The leaked DNC emails detailed efforts by the committee to rig the Democratic primary in favor of Hillary Clinton.
Private investigators have claimed there is evidence that DNC staffer Seth Rich was the source WikiLeaks used to obtain the emails, which were copied on July 5, 2016. Rich was murdered on July 10, 2016.
The DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz as well as Chief executive Amy Dacey and Chief Financial Officer Brad Marshall all resigned after the devastating release of hacked emails from the committee.
Key findings in the report by the IT specialist known as The Forensicator:
- On 7/5/2016 at approximately 6:45 PM Eastern time, someone copied the data that eventually appears on the "NGP VAN" 7zip file (the subject of this analysis). This 7zip file was published by a persona named Guccifer 2, two months later on September 13, 2016.
- Due to the estimated speed of transfer (23 MB/s) calculated in this study, it is unlikely that this initial data transfer could have been done remotely over the Internet.
- The initial copying activity was likely done from a computer system that had direct access to the data. "Direct access" means that the individual who was collecting the data either had physical access to the computer where the data was stored, or the data was copied over a local high speed network (LAN).
- This initial copying activity was done on a system where Eastern Daylight Time (EDT) settings were in force. Most likely, the computer used to initially copy the data was located somewhere on the East Coast.
- The data was likely initially copied to a computer running Linux, because the file last modified times all reflect the apparent time of the copy and this is a characteristic of the Linux ’cp’ command (using default options).
- A Linux OS may have been booted from a USB flash drive and the data may have been copied back to the same flash drive, which will likely have been formatted with the Linux (ext4) file system.
Analysts believe the most important aspect in The Forensicator’s report is the "estimated speed of transfer (23 MB/s)" at which the documents were copied. Analysts say it’s "inconceivable" the DNC documents could have been copied at such speed from a remote location.
Disobedient Media noted that "The Forensicator concluded that the chance that the files had been accessed and downloaded remotely over the Internet were too small to give this idea any serious consideration. He explained that the calculated transfer speeds for the initial copy were much faster than can be supported by an Internet connection.
"This is extremely significant and completely discredits allegations of Russian hacking made by both Guccifer 2.0 and Crowdstrike."