Russian Hacking Intent to Influence US Election: Not Proven

The mystery of whether or not Russian hackers influenced the US presidential election may never be conclusively cleared up, and the argument between pro-Trump and pro-Clinton camps may never end – until such time as the hackers self-styled “Guccifer 2.0” are definitively identified.
Those hackers grabbed the headlines when they leaked documents and e-mails filched from the Democratic National Committee in June, which sorely embarrassed the Hillary Clinton campaign for the presidency.
Using a makeshift website, they claimed to be Romanians.
Their method of breaking into the often unprotected DNC computers was not technologically sophisticated.. One of the hackers was quoted as saying to a reporter from the Motherboard magazine that he “used 0-day exploit” of “NGP VAN soft”, and “installed shell-code” into the DNC server that allowed him to break into the network, and then installed malware on several PCs. He made the remarks in broken Romanian indicating that he was not who he claimed to be.
The hackers were able to copy thousands of documents from the Democratic Party’s databases and e-mail servers, including mails recording how Clinton followers crushed her rival Bernie Sanders.
The fact that German experts and US cyber security companies were able to determine definitively that Guccifer 2.0 was just a cover for the APT28 and Fancy Bear hacker groups, which are linked to the cyber arms of Russian intelligence, demonstrated the inability of American intelligence cyber experts to identify the DNC hackers.
When challenged, President-elect Donald Trump has said he does not know who the hackers really are. “They may be Russian, or Chinese or anyone else,” he says. “Nobody knows for sure.”
A possible domestic conspiracy has never been ruled out. On Dec. 9, Trump expressed scorn for American intelligence agencies when he said: “These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.”
The following Monday, the president-elect rejected an assessment by the CIA that Russian hackers directed by Moscow and its intelligence services intervened in the US election process and helped him win. Nothing is proven, he said, dismissing CIA and media assessments as based on analysis not evidence.
His view was endorsed the next day when three unnamed US intelligence officials were quoted as saying that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees the country’s 17 intelligence agencies, does not endorse the CIA assessment of Russian intent to influence the US presidential election, for lack of concrete evidence, although intelligence analysis points to Moscow.
The conventional wisdom among the world’s intelligence experts is that the US National Security Agency can intercept any text, picture, document or video on the Internet, anywhere around the globe, according to DEBKA Weekly’s intelligence and cyber defense experts.
And so, the absence of evidence for Russian cyber interference in the US election is strongly attested to by the inability of US intelligence to decipher the hacking of DNC computers, as well as the uncertainty surrounding alleged Russian hacking. Why else would there be closed-door meetings for a handful of senators to see classified CIA documents reportedly showing evidence of the hacking, and how else to explain the inconsistencies in the assessments by the various US intelligence chiefs?
The FBI, for instance, challenges as unproven the CIA’s firm determination that Russia sought to influence the election in favor of Donald Trump. Had there been proof, US intelligence and law enforcement agencies would have found the hackers and brought them to justice, so drawing a line on the arguments, rumors, false reports and accusations filling America’s air waves week after week.
They are all fueled by the intelligence assessments based on conjecture, vague pointers
and preconceptions that have guided many of the world’s intelligence agencies into missing some of the most important political and military events of the past decade.
At the last minute, the CIA called off a briefing promised to the House Intelligence Committee on its findings regarding alleged Russian hacking that was scheduled for Thursday, Dec. 15. House members treated the cancellation as “a snub” and called on the agency to either back away from its allegations, or come clean.