Well, there's your epic flip-flop. Try not to get whiplash Trump supporters.
Trump now says that he fully accepts the intelligence community's assessment. Furthermore, he now says that he didn't get all the controversy, so he
either got a transcript or watched a clip (he claims both) of his remarks at the podium and now apparently realizes that he misspoke.
His claim is that in this statement, he meant to say "wouldn't" rather than "would" :
"My people came to me, Dan Coates, came to me and some others they said they think it's Russia. I have President Putin. He just said it's not
Russia.
I will say this: I don't see any reason why it
would be."
This is of course utter bull# and it's clear that it is looking at the rest of his statement:
"But I really do want to see the server but I have, I have confidence in both parties.
I really believe that this will probably go on for a while but I don't think it can go on without finding out what happened to the server. What
happened to the servers of the Pakistani gentleman that worked on the DNC?
Where are those servers? They're missing. Where are they? What happened to Hillary Clinton's emails? 33,000 emails gone, just gone. I think in Russia
they wouldn't be gone so easily.
I think it's a disgrace that we can't get Hillary Clinton's thirty three thousand e-mails.
I have great confidence in my intelligence people but I will tell you that President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today and
what he did is an incredible offer."
He went straight to repeating talking points used in the pro-Trump bubble to dismiss the existence of the hack in the first place.
FTR, it turns out that the DNC/CrowdStrike turned over images of the compromised servers to the FBI, which as I had surmised after reading the DNC
lawsuit, were largely virtualized.
If you're not familiar with virtualization, the upshot is that there's not a single physical piece of hardware for each server. Instead, multiple VMs
(Virtual Machines) run concurrently on each virtualization host, sharing processor and memory resources. The drives for these VMs are typically
VHDs/VMDKs (Virtual Hard Drives/Virtual Machine DisKs) — essentially a hard drive in a file — residing together on shared storage.
So in fact, for most of the 140 or so servers the DNC had, there's no actual physical server to be turned over. And in the case of a physical server,
a more typical response in a scenario like this would be to image the victim's servers — make a byte for byte copy of the its drives (and memory for
that matter).
It's utterly unnecessary to seize the hardware. The whole thing makes no sense. And really, if CrowdStrike wanted to fake a hack, they'd have
absolutely no problem fabricating forensic evidence of one on the servers. "What about the servers bro?!!?!" is an all around dumb talking
point.
edit on 2018-7-17 by theantediluvian because: (no reason given)