A July 16 CNSNews.com article by Max Augros is yet another bit of pro-Trump stenography:
When asked about U.S. intelligence claims that Russia interfered in the 2016 U.S. elections and whether he would call on Russian President Vladimir Putin to not interfere again, President Donald Trump said he wants to know why the FBI did not seize the Democratic National Committee’s server, which was allegedly hacked by Russian actors, and he wants to know why the FBI has not tracked down Hillary Clinton’s apparently missing 33,000 emails.
“But I don’t think it can go on without finding out what happened to the sever,” said Trump. “What happened to the servers of the Pakistani gentleman that worked on the DNC? Where are those servers? They’re missing. Where are they?”
“What happened to Hillary Clinton’s emails?” he said. “33,000 emails gone, just gone. I think in Russia they wouldn’t be gone so easily.”
If Augros had cared more about journalism than stenography, he would have pointed that, as the headline of this Daily Beast article explained, the purportedly missing server Trump is obsessed with is neither missing nor a server:
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.
[…]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.”
See, that wasn’t so hard — in fact, a simple Google search would have easily uncovered it, had Augros bothered to do so. But, again, pro-Trump stenography trumps even the most basic explanatory journalism at CNS if explaining things makes Trump look bad.