Resigned tonight. The robust way he stood up to the Trump Administration and to trump himself on ethics issues and the president s unprecedented financial conflicts of interest. His name is walter shoeb. He said he was not forced out of the Office Of Government Ethics. He basically says hes leaving because the u. S. Governmentestics rules are not Strong Enough to allow him to stand up to what this president and his family are doing so he is leaving his jb at the Office Of Government Ethics in order to try to strengthen the rules from the outside. Very interesting resignation today. Weve got more on that story ahead. Theres a lot going on. Weve got a big show tonight. I said at the very end of last nights show weve got a scoop to share with you tonight. This is that scoop. Inhouse on your staff weve been talking about this as and inside, kind of an insideout
story. Not your typical news story, not your particular scoop. But i think its important. One of the few times weve ever had a scoop on the show where i feel like i need to send up this like a flare for other News Organizations in particular. Thats part of what im intending to do with part of this story tonight. Here it goes. We have this thing we have been doing on our show for a while now thats called www. Sendittorachel. Com. Basically if you want to get in touch with us, give us a tip or send us a document you can do so via that website. We get tons of stuff like that. We get information about local political fights that otherwise arent Getting National coverage. We get a lot of information about bad behavior by elected officials. We occasionally get news about really Good Behavior by elected officials that has gone unnoticed, we get anonymous tips and documents too. Logistically hard to validate 37 when it appears to be classified at that level, you cant run a document like that by people the way you would for any other kind of document we might get shipped to us from some source. People who are in a position to recognize or authenticate this kind of document, people who have worked with things at this level of classification, they typically will refuse to look at a document like this if theres any chance it is real, that it is real classified information that has been declosed. The terms of their Security Clearance mean they cant review anything like that without it creating legal obligations on them. So its very hard to check this stuff out. Classification wise. It is logistically very difficult to deal with, very very sensitive. But in terms of the political implications of this document that we were given, its content, politically this thing is so
2016 election. The u. S. Report that said et went on for longer than previously disclosed within wider than priestly disclosed and they got further in their attack than had been previously disclosed. Quoting from The Intercept. Russian Military Intelligence executed a cyberattack on one u. S. Voting Software Supplier and spear speer phishing emails to hundreds of local officials days before last years president ial election. Russian government hackers were part of a team with a mandate specifically focused on the elections. They focused on the hacking system. Russian hacking may have breached om elements of the u. S. Voting system. And all of this explosive stuff is cited to, quote, a highly classified Intelligence Report obtained by The Intercept. In addition to their writeup of it, this is important, the interce intercept, they didnt just publish an article about that top secret Intelligence Report, they actually published the top secret Intelligence Report, the top secret nsa report that they say they obtained, five pages of it detailing this mrn intelligence understanding of how russians tried to get into the American Election system. It came with a flow chart of how the russians got in, why they targeted the places they did. Very detailed. And the whole thing was labeled top secret on every page. The intercept reported when they published this thing that u. S. Intelligence officials wouldnt comment on the document but they said agencies did ask them for certain redactions, some of which The Intercept agreed to make. So they made those redactions, specific redactions at the request of u. S. Agencies and then they hit publish on this
story. Big deal right. New Detail Evidence into American Intelligence Gathering On Russian Shan attempts to get inside the election system. This was a big story based again on a very classified document. Real story for The Intercept. Now a month later The Intercept story is remembered less for the content of the story and more for what happened immediately after they published. Because immediately after they published it we learned that there was an arrest. We got our first heads up of The Intercept story just before 4 p. M. On june 5th. An hour later at 5 p. M. , the Justice Department announced they had arrested the person who had allegedly leaked that top secret document to The Intercept. And this is a pending federal case against that nsa contractor. Its not resolved at all. But from the criminal complaint the government filed here, the case is not at all subtle. Apparently the nsa can tell how many people have accessed, ever looked at an individual secret document like this. They can tell who they are by name. And in the criminal complaint, the fbi agent named in the complaint lays out how the fbi investigation into this leak proceeded. They have this list of like a half dozen people who they know have accessed this document. They go down that list looking for someone who has accessed the document who also appears to have been in touch with this news organization, with The Intercept. By that process they quickly narrow it down to one nsa Contractor Working in the state of georgia, a contractor named reality lee winter. According to the fbi she was the only one of the six who had both accessed the document and been in touch with The Intercept. Then they go down a second line of approach. The agent says in this criminal complaint that theres a crease,
