Israel Hacked Russian Intelligence, Helped Trump Get Elected Israel conveyed to Roger Stone news of Russian hack of Clinton-DNC servers and plans for Wikileaks dump

יחידה 8200 פרצה למחשבי המודיעין הרוסי, ובעקבות זאת ישראל העבירה תכתובות דואר אלקטרוני של קלינטון לטראמפ – ועזרה לו לזכות בנשיאות

James Bamford, one of America’s leading cyber-intelligence experts, published The Trump Campaign’s Collusion With Israel in The Nation, offering a startling expose on the 2016 election and Israel’s role in helping Trump win it.  The starting point for his report is a 2018 FBI filing which reveals secret contacts Roger Stone had with one of Bibi Netanyahu’s most trusted aides.  This included meetings with Stone, at which the aide brought an IDF general to emphasize the importance of the intelligence the Israelis were offering Trump.  For more intelligence-related information, read the Senate Intelligence Committee report.

Netanyahu’s fixer, whom Bamford calls a “secret agent,” was Issac Molho. He is an Israeli private attorney, related to Netanyahu by marriage. In 2017, Molho and his law partner, David Shimron, were accused of accepting a massive bribe for their roles in negotiating a multi-billion deal for German nuclear-armed Dophin submarines.  The prime minister assigned his most secret assignments to Molho and trusted him completely.  He has negotiated with Yasser Arafat, arranged the prisoner exchange for Gilad Shalit, and traveled to Arab countries for similar purposes.  Though Ron Dermer was sometimes described as Bibi’s Brain, Molho was something like Bibi’s doppelganger. He performed the critical tasks which Bibi can’t do for reasons of state.

The IDF SIGINT Unit 8200 may have, according to Bamford, hacked Russian intelligence.  He offers strong circumstantial evidence that the Israelis knew in real time it had hacked into the e-mail servers of both the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee.  The thousands of e-mails Wikileaks eventually released, caused enormous damage to the reputation of the DNC and the resignation of one of Clinton’s closest aides, Tony Podesta.  But even more importantly, the scandal offered a fatal blow to the Clinton campaign.  Though she seemed to have the momentum a few weeks before the election, once they were released by Wikileaks she never recovered.  It’s safe to say (and Clinton has confirmed this) that without this scandal she may, and probably would have won.

Molho and other Israeli figures served as a backchannel to the Trump campaign; to whom they offered information about the Russian hack of the servers. Bamford believes they had direct access to what the Russians were saying or writing about their exploit.  Molho repeatedly met or spoke with Stone, conveying much of this to him.  Stone in turn relayed it to Trump both directly and via campaign officials like Paul Manafort.

The “Four-Star General”

In order to establish their bona fides, Molho even brought along someone Stone called a “four-star general,” because the Israelis knew that Trump, who attended a private military school, liked generals with shiny epaulets. Israel, Bamford notes, doesn’t have four-star generals. The IDF’s highest rank is three-star general and only one officer has three stars: the chief of staff.  Molho would not have brought the then-top officer, Gadi Eisenkot, for obvious reasons.  But he likely brought a past one, none other than Benny Gantz who, after retiring, had founded a cyber-intelligence firm.

This is the same Gantz who is leader of the Opposition and a potential future prime minister.  The same one who refused to form a government with Palestinian parties and instead chose to throw in his lot with Netanyahu, who treated him like political refuse. The one who led Operation Protective Edge which, in 2014, murdered 2,300 Palestinians in Gaza; for which the International Criminal Court is investigating Israel for war crimes. He is the darling of the pro-democracy movement and seen as the figure who would, if Bibi and his government fell, would return Israel to normalcy.  The same Benny Gantz played an important role in making Trump president. Let no Democrat ever forget that.

Israeli intelligence knew about the Clinton-DNC hack before Trump did and before the Democrats, the ultimate victims, did.  Then, when the Israelis told the Trump campaign, it knew even before the Clinton campaign did.  I can’t emphasize how valuable it is to a campaign to know when a scandal is about to break against a rival.  Not to mention knowing all the details of the scandal even before the opponent does.  And Trump reaped all the rewards.

