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As President-elect Donald Trump prepares to take the oath of office Friday, a pall hangs over his upcoming presidency amid an unprecedentedly concerted campaign to delegitimize it.\u00a0Unconfirmed accusations continue to swirl alleging that Russian President Vladimir Putin authorized \u201cRussian hacking\u201d that helped put Mr. Trump in the White House.<\/p>\n
As President for a few more days, you have the power to demand concrete evidence of a link between the Russians and WikiLeaks, which published the bulk of the information in question.\u00a0Lacking that evidence, the American people should be told that there is no fire under the smoke and mirrors of recent weeks.<\/p>\n
We urge you to authorize public release of any tangible evidence that takes us beyond the unsubstantiated, \u201cwe-assess\u201d judgments by the intelligence agencies.\u00a0Otherwise, we \u2013 as well as other skeptical Americans \u2013 will be left with the corrosive suspicion that the intense campaign of accusations is part of a wider attempt to discredit the Russians and those \u2013 like Mr. Trump \u2013 who wish to deal constructively with them.<\/p>\n
Remember the Maine?<\/strong><\/p>\n Alleged Russian interference has been labeled \u201can act of war\u201d and Mr. Trump a \u201ctraitor.\u201d\u00a0But the \u201cintelligence\u201d served up to support those charges does not pass the smell test.\u00a0Your press conference on Wednesday will give you a chance to respond more persuasively to NBC\u2019s Peter Alexander\u2019s challenge at the last one (on Dec. 16) \u201cto show the proof [and], as they say, put your money where your mouth is and declassify some of the intelligence. \u2026\u201d You told Alexander you were reluctant to \u201ccompromise sources and methods.\u201d\u00a0We can understand that concern better than most Americans.\u00a0We would remind you, though, that at critical junctures in the past, your predecessors made judicious decisions to give higher priority to buttressing the credibility of U.S. intelligence-based policy than to protecting sources and methods.\u00a0With the Kremlin widely accused by politicians and pundits of \u201can act of war,\u201d this is the kind of textbook case in which you might seriously consider taking special pains to substantiate serious allegations with hard intelligence \u2013 if there is any.<\/p>\n During the Cuban missile crisis, for instance, President Kennedy ordered us to show highly classified photos of Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba and on ships en route, even though this blew sensitive detail regarding the imagery intelligence capabilities of the cameras on our U-2 aircraft.<\/p>\n President Ronald Reagan\u2019s reaction to the Libyan terrorist bombing of La Belle Disco in Berlin on April 5, 1986, that killed two and injured 79 other U.S. servicemen is another case in point.\u00a0We had intercepted a Libyan message that morning: \u201cAt 1:30 in the morning one of the acts was carried out with success, without leaving a trace behind.\u201d\u00a0(We should add here that NSA\u2019s dragnet SIGINT capability 30 years later renders it virtually impossible to avoid \u201cleaving a trace behind\u201d once a message is put on the network.)<\/p>\n President Reagan ordered the U.S. Air Force to bomb Col. Muammar Qaddafi\u2019s palace compound to smithereens, killing several civilians.\u00a0Amid widespread international consternation and demands for proof that Libya was responsible for the Berlin attack, President Reagan ordered us to make public the encrypted Libyan message, thereby sacrificing a collection\/decryption capability unknown to the Libyans \u2013 until then.<\/p>\n As senior CIA veteran Milton Bearden has put it, there are occasions when more damage is done by \u201cprotecting\u201d sources and methods than by revealing them.<\/p>\n Where\u2019s the Beef?<\/strong><\/p>\n We find the New York Times- and Washington Post-led media Blitz against Trump and Putin truly extraordinary, despite our long experience with intelligence\/media related issues.\u00a0On Jan. 6, the day after your top intelligence officials published what we found to be an embarrassingly shoddy report purporting to prove Russian hacking in support of Trump\u2019s candidacy, the Times banner headline across all six columns on page 1 read:\u00a0\u201cPUTIN LED SCHEME TO AID TRUMP, REPORT SAYS<\/strong>.\u201d<\/p>\n The lead article began: \u201cPresident Vladimir V. Putin of Russia directed a vast cyberattack aimed at denying Hillary Clinton the presidency and installing Donald J. Trump in the Oval Office, the nation\u2019s top intelligence agencies said in an extraordinary report they delivered on Friday to Mr. Trump.\u201d\u00a0Eschewing all subtlety, the Times added that the revelations in \u201cthis damning report \u2026 undermined the legitimacy\u201d of the President-elect, and \u201cmade the case that Mr. Trump was the favored candidate of Mr. Putin.\u201d<\/p>\n On page A10, however, Times investigative reporter Scott Shane pointed out: \u201cWhat is missing from the public report is what many Americans most eagerly anticipated: hard evidence to back up the agencies\u2019 claims that the Russian government engineered the election attack.\u00a0That is a significant omission.\u201d<\/p>\n Shane continued, \u201cInstead, the message from the agencies essentially amounts to \u2018trust us.\u2019\u00a0There is no discussion of the forensics used to recognize the handiwork of known hacking groups, no mention of intercepted communications between the Kremlin and the hackers, no hint of spies reporting from inside Moscow\u2019s propaganda machinery.\u201d<\/p>\n Shane added that the intelligence report \u201coffers an obvious reason for leaving out the details, declaring that including \u2018the precise bases for its assessments\u2019 would \u2018reveal sensitive sources and methods and imperil the ability to collect critical foreign intelligence in the future.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Shane added a quote from former National Security Agency lawyer Susan Hennessey: \u201cThe unclassified report is underwhelming at best. There is essentially no new information for those who have been paying attention.\u201d\u00a0Ms. Hennessey served as an attorney in NSA\u2019s Office of General Counsel and is now a Brookings Fellow in National Security Law.<\/p>\n Everyone Hacks<\/strong><\/p>\n There is a lot of ambiguity \u2013 whether calculated or not \u2013 about \u201cRussian hacking.\u201d\u00a0\u201cEveryone knows that everyone hacks,\u201d says everyone: Russia hacks; China hacks; every nation that can hacks. So do individuals of various nationalities. This is not the question.<\/p>\n You said at your press conference on Dec. 16 \u201cthe intelligence that I have seen gives me great confidence in their [U.S. intelligence agencies\u2019] assessment that the Russians carried out this hack.\u201d\u00a0\u201cWhich hack?\u201d you were asked.\u00a0\u201cThe hack of the DNC and the hack of John Podesta,\u201d you answered.<\/p>\n Earlier during the press conference you alluded to the fact that \u201cthe information was in the hands of WikiLeaks.\u201d\u00a0The key question is how the material from \u201cRussian hacking\u201d got to WikiLeaks, because it was WikiLeaks that published the DNC and Podesta emails.<\/p>\n Our VIPS colleague William Binney, who was Technical Director of NSA and created many of the collection systems still in use, assures us that NSA\u2019s \u201ccast-iron\u201d coverage \u2013 particularly surrounding Julian Assange and other people associated with WikiLeaks\u00a0 \u2013 would almost certainly have yielded a record of any electronic transfer from Russia to WikiLeaks.\u00a0Binney has used some of the highly classified slides released by Edward Snowden to demonstrate precisely how NSA accomplishes this using trace mechanisms embedded throughout the network.\u00a0[See: \u201cU.S. Intel Vets Dispute Russia Hacking Claims,<\/a>\u201d Dec. 12, 2016.]<\/p>\n
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