like you get a crease from folding something. Theres a crease that is visually evident on the document itself that was a clue to the fbi that whoever took this document off of the nsa had printed it, had printed the panel and folded it and carried it out of the nsa office by hand. And then there was another clue and this is where the story gets a little bit crazy. Most color printers, maybe even all of them, i dont know, they apparently leave behind when they print, right, when they print out a piece of paper from a commuter, when they present they leave behind a fingerprint on every sheet they leave out. You know in old school detective agencies, they figure out which typewriter typed the ransom note. Theres a version of that for Computer Printers too. And that may have come calling when The Intercept showed the
nsa this document they had obtained through a source because they wanted the nsa to validate it, to comment on whether or not this document they had received was real. In that document, which we have access to because they published it online when they published their story. In that document along idsisid texts and the flow chart and the redactions, alongside all of that obvious stuff was this barely visible fingerprint from the printer it was printed on. The fingerprint is basically a series of light almost invisible yellow printed dots. And unless youre looking for them, you would never notice them just by reading the document. But if you run the page like through an Image Software and do a magic reversing of the colors and a little brightening so you can see them on your tv, up pops. If youre looking for it, a readable specific grid of these little dots. And that grid of those little dots is basically a fingerprint
and it tells you which exact printer was used to print out that page. Tells you the model number, tells you the serial number and tells you exactly which time and date that printing happened. Now it may be that the fbi didnt have to use those little yellow printer dots to track down their suspect. The fbi doesnt mention the printer dots in their charges document in this case. But once the Sper Septembintercd this document, for people who understand the forensic tracking of documentings, those yellow dots were an obvious thing to worry about. They were there to be read by a trained observer on that document that The Intercept published online. Okay. Now let me show you how this worked for us. This is the nsa document published by The Intercept. You see the little dots in that specific pattern in rels to the piece of text that we uncovered
there. Its on one of the pages that The Intercept covered. Now watch, im going to show you that same pattern of dots expect this ti expect this time its from a different document. As you can see, its the same pattern of dots, the top half of the pattern. But what im showing you here, this is not the document published by The Intercept. This is from the document that somebody sent us throw with www. Send it to rachel. Com. That same pattern of dots, the Supper Portion of it exactly appeared on the supposed nsa document that somebody sent to us anonymously. Again, you see it here in The Intercept document with the dots by the word summary. The same dots, the top part of the pattern appear magic by the word summary in the document that we got. Its not all of the dots. Just the ones that appear to have slipped through in a Photocopy Cut and paste job. This is what it appears to us. A cut and paste forgery. Using The Intercept nsa document as a template. And again here. See that thin line is there on the upper lefthand corner. You can see the crease where the fbi says The Intercept document was folded after it was printed. We think we see remnants of that exact same crease on the forged supposed top secret nsa document that got sent to us. We got this nsa document the same week The Intercept published theirs. Heres another thing ki shi can you. Look at the metadata. The suspect on The Intercept leak goes to jail on saturday, gets arrested on saturday, june 3rd. Saturday june 3rd, the fbi interviews and arrests reality winter. Shes pleaded not guilty but shes been in jail since
saturday june 3rd. The intercept published their story two days later, around 4 p. M. That monday, june 5th. The forged document we got sent to us appeared to have been created in that narrow window of time after reality winter got arrested and after The Intercepter published its documents. Our document appears to be a cut and paste forgery derived from The Intercepts document. We cannot know for sure. But if that is the case, then whoever did that work to create that forgery was cutting and pasting to create a document, working with a document that was not yet publicly available. They would have started creating that file or they would have started that file after reality winters arrest and before The Intercept published it to everyone and then sent it to us two days later. Given what we know about the time it wu sent to us and what we can see from the metadata, we
