Impeachment: The Process Begins

Because there is reason to suspect that this citizen committed crimes in that country.

Democrats really want to place themselves above the law. We shouldn't let them get away with it.



No. They are responsible for policing their own country.



Take the fall? The server will either be found or it won't.



Beats me. I'm not really following the server issue.



Because he has the trust of the President.

If there is cause to think an American has committed a crime in another country, why hasn't an extraterritorial investigation and prosecution from our own AG's office invoked first?

If you're saying that other countries are responsible for policing their own country, why doesn't that apply in this situation?

The server in question is located in Washington DC. It's in the FBI's hands since Cloudstrike turned it over in 2016. So, I have to ask, how can a computer be in two places at once?

If you're not really following the server issue then you are under qualified to make the assertion the President shouldn't be impeached. Since that is one of the "conditions" the President laid out to Ukraine to receive aid money, shouldn't you be better informed?

If all it takes to be in charge of Foreign Affairs and investigations in that arena is the trust of the President, are you advocating to get rid of Security Clearances altogether because they mean absolutely nothing to our President?

The server was never turned over. Crowdstrike told the FBI what was on it. The FBI settled for that because they were corrupt. Stop lying.

you and oral just repeat your stuff ad nauseum. My own observation is that such unending mantras dont make you sound like youre correct, it just makes you sound pathetic.

Lol! Ok Boomer...

Trump’s ‘Missing DNC Server’ Is Neither Missing Nor a Server
The president can spout conspiracy theories all he wants. But the DNC turned over all its key data to the FBI after it got hacked. And that info wasn’t stored on a single server.

Kevin Poulsen
Sr. National Security Correspondent
Updated 07.17.18 6:49PM ET / Published 07.16.18 9:58PM ET

Donald Trump turns to right-wing conspiracy theories when he’s cornered, and he was cornered on Monday. Standing feet away from Vladimir Putin at a press conference following their Helsinki tete-a-tete, a reporter challenged Trump to condemn Putin for Russia’s election interference, “in front of the world.” Instead, the world watched as the president of the United States took Putin’s side against his own Justice Department and his own intelligence agencies, and launched into a rambling discourse about Hillary Clinton’s emails and a supposedly missing DNC server that hides the truth about Putin’s innocence.

“You have groups that are wondering why the FBI never took the server. Why didn’t they take the server? Where is the server, I want to know, and what is the server saying?”

The server is saying shut up.

The “server” Trump is obsessed with is actually 140 servers, most of them cloud-based, which the DNC was forced to decommission in June 2016 while trying to rid its network of the Russian GRU officers working to help Trump win the election, according to the figures in the DNC’s civil lawsuit against Russia and the Trump campaign. Another 180 desktop and laptop computers were also swapped out as the DNC raced to get the organization back on its feet and free of Putin’s surveillance.

But despite Trump’s repeated feverish claims to the contrary, no machines are actually missing.

It’s true that the FBI doesn’t have the DNC’s computer hardware. Agents didn’t sweep into DNC headquarters, load up all the equipment and leave Democrats standing stunned beside empty desks and dangling cables. There’s a reason for that, and it has nothing to do with a deep state conspiracy to frame Putin.

Trump and his allies are capitalizing on a basic misapprehension of how computer intrusion investigations work. Investigating a virtual crime isn’t a like investigating a murder. The Russians didn’t leave DNA evidence on the server racks and fingerprints on the keyboards. All the evidence of their comings and goings was on the computer hard drives, and in memory, and in the ephemeral network transmissions to and from the GRU’s command-and-control servers.

When cyber investigators respond to an incident, they capture that evidence in a process called “imaging.” They make an exact byte-for-byte copy of the hard drives. They do the same for the machine’s memory, capturing evidence that would otherwise be lost at the next reboot, and they monitor and store the traffic passing through the victim’s network. This has been standard procedure in computer intrusion investigations for decades. The images, not the computer’s hardware, provide the evidence.

Both the DNC and the security firm Crowdstrike, hired to respond to the breach, have said repeatedly over the years that they gave the FBI a copy of all the DNC images back in 2016. The DNC reiterated that Monday in a statement to the Daily Beast.

“The FBI was given images of servers, forensic copies, as well as a host of other forensic information we collected from our systems,” said Adrienne Watson, the DNC’s deputy communications director. “We were in close contact and worked cooperatively with the FBI and were always responsive to their requests. Any suggestion that they were denied access to what they wanted for their investigation is completely incorrect.”

The FBI declined comment for this story, but in testimony before the House Intelligence Committee last year, then-director James Comey said that Crowdstrike “ultimately shared with us their forensics.”

At that same hearing, Comey complained that the DNC didn’t give the FBI direct access to the DNC’s servers. It’s unclear why Comey wanted the FBI operating on the DNC’s live network, but if the DNC demurred it wouldn’t be an unusual call, particularly five months before election day.

“The FBI is looking to investigate and prosecute crimes, and we’re looking to return a system to operation as quickly as possible with minimal impact,” said Rendition Infosec’s Jake Williams, one of several incident response professionals interviewed for this story. “I can tell you honestly that had I been part of that incident response, I would not have advocated calling in the FBI. Every minute the FBI spends keeping the actors in play, that’s a minute I don’t get back in prepping for the election. I would absolutely have shared images with them.”

Kenn White, a security expert and former DHS adviser, agreed that the FBI wouldn’t have expected direct access to DNC’s computers, “The FBI had one of the best cyber security firms in the world giving them forensics, and going in depth and reverse engineering to the byte level these implants and turning it over.”

In some versions of the servergate conspiracy theory now espoused by Trump, nothing less than physical possession of the hardware will suffice, because Crowdstrike, a respected security firm helmed by a former senior FBI agent, might be part of the deep state’s efforts to frame Putin. White scoffs at that notion, noting that National Republican Congressional Committee is one of Crowdstrike’s customers.

