President Trump’s Latest “Motion to Compel Discovery” Exposes Foreign Interference in 2020 Election in “One of the Worst Cybersecurity Incidents in History”

Yesterday, President Trump’s legal team submitted a motion to compel discovery in the Washington DC case in which he is charged with conspiring to overturn the 2020 Presidential Election.  Trump’s attorneys state that the case in Washington DC “reflects little more than partisan advocacy designed to sabotage President Trump’s leading campaign for the 2024 Presidential Election.”

On October 26th, 2023, Trump’s legal team submitted a Classified Information Procedures Act (CIPA) Notice and Objection to Unauthorized Deletions of Classified Information objecting to certain redactions in certain classified discovery items:

“…the Special Counsel’s Office argued that “the classified discovery issues” in this case are “limited,” “tangential,” “narrow,” and “incidental” because the charges…do not rely on classified materials.”

To which Trump’s counsel responded:

“…the government appears to have looked with tunnel vision at limited issues it believed were relevant.”

and that

“The Indictment in this case adopts classified assessments by the Intelligence Community and others that minimized, and at times ignored, efforts by foreign actors to influence and interfere with the 2020 election.  President Trump will offer classified information at trial relating to foreign influence activities that impacted the 2016 and 2020 elections, as well as efforts by his administration to combat those activities.  President Trump will also present classified information relating to the biased and politicized nature of the intelligence assessments that he and others rejected during the events in question.”

With yesterday’s filing, we got quite a bit of clarification as to what “foreign interference” is being alleged.

Most notably: the infamous SolarWinds Orion hack.

The Gateway Pundit has previously reported on the hack itself, as well as SolarWinds ties to Dominion Voting Systems, the CEO selling off $45M worth of the stock just a week before the hack story broke, as well as the company’s ties to Obama, Hillary Clinton, China, Hong Kong, and the US elections process.

On November 17th, 2020, President Trump fired Chris Krebs, the director of the Cybersecurity Infrastructure and Security Administration, regarding his “most secure election in American history,”  claiming the statement was “highly inaccurate.”

In the Motion to Compel filing, regarding the “SolarWinds “SUNBURST” Attack, Trump’s counsel alleges that:

“…between January 2019 and at least December 2020, parties reportedly linked to Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Services…perpetrated what the SEC recently described as “one of the worst cybersecurity incidents in history.”  In connection with what is now known as the “SUNBURST attack,”

[T]he threat actors inserted malicious code into three software builds [bold added] for SolarWinds’ Orion products. SolarWinds then delivered these compromised products to more than 18,000 customers across the globe. The malicious code provided the threat actors with the ability to access the systems of these compromised customers [bold added], provided certain other conditions were met, and became known as the SUNBURST attack.

During the attack:

[T]hreat actors conducted reconnaissance, exfiltration, and data collection; identified product and network vulnerabilities; harvested credentials of SolarWinds employees and customers; and planned additional attacks against SolarWinds’ products that would be deployed during later stages of the campaign.

They claim the malicious code provides a “backdoor” into the network’s of SolarWinds customers who were using the infected versions of the software.  Once SolarWinds was made aware of the vulnerabilities and the ensuing “SUNBURST” attack, the SEC claimed “[SolarWinds] did not fully disclose its known impact.”

Following the discovery of the attack, the New York Times reported that it impacted the DOJ, DHS, State, Treasury, and Commerce Departments, the National Security Agency, and parts of the Pentagon, among others.

Ironically,Chris Krebs, after being fired, would go on to form the Krebs Stamos Group with Stanford Internet Observatory founder Alex Stamos.  Stamos’s Stanford Internet Observatory, along with The University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, Graphika, and The Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab were members of the Election Integrity Partnership.  They infamously published “The Long Fuse” report, which explicitly admits to “engag[ing] with government stakeholders primarily to provide analytical capability and context around election-related misinformation.”

The Long Fuse Report also admits to a corroboration with the EI-ISAC, which was a “singular conduit for election officials to report false or misleading information to platforms.”

When Stamos and Krebs formed the Krebs Stamos Group, their first customer was…you guessed it…SolarWinds.

Fiona Hill to Moderate “Cyber Disruption and Disinformation” Discussion at Naval Institute