believe this is the time line. Is the time line a clue as to who contacted us and sent us this document . We dont know. Maybe the metadata itself is faked or wrong in some way. I dont know. There are other things that are wrong in the document too. That raised red flags for us but theyre subtle. There are some little typos. Some weird spacing that just doesnt look right. It has a date on it in termtss when in the future it can be declassified. That doesnt make sense if it was produced when they said it was produced. The big red flag for us is that the document we were given, this is part of what made it seem so red hot, it names an American Citizen. The document we were sent, which we believe to be a forgery, names a specific person in the Trump Campaign as working with the russians on their Hacking Attack on the election last year. And the specific name of the Trump Campaign person is irrelevant and im not sharing it now because we belief from how the nsa works with multiple
conversations with officials familiar with documents of this type, we believe that a u. S. Citizens name would never appear in a document like this. Even if the typos and the weird spacing and the other odd stuff has snuck through for some reason. An American Citizen name would not have snuck through, not at this level of an nsa report. That our document contains an american name spelled out, that says to experienced people who have worked with this stuff that what we got is forged. Its fake. Which is interesting if you work on this show. This is news because why is someone shopping a forged document of this kind to News Organizations covering the trumprussia affair . Last week three journalists resigned from their jobs at cnn after that network retracted a story they had written about the Trump Administration. Cnn says the sourcing of that
story in retrospect did not meet its editorial standards. Also last week vice retracted two stories about the Trump Administration, like cnn. Vice also cited problems with the sourcing of those stories. The thing thats knocking around in the back of your mind right now is from 2004, when the legendary dan rather lost his career on the cbs over a story on the evening news that deviled into george w. Bushs truncated service in the National Guard. The rather team had documents that they got from a source that they checked out but the sources of the documents was later attacked and undermined. Cbs was ripped to shreds over the process they went through. Still over a decade later the origin of those documents is murky. But undeniably, cbs running that story was a disaster for two things. It with as disaster for everyone involved and it was a disaster for a news story. All right. That was in personal terms, that was the end of a trusted voice of reason and insight perspective dan rather as a regular presence in the Family Living room. In terms of the news, that was a spike through the heart of the story of george w. Bushs National Guard service keeping him out of vietnam, which was a true and interesting story and which really might have been a serious ongoing political liability for candidate george w. Bush. But nobody was ever willing to touch it again during that campaign because of the way the comets pu documents blew up like a pipe bomb at cbs news. And so heads up, everybody, this is what i mean by an insideout scoop. Somebody for some reason appears to be shopping a fairly convincing fake nsa document that purports to directly implicate somebody from theTrump Campaign in working with the russians on their attack on the election. Sit it is a forgery. Let me kaf yocaveat that. It is either a forgery or every person we consulted about it is wrong. I dont any if the Trump Administration worked with russia or not. If they did to help trump to the presidency, that is clearly the biggest political scandal in modern history by a mile. We dont know whether it happened or not. Not yet. The Special Counsel is investigating. Con cessions committees are investigating. And the news media are investigating. One way to stab in the heart aggressive american reporting on that subject is to lay traps for american journalists who are reporting on it, trick agencies
into reporting. And then after the fact blow the credibility up. You cast a shadow over any similar reporting in the future, whether or not its try. Right. Even if its true you plant a permanent question, a permanent asterisk, a permanent who knows as to whether that too might be false like that other story. Whether that too might be based on fake evidence. So heads up, everybody. Part of the defense against this trushrussia story now we can report include somebody apparently forging one Classified Nsa report and shopping it to News Organizations as if its real. We dont know whos doing it but were working on it. Heads up in the meantime, everybody. We will be right back. E i came. Finding out that im part native american and that i was related to one of the Founding Fathers i think has brought me closer to
feeling more patriotic, definitel