A DOJ That Still Chases ‘Russian Hackers’ Will Never Reckon With Russiagate
The article discusses the dismissal of the indictment against former FBI Director james Comey on procedural grounds, leaving accountability for the Russia collusion allegations unresolved. It highlights ongoing but unclear investigations into a broader conspiracy involving Comey and others who allegedly concealed the operation’s origins with the Clinton campaign. A essential contradiction undermines prosecutions related to Russiagate: while some defendants are accused of fabricating a Russian collusion narrative, the Department of Justice together prosecutes Russian nationals for interfering in the 2016 election-based on claims accepted as fact.
the piece scrutinizes the politically timed indictment known as United States v. Netyksho, issued just before the 2018 Trump-Putin summit, which implicated Russia in the Democratic National Committee (DNC) hack. This indictment,the article argues,was more a political maneuver than a sound legal case,designed to constrain President Trump’s diplomatic efforts with Russia. It further exposes inconsistencies in the timeline of the DNC email exfiltration, which contradict key parts of the official investigation, and calls into question CrowdStrike’s forensic reports, the only examination of the DNC servers-which were never directly accessed by the FBI.
The Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) from January 2017 is criticized as a politically motivated document that inaccurately attributed the DNC hack to Russia,despite withheld FBI and NSA findings suggesting insufficient technical proof. Despite being exposed as flawed, the ICA remains the basis for Executive Order 13848 on foreign election interference, perpetuating the narrative within U.S. policy.
the article argues that the official Russiagate story is built on weak evidence, contradictions, and political motivations rather than verified facts. It calls for dismissing the Netyksho indictment and revising the Executive Order to enable a genuine accountability process, as current contradictions within the Department of Justice’s actions indicate either ignorance of the record or unwillingness to confront the truth.
With the indictment against former FBI Director James Comey dismissed on procedural grounds, we are back at square one on accountability for the Russia collusion hoax. There are some reports that Jason Reding, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, is examining the wider conspiracy involving Comey and several other key Russiagate figures who worked to conceal that the entire operation originated with the Clinton campaign. However, we have no clear sense of where that inquiry stands or whether it is moving at all.
What we do know is that any honest reckoning with Russiagate runs straight into a structural contradiction that would have haunted any prosecution of Comey and will continue to undermine any future attempt to hold the architects of the hoax to account.
No one has confronted the central problem that it is not logically or legally coherent to allege a domestic conspiracy to invent Russian collusion. At the same time, the Department of Justice keeps prosecuting Russian nationals for allegedly interfering in the 2016 election to help Trump.
Any defendant accused of promoting a false Russia narrative can point to the obvious contradiction that the same DOJ now accusing them still maintains United States v. Netyksho, the Mueller era indictment of twelve Russian officers that treats the supposed Russian hack of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) as established fact and uses it as the foundation for its entire case.
The Political Timing and Purpose of the Netyksho Indictment
Before any discussion of the technical evidence, we need to confront the most revealing aspect of the case, which is its timing. The indictment was unveiled on the eve of the 2018 Trump–Putin summit in Helsinki and its effect was immediate. It poisoned the meeting before it even began by publicly, and with far less evidence than advertised, pinning the alleged DNC hack on the Russian state. It was a political indictment from start to finish, crafted to box in President Trump and shut down any possibility of rapprochement with Moscow. Once that political purpose is understood, the case reveals both its inherent fragility and its true function as a fabricated narrative dressed up as law enforcement.
Even so, for nearly a decade, the official story of the DNC hack has been treated as settled fact: Russia did it, the intelligence community and Robert Mueller confirmed it, and that was supposed to be the end of the matter. Yet the more one examines the timeline, the forensic record, and the investigative process, the weaker the foundations of this narrative appear.
The Collapse of the Predicate for the FBI Investigation
The most striking problem sits in plain sight. The metadata of the DNC emails released by WikiLeaks shows that the emails were exfiltrated in two short sessions on May 23 and May 25, 2016. However, media reports at the time, as well as Obama’s Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, claimed they were stolen in April. That date was not a coincidence as it structured the entire chain of subsequent claims.
CrowdStrike, the private cybersecurity contractor that conducted the DNC’s internal forensic review — and the only entity ever granted access to the servers, not the FBI — told Congress that data had been staged for exfiltration on April 22. For years, government officials and major media outlets repeated the same incorrect story. Only later did the Mueller report shift the timeline to May 25 through June 1, a window that still failed to align with the May 23 and May 25 metadata. No official account has ever incorporated the actual timestamps contained in the email archive itself.
