Photo Credit: Courtesy Aaron Klein
Aaron Klein

Is Democrat Money Skewing FBI’s Hacking Intel?

CrowdStrike, the third-party company relied upon by the FBI to make its assessment about alleged Russian hacking into the Democratic National Committee (DNC), was financed to the tune of $100 million from a funding drive last year led by Google Capital.

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Google Capital, which now goes by the name of CapitalG, is an arm of Alphabet Inc., Google’s parent company. Eric Schmidt, the chairman of Alphabet, has been a staunch and active supporter of and occasional adviser to Hillary Clinton and is a longtime donor to the Democratic Party.

On Thursday, a senior law enforcement official told CNN that the DNC “rebuffed” the agency’s request to physically examine its computer servers after the alleged hacking. Instead, the FBI relied on CrowdStrike’s assessment that the servers had most likely been hacked by Russian agents.

CrowdStrike is a California-based cybersecurity technology company co-founded by experts George Kurtz and Dmitri Alperovitch.

CrowdStrike advertises on its website that it is “proud to have received major funding from some of the world’s most prestigious technology providers and investment firms” – most prominently Google Capital with a “$100M investment in CrowdStrike.”

Shawn Henry, president of CrowdStrike Services and CSO of the firm, is a retired executive assistant director of the FBI.

Last April, CrowdStrike General Counsel and Chief Risk Officer Steven Chabinsky was appointed to President Obama’s White House Commission on Enhancing National Cybersecurity.

CrowdStrike co-founder Alperovitch is a non-resident senior fellow of the Cyber Statecraft Initiative at the Atlantic Council. The Council takes a hawkish approach toward Russia and has released numerous reports and briefs about Russian aggression.

The Council is funded by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Inc, the U.S. State Department, and NATO ACT.

Another Council funder is the Ploughshares Fund, which in turn has received financing from billionaire George Soros’s Open Society Foundations.

 

International Condemnation Of Israel Emboldens Terrorists

The timing of Sunday’s deadly truck-ramming terrorist attack in Jerusalem may be instructive. The attack, carried out in the eastern Jerusalem neighborhood of Armon Hanatziv, also known as Eastern Talpiot, came less than three weeks after the United Nations Security Council declared eastern Jerusalem to be “occupied Palestinian territory.”

It followed lame-duck Secretary of State John Kerry’s Mideast policy speech in which he largely blamed Israel for the absence of negotiations (while the Palestinians have refused multiple statehood offers as well as attempts by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to jumpstart talks) and repeatedly slammed Israeli settlement construction, including in eastern Jerusalem.

The Jerusalem truck terror also comes one week before the Palestinians are scheduled to attend a farcical Paris “peace” conference at which the international community, minus Israel, is slated to get together to set the future parameters of a Palestinian state.

The Palestinians have a long and sordid history of responding to peace talks or international pressure on Israel with terror campaigns targeting Israelis. Arch terrorist Yasir Arafat made repated use this tactic, responding, for example, to generous Israeli statehood offers in September 2000 by launching the deadly Second Intifada.

Within less than 48 hours of last month’s anti-Israel UN resolution, I noticed an immediate uptick in Palestinian terrorist attacks targeting Jews in the West Bank and eastern Jerusalem, the very areas where Israeli construction was singled out in the UN document. I wrote at the time that it was too early to tell whether the violence represented a spike in Palestinian terrorism following the UN vote or whether the incidents were part of the year-and-a-half-long trend known as the so-called Palestinian wave of terror that seems to escalate and then tamper down. With the truck terror, we may be more clearly seeing the Palestinian response to the mounting international pressure on Israel.

 

Former Gitmo Commander ‘Disgusted’ By Obama’s Actions

Col. Michael Bumgarner, the former commander of the guard force at the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, stated in an interview on Sunday that he is “disgusted” by President Obama’s continued effort to empty out Gitmo.

Bumgarner charged Obama with attempting to use Gitmo to ensure his legacy at the expense of national security. He served from April 2005-June 2006 as commander of the Joint Detention Group, the guard force component of the Joint Task Force at the U.S. prison in Guantanamo.

The Pentagon announced last Thursday that four detainees had been released to Saudi Arabia, where they will purportedly participate in a rehabilitation program. From the 535 detainees in Gitmo during Bumgarner’s work there, the population is now down to 55, and 19 of those have reportedly been cleared for release. There is speculation Obama may release more detainees in his final days in office.

“It has nothing to do with national security reasons,” stated Bumgarner. He was speaking on this reporter’s Sunday night talk radio program, “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio,” broadcast on New York’s AM 970 The Answer and Philadelphia’s NewsTalk 990 AM.

Continued Bumgarner: “His whole motivation has nothing to do with national security. In my mind, it is clearly a legacy issue for Obama who signed on, you know, day one of his presidency, ‘I am going to close Guantanamo.’ I knew then … that would never happen. It is just impossible. He had no clue what he had just signed. And he has found out how hard that is.

“So the argument always is that [the terrorists] make this a propaganda matter to recruit more people. You and I both follow this pretty closely. I don’t ever see it out there that Guantanamo is your call to battle, you know. I never see that. You and I both know what drives this fight. It has nothing to do with national security. Again, it’s a legacy issue for Obama. And I’m ashamed that it is occurring. Embarrassed. Disgusted. I don’t know how it to make it stronger.”

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Aaron Klein is the Jerusalem bureau chief for Breitbart News. Visit the website daily at www.breitbart.com/jerusalem. He is also host of an investigative radio program on New York's 970 AM Radio on Sundays from 7 to 9 p.m. Eastern. His website is KleinOnline.com.