WHAT DOES TRUMP KNOW?
by Sharon Rondeau
(Jul. 7, 2017) — Just after noon EDT on Friday, internet entrepreneur Kim Dotcom tweeted a response to President Donald Trump’s claim that “Everyone here is talking about why John Podesta refused to give the DNC server to the FBI and the CIA.”
Trump is attending the G20 in Hamburg, Germany, where as of this writing he has finished a 2+-hour meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Podesta was Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign chairman and former chief of staff to President Bill Clinton. In early October, the open-government publisher WikiLeaks posted thousands of his emails online which cast not only the DNC, but also Clinton, in an unfavorable light to many observers and may have cost Clinton the election.
According to several components of the U.S. intelligence community, the DNC server was breached by Russian operatives attempting to interfere with the election. It has been reported that an earlier WikiLeaks release beginning last July which revealed hundreds of unflattering and incriminating conversations among DNC leadership was obtained through such “meddling.”
Those emails, released in batches by WikiLeaks just prior to the Democrat convention, indicated that Sen. Bernie Sanders was preempted from obtaining the Democrat presidential nomination by the DNC’s clear favoring of Clinton despite the party’s pledge of neutrality in the primaries.
While Podesta might not have been in a position to permit access to the DNC server to any outside entity, it has been widely reported that the FBI never examined it, including by former agency Director James Comey.
Instead, the DNC had an outside company, Crowdstrike, perform an analysis of the intrusion.
Crowdstrike has been reported to have ties to the DNC outside of its contractual abilities. According to an article by The Young Turks published at Medium.com, Crowdstrike was also under contract with the FBI for unspecified services at the same time it performed the analysis of the DNC server.
Dotcom’s tweet on Friday referred to his May 20 claim that a young DNC employee, Seth Rich, was involved in releasing emails and attachments from the DNC server to WikiLeaks with Dotcom’s own involvement.
On July 10 of last year, Rich was shot twice in the back by one or possibly two assailants and left for dead in the street not far from his home in Washington, DC. It has been reported that he remained alive and was speaking while paramedics worked to transport him to an area hospital, where he later died.
The DC Metro Police Department has not solved the murder and claims that it was the result of a “botched robbery” attempt. Others say there is no evidence to support that theory since Rich had all of his valuables on his person when he was found by EMTs.
Dotcom has previously suggested that the DNC avoided the FBI’s offer to inspect its server because of “Seth Rich.”
However, anyone publicly questioning the public narrative has been vilified by the mainstream media, as occurred with Sean Hannity in early June when his advertisers were targeted by such organizations as Media Matters. The Washington Post, The New York Times, and CNN have been particularly assiduous in insisting that Rich could not have been a WikiLeaks source by assigning the lead to “conspiracy theory” status.
Dotcom has remained steadfast in insisting that he “knows” that Rich was a WikiLeaks source and has offered to testify to Special Counsel Robert Mueller in person if suitable arrangements can be made for his safe travel to and from the U.S.
In January 2012, the U.S. Justice Department charged Dotcom with copyright infringement and other crimes, shuttering his online file-sharing website, Megaupload. Dotcom’s home in New Zealand was raided and he was placed under house arrest, a circumstance in which he has remained since that time.
Dotcom proclaims his innocence and has offered his side of the story on his website, Kim.com.
