There's a fair bit of evidence in Mueller's report: https://www.justice.gov/storage/report.pdf. But probably the most damning evidence is still highly classified.

There's evidence released by private firms, including ThreatConnect, FireEye, CrowdStrike, Fidelis, and Dell SecureWorks, who have been tracking Russian intelligence groups, including the ones that they allege hacked the DNC, for many years prior:

* https://threatconnect.com/blog/reassesing-guccifer-2-0-recen...

* https://www.fireeye.com/current-threats/apt-groups/rpt-apt28...

* https://www.crowdstrike.com/blog/bears-midst-intrusion-democ...

* https://www.fidelissecurity.com/threatgeek/archive/findings-...

* https://www.secureworks.com/research/threat-group-4127-targe...

(There are varying degrees of technical details in each report, but I recommend reading them all to get a full picture.)

Dutch intelligence says they hacked GRU computers and cameras and observed the hacks as they were happening: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/01/dutch.... They contacted NSA, and this may have been the first time US intelligence became aware of this.

The evidence is so comprehensive, Mueller was able to name 12 of the GRU officers who conducted the breaches: https://www.justice.gov/file/1080281/download. This indictment gets extremely specific, to the point of what software they were running and when, what they were searching for, how they got the funding to buy the VPN access they used to register the Guccifer 2.0 Twitter account, exactly what they said and sent to Wikileaks, etc. This goes into very granular detail. Here's an excerpt:

>Between on or about May 25, 2016 and June 1, 2016, the Conspirators hacked the DNC Microsoft Exchange Server and stole thousands of emails from the work accounts of DNC employees. During that time, YERMAKOV researched PowerShell commands related to accessing and managing the Microsoft Exchange Server. 30.

>On or about May 30, 2016, MALYSHEV accessed the AMS panel in order to upgrade custom AMS software on the server. That day, the AMS panel received updates from approximately thirteen different X-Agent malware implants on DCCC and DNC computers.

There is essentially a global consensus among intelligence and security organizations, governmental and private, that Russian intelligence was behind the DNC hack and the Guccifer 2.0 persona. By contrast, not a single entity other than the US government backed the Iraq WMD claims, and there wasn't any sort of specific public claims made beyond "they have WMDs". Here, Mueller's reports make hundreds of very specific, narrow claims.

If you like, I could write a 30+ page summary of all of the credible evidence in all of these documents, in addition to hints at what sort of classified evidence US intelligence may have (likely through compromised GRU and Russian government systems, and perhaps also moles, in combination with what the Dutch gave them).

As for whether Assange was aware of any of this or suspected it; who knows. It's very likely "Guccifer 2.0" / GRU would have maintained their cover while sending him information. Doesn't really make sense for them to be like "hey, Russia here, here's some stuff you might want". He's smart, though, and surely was (or at least is now) aware of the possibility.

> If you like, I could write a 30+ page summary of all of the credible evidence in all of these documents, in addition to hints at what sort of classified evidence US intelligence may have (likely through compromised GRU and Russian government systems, and perhaps also moles, in combination with what the Dutch gave them).

If you're offering... yes please.

I've seen some good RAND Corp write ups, and others on security blogs, to include one of those you listed, but a reasonably concise omnibus would be nice.

I want to and may get around to it eventually, but my infosec day job is occupying quite a bit of my time at the moment. If there's still contention around this in this sub-thread, that'll increase the odds I'll try to do it. (If most repliers are in agreement with the conclusion, not too much point of it.)

And just an aside unrelated to your post: I know the WMD error/lie/both depending on who was saying it has severely tarnished the credibility of the US intelligence community, as it should have, but it'd also be unempirical to disregard everything they ever say afterwards no matter how many decades later, especially when there seems to be near-universal independent agreement.

Purely speculatively, I suspect this was all very intentional of Russian intelligence, and perhaps Putin himself (if reports of his personal involvement are accurate; given his past field experience in intelligence, it seems plausible).

For example, that's one reason they began sending phishing emails the same day Trump gave his "Russia, if you're listening" comment/joke. They knew what kind of look that would create. They knew that whatever they did would be vehemently denied by Trump and his supporters and aggressively pounced on by his detractors and drive a huge wedge through the country and create wild disagreement about the integrity of this and future elections. The "metagame" (interpretation, backlash, and other butterfly effects) may have been much more of the goal than the game itself (releasing the compromised emails, which really weren't that juicy beyond things we already knew like bias against Bernie, the only exception being the Donna Brazile thing; though the perception and theories may have done much more damage than the actual facts). The mere appearance of Russian manipulation and the debates over whether it's ruining us or is a conspiracy theory achieves a significant objective without having to do hardly anything at all.

Maybe I'll write a big blog post about this whole thing, since I've ranted about this kind of meta-manipulation idea at length before (not that it's a novel proposition, or anything) in addition to debates about the evidence. First I'd need to make a blog, though.

The evidence is so comprehensive, and yet we can't see it.

Pages 36 to 51 of volume one of the Mueller report concern the hacking and dissemination of DNC emails. It has many detailed claims and conclusions, but what's notably missing:

The actual evidence on which Mueller bases his conclusion that both DCLeaks and Guccifer 2.0 are cutouts for the GRU. He doesn't even indirectly allude to specific evidence, let alone include it in the report. It just isn't there.

Funny thing: on page 46 it cites a 9/15/16 Twitter DM, @guccifer_2 to @dcleaks. If they're both false identities for the GRU, it seems odd for Russian state coworkers to be communicating with each other over cleartext DMs on Twitter, an American company. (Unless that's just to deviously throw us off their trail.)

>(Unless that's just to deviously throw us off their trail.)

This seems fairly probable.

But, yes, those are all valid points. The Mueller report does not contain the actual hard evidence of the attribution. It contains the full names of the people who registered the account and a lot of the things they did, but it doesn't state the proof of this. I suspect if we all had Top Secret clearances we would probably all be satisfied with the evidence they have, but that's blind speculation of course. A large percentage of it may be Dutch intelligence's findings, which have been widely reported on, but of course you still have to take Dutch intelligence's word for it that they really did compromise GRU computers and observe them.

There is some real evidence (especially released by private security firms) of GRU and SVR hacking the DNC et al., and Guccifer 2.0 is the only one who ever claimed to have the documents discovered during the hack. There's probably a lot of other circumstantial evidence, too. If I get around to writing a long post about all of this, I'll cover everything I can find.