Podesta and high-ranking Dems have leveled this very charge.

The extent of the DKIM signatures all being true makes this very unlikely.

RSA1024 and SHA-1 can be beaten, but not easily and not in this volume.

It is not E2E from the people authoring the e-mails, so the server maintainer (often Google) could be forging and signing e-mails.

However, again, doing it the volume it would have had to be done is not likely.

The DNC has backed off from the forgery accusations. Besides the asinine nature of the accusations making them look bad, such accusations weaken their grand thesis: Russia hacked them. If they open up the possibility that most or all of the e-mails could have been fabricated whole cloth, then it undermines the argument that Putin pulled off an ingenuous heist of tens of thousands of e-mails.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3835460/Now-Podesta-...

if the emails are fake, how could a password from the emails dump be used to login into his twitter page.

The problem isn't the truth of the claims, it's that the illicitly gained information was strategically released to disrupt one specific campaign, effectively destabilizing our election. Much like Comey's last minute email announcement revealed nothing new, yet allowed the email narrative to renew its currency in the last days of the campaign.

Imagine if the IRS "accidentally" released Trump's tax returns or been hacked to allow this data to come out. Or if the alleged tapes went public of Donald Trump making openly racist remarks on his TV shows outtakes. Even if these simply revealed things many people already expect to be true, it would have had mesurable impact on the election.

The NYT did publish Trump's stolen tax return, and were quite self-congratulatory about having done so...

> Or if the alleged tapes went public of Donald Trump making openly racist remarks on his TV shows outtakes.

...and, the stories about the hacked material were outnumbered probably 100-1 by the simultaneous coverage of the stolen backstage Access Hollywood tape (which was doubly illegal because California is a "two-party consent" state).

Which is not to say either of those things weren't newsworthy, or shouldn't have been reported on, but: it's completely, blatantly hypocritical to say that illegally-obtained information should not be allowed to affect the election when it hurts one candidate, but is fair game to use to hurt the other.

Private domestic entities are subject to lawsuits, if the injured party believes their rights have been violated. The recourse is clear.

If it's the US government getting directly involved (e.g. IRS leak), that's a huge scandal. That's why Watergate led to the resignation of a president.

The only way we can hold foreign governments accountable is via our own government. So sanctions would seem to be completely appropriate to me.

Since Trump was mic'd up on the bus (they were going to film a segment), I think there is a case to be made that he couldn't realistically make the case he didn't know he was being recorded or could be recorded. I think it'd be a hard sell that this was an illegally recorded conversation.

In any case, it's only a question of how many laws were broken in the process of its being obtained by media outlets, not whether the law was broken.

His ex-wife had copies of those documents and it's widely suspected that she was the one to leak them.

There's no evidence[2] that Russia hacked the DNC. It's "widely suspected" that murdered DNC staffer Seth Rich leaked the emails.[3]

Even if Marla Maples herself provided the returns to the NYT (and the NYT claims they were sent from Trump Tower), I strongly suspect it would've been in that case a violation of their divorce settlement.[4]

[1] Obviously the NYT themselves didn't steal Trump's tax returns, but their source almost certainly did.

[2] That we've seen.

[3] That theory is IMO ridiculous; my point is that it's also evidence-free speculation.

[4] If it were Marla, and it didn't violate the divorce settlement, why the anonymity?

Unflattering leaks are part and parcel of Presidential campaigns, on both sides. It's why candidates get "vetted", meaning digging up as much dirt as possible in advance to see if it can be dealt with or if it disqualifies the candidate.

And if you want to focus on foreign (illegal) involvement in U.S. elections, look no further than the alleged Chinese involvement in the 1996 presidential election https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1996_United_States_campaign_fi...

My point being, this is almost entirely political. It changes no ones mind.