Friday, June 17, 2016

Call Tony Podesta at (202) 393-1010 and Tell Him to Make His Brother Stop Talking about UFOs

In the second release of documents allegedly filched from the DNC, Guccifer 2.0 includes lists of various DNC donors along with some personal details.

Before plunging into the leaked documents, Guccifer 2.0 calls out Debbie Wasserman-Schultz for claiming that "no financial information or secret documents were stolen."

The hacker challenges this claim from Wasserman-Schultz by providing screenshots of Excel spreadsheets that contain "donors lists and their detailed personal information including email addresses and private cell phone numbers."

The screenshots certainly look authentic to my eye (though my eye isn't especially well-trained in detecting spreadsheet chicanery).

But I'm not sure the doxing is as thorough as Guccifer 2.0 suggests. The first entry in the first screenshot lists Ellen Tauscher as a donor whose phone number is (202) 234-4671. One way to check on whether that really is Tauscher's number is to throw it into Google. If you do so, you'll find that it comes up (along with Tauscher's name and address) in a whitepages entry.

The third screenshot for this new post by Guccifer 2.0 includes a highlighted entry for Tony Podesta (brother of the infamous John, who cannot stop yammering about the potential declassification of Area 51 files under a Hillary Clinton presidency). I googled the phone number associated with Tony and found it listed on the contact page of the Podesta Group's website (under the "Anything" category). When I googled the two email addresses, I found the first (tpodesta@gmail.com) plastered all over teh interwebz. The second email address listed (tpodesta@podesta.com) appears to be a predictable variation on podesta@podesta.com (which is listed on the bio page that the Podesta Group dedicates to Tony).

I haven't checked any other data "exposed" by these spreadsheets. Maybe some of it will turn out to be far more "secret" than the two entries I randomly decided to examine. (Random is the wrong word. I picked the Tauscher entry because it came first and the Podesta entry because it was highlighted and because I hoped it really would include Tony Podesta's private cell phone number so that I could tell him to punch his brother in the nose the next time he diverts attention from Clinton's message-less campaign by invoking UFOs).

So far, I'm not blown away by the secret info I've encountered, and I want to share one comment from a reader (Tyrone Russ) of the hacker's blog:
Holding back +1’ing anything like this until it’s confirmed. The Trump report appears to be just a dump of media reports about the Teflon Donald, with no authorship/masthead noting who created the report.
The spreadsheets? Again, no way to verify who created them. They’re way too generic to be any kind of smoking gun without corroborating metadata.
Not a Shill-bot, just being careful – the Kool-Aid can be strong, but can also be subtle.
EDIT: Going through all the doc’s linked, they all have the concerns I stated. No confirmation, no email headers, no metadata. It’s smelling a little fishy. Just because you want something to be true, doesn’t necessarily make it true.
Like Russ, I just want my fellow Sanders supporters to take a few deep breaths before they go hog wild with this Guccufer 2.0 stuff. Yes, it confirms a lot of what we already know about collusion between Clinton and the DNC. But the problem is that if we make too big a deal out of that supposed confirmation and the info turns out to be doctored or in any way inauthentic, the Hillaryans will simply point to the Guccifer 2.0 story as proof that there was never any collusion.

Let's not go overboard.

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