The same Clinton-campaign-connected researchers who helped generate an infamous fake news story were likely the U.S. government’s source for the initial announcement that Russians hacked the Democratic National Committee, according to documents produced across years of Open Records requests and congressional letters.

According to a letter recently sent to Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, work on attribution of the hack was done by a “Georgia tech team” who submitted a report on August 7, 2016, titled “Fancy Bear/APT28 Attribution analysis” …

That Georgia Tech team was led by researchers David Dagon and Manos Antonikakis, known to be sources for the infamous “Alfa Server” story claiming the Trump team was engaged in a bizarre scheme to beep backchannel secrets to Russia’s Alfa Bank. The never-believable Alfa story has been dismissed by the Justice Department’s Inspector General, and is destined to take a place alongside the “pee tape” and the “secret talks” of Paul Manafort and Julian Assange as one of the most absurd pieces of much-reported, never-happened news from the Trump-Russia period.

[Read on for Taibbi’s dot-connecting, which is at least compelling. Don’t forget that the DNC balked at allowing the FBI access to the physical servers, and that the FBI didn’t press the issue at the time. Supposedly the FBI found Crowdstrike reliable as an analyst of the servers, but there’s now a question arising as to when Crowdstrike conducted its analysis and whether they or the Georgia Tech team did it. — Ed]