The Israeli Quid Pro Quo

The Israelis did not do all this for Trump for nothing.  Netanyahu had a hate-hate relationship with then-Pres. Obama, who was pressuring him, along with Secretary of State Kerry, to agree to a deal that would resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  Netanyahu, who made a pretense of negotiating with them and the Palestinians, wanted nothing to do with it.  No Israeli prime minister since Camp David has ever signed a peace agreement.  It’s accepted wisdom that doing so is a political death knell in this security-obsessed country.  Peace, in short, is radioactive.

Netanyahu understood that if Clinton won the presidency, the pressure would continue, and even increase.  He also knew that she would largely continue with Obama’s foreign policy agenda.  That meant remaining in the JCPOA nuclear agreement and perhaps lifting, partially or in full, strangling sanctions against Iran.  The Israeli prime minister had made a hallmark of his 15-year tenure implacable hostility to Iran.  His intelligence agencies had sabotaged its nuclear facilities, assassinated its nuclear scientists, and caused a devastating explosion destroying the Revolutionary Guards’ main missile production and launch site.  In short, he’d staked his political career on this, and ran his election campaigns hammering home this message with Israeli voters.

If Trump won, Netanyahu knew he would cancel the deal.  That, in turn, would redound even more to his credit among Israelis.  But there were other goodies the prime minister bargained for.  Bamford recounts a meeting between Dermer, then the Israeli ambassador, and Trump at Trump Tower.  Though what they spoke about isn’t known explicitly, we know for a fact, because days later Trump announced with great fanfare that if he won he would move the US embassy to Jerusalem and recognize it as Israel’s capital.

This was a bombshell, because presidents and Congresses for decades had refused to do precisely this.  They did not want to put their thumb on the scales of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, without it also being shared as the capital of a Palestinian state.  Trump was signaling that he was “all in” for Israel.  There would be no more pretense of the US being an honest broker.  The Palestinians would become, to use an old Jewish phrase, chopped liver.

Mueller refused to prosecute Trump, the Russians, or Israel

What’s especially shocking in all this is that Robert Mueller knew all this.  He knew that the Russians had indeed interfered in our election, that the Israelis had played an equally damaging role.  He also knew, ironically, that Unit 8200 had precisely the evidence proving Russian intelligence’s role.  But that the Israelis wouldn’t give him access to it.  Further, Mueller did have clear evidence of Israel’s role.  The FBI filing even lays out the various charges which Stone could face (he was eventually convicted and then had his sentence commuted by Trump).

But prosecuting Israel would have been incredibly difficult both legally and politically.  Mueller would have had to charge Molho.  He would have had to implicate Gantz as well, a former IDF chief of staff.  He also would have, by extension, gone after Netanyahu as the architect of the plot.  That’s an awfully steep hill to climb.  Mueller doesn’t strike me as the type of guy who wanted to fight that fight.  To do so, he would have mounted an aggressive campaign against powerful forces, including the Israeli government and its Israel Lobby attack dogs.  And he would have had to do it against a backdrop of Donald Trump as president.  They would have crucified him.  It would take a lawyer tough as nails to be willing to take that sort of case on.  And Mueller wasn’t it.

Bamford suggests that Congress needs to hold hearings on this scandal and subpoena witnesses.  Two foreign countries conspired with Donald Trump to win the election.  But only one has faced scrutiny for its role.  The other still lurks in the shadows.  Will it ever be held accountable in any US forum?

Finally, there is one thing troubling that no one else has mentioned: why didn’t the NSA know about any of this?  It is, if anything, even more technologically-advanced and its hackers even more skilled than Israel’s.  So why didn’t it have access to Russian intelligence?  Why didn’t it penetrate Unit 8200 to find out what it knew?  Why did every intelligence agency except our own know what was happening?

I am attempting to confirm the Israel-related portions of this story via Israeli sources.