The commission I received from Consortium News to write about the newly revealed House Intelligence Committee testimony by Shawn Henry, head of CrowdStrike, came with a caution to avoid taking victory laps waving the flag of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
As readers of Consortium News and of raymcgovern.com know, VIPS has been poking forks into the red herring of “Russian pre-2016-election hacking of the DNC emails” for three and a half years. In the process, we have called attention to the tarnished reputation of CrowdStrike, a viscerally anti-Russian cyber-security firm that has had to retract erroneous forensic findings in the past. We have also noted that, like former British intelligence sleuth Christopher Steele, CrowdStrike was paid by the Democrats; and that, instead of ordering the FBI to investigate, Comey chose to defer to CrowdStrike to look into the alleged Russian “hack”.