On the Amplification of Russian Hacking Trooferism

This is an important article by Duncan Campbell on the British troll who played a major role in perpetuating nonsensical arguments on behalf of the proposition that the DNC was never hacked. Marcy Wheeler has a good summary:

Campbell’s is an important and successful effort to push back against disinformation (and to get Bill Binney and Ray McGovern to back off their support for it). It does the following: Affirmatively IDs Leonard, demonstrates that he used the facilities of his employer to do some of this work, and shows how he falsely blamed a former co-worker for some of the work Shows how Leonard serially adopted ever new theories, but never the one almost every expert had backed, that Russia had done the hack Shows the co-travelers, including the far right, that Leonard embraced in his efforts to discredit the dominant explanation Tracks some of the false identities Leonard adopted along the way (I believe, given the data in the story, he has adopted false IDs on this site as well) This work is particularly valuable because it demonstrates how early — by May 2016 — Leonard focused attacks on Clinton before coming out with his debunking site. [...] But the core of Campbell’s debunking (and the basis of his success at persuading Binney and McGovern, to the extent he did) pertains to the Forensicator effort to claim that certain files released in September 2016 proved that Russia couldn’t have done the hack because they had been copied in the Eastern time zone. Campbell shows that shows that the data behind the Forensicator effort had been adopted uncritically by Leonard and his allies, and that the most obvious conclusion based on the evidence is that hackers manipulated the timestamps of these files, and only these files.

The Nation really needs to retract those embarrassing articles by Patrick Lawrence et al. They're just the anti-anti-Trump version of birtherism.