Mueller Russian indictment does not support Steele dossier charges of how hacking was paid for

Rowan Scarborough:

Dossier writer Christopher Steele’s assertion that Moscow bankrolled its election hacking through laundered pension funds via Russian diplomats in Washington isn’t supported by two official U.S. reports.

Mr. Steele, whose anti-Trump work was financed with money from the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee, wrote of an elaborate money-skimming operation by the embassy and other consulates. A diplomat/spy in Washington, he said, was involved in laundering Russian veterans’ pensions to pay for hacking Democratic Party computers and stealing documents.

Special counsel Robert Mueller’s indictment of 12 Russian intelligence officers on Friday offers what appears to be the first official report on how Moscow paid for the hacking. The indictment makes no mention of diplomats or pension funds. The indictment says the Russians used crypto, or digital, currencies to pay vendors for the use of servers and internet domains.

The indictment does not state the ultimate source of money to purchase cryptocurrencies, whose owners’ identities are easier to hide than those using traditional bank transactions. What’s more, the operation was not expensive. The Mueller indictment puts the cost of servers and domains at $95,000 to try to wreck the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

In a second report on hacking on March 22, Republicans on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence also made no mention of any Russian Embassy role or pensions. A congressional source said the committee heard no evidence of pension money laundering.

Overall, the Republican majority concluded that there was no evidence the Trump campaign colluded or coordinated with Moscow in its concerted 2015-16 effort to hack Democratic Party computers and spread false anti-Clinton stories on social media.
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Mr. Steele’s dossier describes an unverified “extensive conspiracy” between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. Russia raised the money, he said, by skimming money from pensions to Russian nationals living in the U.S.
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Mr. Mueller’s indictment said the cyberoffensive was financed with cryptocurrency, principally bitcoin, and run out of an office suite in Moscow called the “tower.” The indictment doesn’t mention pensions.

The Justice Department’s press release Friday described the operation: “To avoid detection, defendants used false identities while using a network of computers located around the world, including the United States, paid for with cryptocurrency through mining bitcoin and other means intended to obscure the origin of the funds. This funding structure supported their efforts to buy key accounts, servers, and domains. For example, the same bitcoin mining operation that funded the registration payment for DCLeaks.com also funded the servers and domains used in the spearphishing campaign.”
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Steele or his sources were guessing at the source of funding and guessed wrong.  In fact, the method they suggested would be easier to trace than the one actually used.  The Steele dossier seems to have gotten no substantive fact right about the Russian operation or the alleged connection of the Trump campaign.