A story I posted on July 31 about disgraced DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz and her weird employment of the Awan brothers AFTER they were banned from House IT networks produced a comment (sometimes it’s okay to read them) that suggested that the DNC hack by Russians was actually an inside job.

Compelling, but not something you run with until there’s some corroboration. That corroboration came in the form of a piece from The Nation on August 9 titled, “A New Report Raises Big Questions About Last Year’s DNC Hack.”

I had plans to post it but as I started thinking about it and testing the waters, I saw some banter on Twitter that told me many lefties were stubbornly hanging onto the Russian hack theory and were doing what they do: telling anyone that didn’t believe initial reports that Russians were to blame that they were nutters and conspiracy theorists. Even the very left-leaning outlet The Nation, usually their ally, was in their crosshairs as fabricating crazy talk.

And so I waited.

Enter a diarist here at RedState named Bonchie (with more courage than I) who made a few disclaimers about not being able to verify the accuracy of the report before laying it out in a great piece that should be read all the way through:

First, regardless of what any of us thinks happened (and like I said, I’ve always said it’s the Russians who hacked the DNC), we do not know that the DNC was hacked or who did it as a matter of technical fact. Why? Because the DNC refused to turn the server over to the FBI or give them access to their systems. Jeh Johnson recently scolded them in a Congressional hearing for this. We know it to be true that they did obstruct any attempt at confirming the hack. That is precisely why so many questions remain.

Secondly, while there was an Intelligence report that assigned this hack to Russia, they did so on the back of claims from “CrowdStrike,” a private security firm hired by the DNC which has now retracted several of their original claims. Those retractions happened after Clapper’s report on Russian hacking in December. CrowdStrike was also caught up in controversy by assigning a Russian hack of Ukrainian artillery batteries in 2016. The Ukrainian Defense Minister says that the hack did not happen.

As Bonchie notes, CrowdStrike stands by their initial report (which is why lefties on Twitter are holding onto it like a lifeline), but this new report, says The Washington Examiner, provides reason to doubt their conclusions:

The report says that “forensic investigators, intelligence analysts, system designers, program architects, and computer scientists of long experience and strongly credentialed are now producing evidence disproving the official version of key events last year. Their work is intricate and continues at a kinetic pace as we speak.”

The group found that “there was no hack of the Democratic National Committee’s system on July 5 last year—not by the Russians, not by anyone else.”

The report continues, “Hard science now demonstrates it was a leak—a download executed locally with a memory key or a similarly portable data-storage device. In short, it was an inside job by someone with access to the DNC’s system.”

So if it wasn’t the Russians (and Bonchie remains resolute that even if this new report is true, it STILL could be Putin’s henchmen, just operating from the inside), then who released the emails that tanked the campaign of Hillary Clinton?

The Examiner notes that authorities are close to making a determination there. For me, this new report solidifies two things: 1) RedState diarists are on top of their game; and 2) I’d bet everything I have that Debbie Wasserman Schultz knows exactly who the culprit(s) are.