Once the incorrect timing of the exfiltration is acknowledged, the wider architecture begins to collapse. The Crossfire Hurricane investigation rested on the theory that Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos possessed foreknowledge of the DNC theft when he met with the Australian Ambassador in London, Alexander Downer, in early May 2016. That assertion only makes sense if the emails were obtained in April. If the exfiltration occurred on May 23 and May 25, then Papadopoulos could not have had such knowledge.
For its part, CrowdStrike did not stop the theft, did not observe it, and later conceded in a 2020 “update” that “all of the exfiltration of DNC emails happened after CrowdStrike was already engaged by the DNC.” It offered no explanation for how this could have happened. In fact, when CrowdStrike president Shawn Henry testified under oath, he acknowledged that they had no evidence the emails were ever exfiltrated at all, which stands in stark contrast to the confident claims the company had made in non-sworn settings, like the Washington Post.
Some have suggested local transfers or insider access rather than an external hack. The slain DNC staffer Seth Rich, whose murder remains unsolved, is often raised in this context, though the evidence there is also inconclusive. But the ambiguity is the point. The political narrative insisted on absolute clarity when the underlying forensic record never supported anything close to it.
The ICA Fraud and the Legal Trap It Created
Despite the contradictions in the underlying evidence, the intelligence community moved forward with the Jan. 6, 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA), ordered by President Obama in the post-election scramble to cast Hillary Clinton’s loss as the result of Vladimir Putin’s interference. It presented the DNC hack as conclusively attributable to Russia, the report treated the “Russia hacked the DNC” narrative as settled fact, relying on institutional authority rather than any verifiable forensic data. In any other setting, such a document would never have passed muster.
There is also a deeper problem that shows how thoroughly the ICA still anchors official policy and why any talk of accountability collapses on contact with reality. In July, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard revealed that the ICA was not a mistaken assessment but a calculated inversion of the truth engineered by James Comey, James Clapper, and CIA chief John Brennan to pin Trump’s victory on Vladimir Putin. Her disclosures showed that the ICA buried the fact that the FBI and NSA concluded in 2016 that there was not enough technical evidence to link the DNC emails to Russian state-sponsored actors. Those suppressed findings matched what independent technical researchers had already uncovered, which means the heart of the ICA was known to be false from the beginning.
This revelation feeds directly into the next problem because the inversion of the truth inside the ICA is exactly what any conspiracy charge would target. Yet the same document is still treated as authoritative through Executive Order 13848. The order declares a national emergency over foreign election interference and uses the ICA as its factual foundation. The Trump administration renewed it in August, a month after the ICA had been exposed as a political fabrication.
It is entirely possible the president’s team did not grasp what they were putting in front of him, but that will not matter in court. Any defendant accused of participating in the Russia collusion hoax will point to this contradiction and ask how the government can call the ICA a hoax while also relying on it to justify an ongoing national emergency. The contradiction is so complete that it gives any defendant a straightforward path to walk free.
A Hoax Still Embedded in Federal Policy
The official story rests on an incorrect timeline, servers never examined by the FBI, a contractor that failed to detect or prevent a major exfiltration and could not keep its public claims consistent with sworn testimony, and an intelligence assessment built on assertions rather than evidence. At every step, the claims were driven by political need, not verified technical fact. These anomalies do not definitively point to another actor, but they are more than enough to undermine the certainty with which Russia was accused.
Once the basic problems with the official narrative are acknowledged, the claim that Russian intelligence hacked the DNC collapses under its own weight. This is where the Netyksho indictment returns to the center of the story. It was a political stunt from the moment it appeared on the eve of Helsinki, and it remains an active, unretracted federal indictment, treated as if it were not a central piece of the hoax itself. The same problem now appears in Executive Order 13848, which relies on the ICA as its factual foundation even though the ICA has been exposed as a political fabrication. Both the indictment and the order keep the hoax alive inside the machinery of government.
If there is to be any seriousness about accountability, the Netyksho indictment must be dismissed, as must the Executive Order. Both should have been corrected years ago. Keeping them in place signals that the permanent bureaucracy within the DOJ and elsewhere is still guarding the narrative.
No credible reckoning is possible while the department prosecutes the fruits of a hoax on one hand and claims to expose the architects of that hoax on the other. The contradiction is irreconcilable, suggesting either that the DOJ does not understand its own record or that it has no real interest in confronting it.
Hans Mahncke is in-house counsel at a global business advisory firm. He holds LL.B., LL.M. and Ph.D. degrees in law. He is the author of “Swiftboating America: Exposing the Russiagate Fraud, from the Steele Dossier to the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane Investigation.”
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