.

“It will go down in infamy,” said one Army officer who served in the Syria campaign. “This will go down as a stain on the American reputation for decades.” Those may sound like extreme sentiments, but they’re widely shared by those who served in the Syria mission. For these soldiers, abandoning an ally on the battlefield is about the worst thing that can happen.

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Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/for-us-soldiers-its-a-dagger-to-the-heart-to-abandon-the-kurds/2019/10/14/f0a1db60-eecf-11e9-89eb-ec56cd414732_story.html