“I’ve done incident response for defense contractors and healthcare groups, this is all standard practice,” said White. “It’s completely defensible in terms of best practices and what was going on.”

“We were in close contact and worked cooperatively with the FBI. Any suggestion that they were denied access to what they wanted for their investigation is completely incorrect.”— DNC's Adrienne Watson

It’s also consistent with the Department of Justice’s electronic evidence manual, which recommends capturing images when practical even when the FBI is executing a search warrant against a uncooperative suspect. When the computers belong to a cooperating victim, seizing the machines is pretty much out of the question, said James Harris, a former FBI cybercrime agent who worked on a 2009 breach at Google that’s been linked to the Chinese government.

“In most cases you don’t even ask, you just assume you’re going to make forensic copies,” said Harris, now vice president of engineering at PFP Cyber. “For example when the Google breach happened back in 2009, agents were sent out with express instructions that you image what they allow you to image, because they’re the victim, you don’t have a search warrant, and you don’t want to disrupt their business.”

There’s a final bit of evidence that the FBI got what it wanted from the DNC, and it was filed in the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. last Friday: 29-pages of inside details showing exactly how and when the GRU’s hackers moved through the DNC’s network on their mission to help Trump.

If the president really wants to know what the DNC server is saying, it’s all in the indictment against Putin’s hackers. He just has to listen.

Incorrect. This whole thing is the president trying to cobble together a baseless investigation of someone who disagrees with h and using a denial of desperately needed military aid for a client state to force that client state to conduct a baseless show investigation they see no merit in. Pure abuse of power for purely personal gain. That's the Trump way.

That is what I said. You article is partisan traitorous garbage. Next.

I will not argue with you about being or sounding pathetic. You have all the answers on that. Once again, I bow to the expert.

Your comment shows off your lack of IT technology.

So does yours. There is nothing better than the devices to figure out what was on them, is there? Try again.

Since you seem to only want to argue on how a server's storage is managed, it is of little value to explain it to you.

What is of value if the investigation was not done properly? That is the problem. Something is being hidden and that is not good.

The US government should absolutely open a massive criminal investigation into the Bidens.



If that is true, I'm sure that fact will be noted in the investigation.

Just for the record, I have no idea who or what Cloudstrike is.



It can't be.



Nah. I don't need to know a lot about this server to know that "trying to launch an investigation into it" is not a high crime or misdemeanor.



It's up to the President. If he chooses to do so, I'm not going to worry about it.

What really matters here is the fact that progressives want to violate my civil liberties, and Trump prevents progressives from violating my civil liberties. I don't care about anything else.

Progressives just hate it when people post facts.

That is incorrect. Everything that I said is true.



That is incorrect. There is reason to suspect that the Bidens are engaged in criminal activity. Only an investigation will be able to determine whether the suspicions are true or not.

Progressives are the only people here who target people for investigation merely for disagreeing with them.



Oh please. When Russia invaded Georgia and Ukraine, progressives were perfectly fine with it.

And Ukraine did not get any weapons from us when Obama was president. They only started getting weapons from us after Trump took office.



That is incorrect. Pressuring foreign governments to combat corruption has been standard US government practice for a very long time.

Unless your head is not in the fresh air, this "hypothesis" has been clearly debunked with good hard forensic evidence.

I understand its on your hit list but wishin dont make it a fact.

If you have nothing to avance, Im glad you at least post attempts at humor. Keep working on it.

Its my reading comp skills. So then you should listen to your own utterances and youll read the words upon which I based my opinion

And here I thought is was from experience. Could have fooled me.

John Bolton went around Mick Mulvaney — and released aid to Ukraine before resigning
November 9, 2019 By Bob Brigham


The timeline in the administration’s Ukraine scandal changed again on Saturday with a bombshell new report from Bloomberg News.

“President Donald Trump says he lifted his freeze on aid to Ukraine on Sept. 11, but the State Department had quietly authorized releasing $141 million of the money several days earlier,” Bloomberg reported, citing “five people familiar with the matter.”

“The State Department decision, which hasn’t been reported previously, stemmed from a legal finding made earlier in the year, and conveyed in a classified memorandum to Secretary of State Michael Pompeo. State Department lawyers found the White House Office of Management and Budget, and thus the president, had no legal standing to block spending of the Ukraine aid,” Bloomberg explained.

The report highlights how the administration was divided over the funding, with acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney — who is also the director of the Office of Management and budget supporting Trump’s decision to block the aid, while others, including then-National Security Advisor John Bolton, reportedly wanted the funds released.

“The OMB has argued all along that the congressional notification by the State Department was only one step and it still had the power to hold the money after it was sent because of its authority to apportion — or distribute — the funds,” Bloomberg explained. “But the State Department disagreed. Taylor, the envoy to Ukraine, said in his testimony that it was remarkable that the legal offices at the State and Defense departments had decided ‘they were going to move forward with this assistance anyway, OMB notwithstanding.’”

“The memo to Pompeo had determined that State had the authority to spend the money — regardless of what Trump was saying through the OMB — and would start the process by Sept. 7. But State officials were also wary of provoking a confrontation with OMB and Mick Mulvaney, the acting chief of staff who still leads the budget office, whose team argued they could block the money through a process known as apportionment,” Bloomberg reported.

The new report suggests that Bolton went around Mulvaney to release the aid.

“What they didn’t know, according to one of the people, was that shortly before Sept. 9, Bolton had relayed a message to the State Department that the funding could go ahead. It’s not clear whether Bolton, who resigned from the job a week later, did so with Trump’s approval,” Bloomberg noted.