guccifer

hacker jailed clinton email

ntbcw 2.0 GRU

https://theintercept.com/2023/01/15/guccifer-interview-hacked-clinton-emails/

CAST https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5971920/

YouTube

https://www.youtube.com › playlist?list=PLZ_hwG6UuEJaNFxIWCck7-TDRhqPgCmpW

CYBERWAR - YouTube

Tapping into the geopolitics of hacking and surveillance, Ben Makuch travels the world to meet with hackers, government officials, and dissidents to investigate the ecosystem of cyberwarfare ...

yt 3 26 but 2017? cyberwars, also cozybear dnc DCCC taddeo fla neal a? pol op

FREELANCE HACKER FORUM, FORTUNE 100 CORPS

barret brown ARRESTED AFTER INTERVIEW NEW ORG START W P

NSA CIA HAYDEN CONFIRM RUSSIA BIGGEST INFL OP IN HISTORY

https://www.alternet.org/2022/02/disgraced-rhode-island-republican-illegally-sought-help-from-russian-intelligence-fec/

Rep. David Cicilline enjoyed a landslide reelection when he defeated Republican challenger H. Russell Taub by 29% in Rhode Island’s 1st Congressional District. But that defeat was the least of Taub’s problems: Taub, in 2019, was sent to prison for defrauding donors and committing wire fraud. And now, the Federal Election Commission is saying that Taub illegally sought help from Russian government intelligence during his 2016 campaign.

The Providence Journal’s Alex Kuffner reports, “A few months before the November 2016 general election, Taub sent a direct message to a Twitter account known to be used by the GRU, Russia’s main intelligence agency, according to a recently released FEC filing. In the message to Guccifer 2.0, Taub asked for a list of Republican donors.”

Taub, Kuffner adds, “later received a dossier that included opposition research reports, polling data and other information about his incumbent Democratic opponent in the 1st Congressional District race.”

According to the FEC, Taub violated federal campaign law “by knowingly soliciting, accepting or receiving a prohibited in-kind foreign national contribution in the form of opposition research related to the candidate’s opponent.”

Taub, now 33, was 30 when, on July 24, 2019, the U.S. Department of Justice announced that he had been sentenced to three years in federal prison for defrauding donors — a crime he pled guilty to along with wire fraud.

Under federal campaign finance law, campaign donations must be used for campaigns, not personal expenses.But Taub admitted to using more than $1 million in campaign money for everything from strip clubs to clothes to cigars.

Taub was released from prison on January 13, according to Kuffner.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/crowdstrike-the-truth-about-trumps-insane-ukraine-server-conspiracy

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The Truth About Trump’s Insane Ukraine ‘Server’ Conspiracy

Trump asked Ukraine’s president to help prove a bonkers, Russia-friendly conspiracy theory that U.S. intel relied on manufactured evidence to blame the 2016 DNC hack on Moscow.

Kevin Poulsen

Sr. National Security Correspondent

Updated 10.16.19 12:47PM ET / Published09.25.19

Update: President Donald Trump on Wednesday once again promoted the baseless idea that a Democratic National Commitee server that was hacked in 2016 is being held in Ukraine. Below is a story The Daily Beast published last month about this conspiracy theory amid revelations that Trump asked the president of Ukraine to investigate it.

Donald Trump asked for more than a criminal investigation of his political opponent’s son in his call with Ukraine’s president. Trump also sought help in reviving a long-ago debunked conspiracy theory that challenges the basic underpinnings of the U.S. intelligence community’s findings on Russia’s 2016 election interference, in a bizarre spectacle that sees an American president trying to conscript a foreign leader into undermining his own intelligence agencies.

“I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say Crowdstrike,” Trump said, according to a compilation of notes on the call released by the White House. “I guess you have one of your wealthy people. The server, they say Ukraine has it.”

To those not versed in fringe-right canon, it’s a curious thing to say. “It almost sounds like he was babbling to the president of Ukraine,” said Robert Johnston, CEO of Adlumin, who led the DNC breach investigation while at Crowdstrike. “I imagine it would have confused the Ukranian president. Like, ‘What are you talking about?’”

Conservative websites are spinning the odd exchange as a reference to a Justice Department investigation ordered by William Barr into the origins of the Mueller probe. “It is unclear specifically what Trump was referring to withCrowdstrike,” reads one article in this vein on The Federalist. In truth, it’s actually quite clear. Trump is referencing a conspiracy theory pushed by Russian trolls and far-right pundits that imagines the Democratic National Committee fabricating all the evidence in Russia’s 2016 breach of the DNC network.

“Trump has shown a pronounced preference for the pretend version of events.”

The hoax has its roots in a GRU persona, “Guccifer 2.0,” created to cast doubt on Russia’s culpability in the DNC hack. Today it’s buttressed by deceptive blog posts, memes, and putative forensic analysis of metadata in documents leaked from the DNC and John Podesta intrusions, and has spun out several related theories and offshoots, including the Seth Rich hoax that blames the hack on a slain DNC staffer with previously-unknown hacking skills.

Crowdstrike enters the picture because it’s the security firm the DNC hired to investigate the breach back in 2016, and the first of many to identify Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU, as the perpetrator. A publicly-traded company headquartered in California, Crowdstrike has nothing to do with Ukraine, except in conspiracyland, which pretends that Crowdstrike co-founder Dmitri Alperovitch is Ukrainian, and that he framed Russia for election interference both on the DNC’s orders and to punish Putin for invading his homeland.

In real life, Alperovitch is an American citizen born in Russia who escaped to the U.S. with his family during the Soviet era. But Trump has shown a pronounced preference for the pretend version.

“Why wouldn’t Podesta and Hillary Clinton allow the FBI to see the server?” Trump asked the AP in 2017. “They brought in another company that I hear is Ukrainian-based… I heard it’s owned by a very rich Ukrainian, that’s what I heard.”

The “server” in the conspiracy is the hacked DNC server that the Democrats, the claim goes, won’t let the FBI examine because it would expose their elaborate plot. “What is the server saying?” Trump asked in one tweet last year.

That part’s made up, too. The DNC turned down one unusual FBI request early in the hack investigation. The bureau wanted access to the DNC’s network while the Russians were still in it, most likely to stage a counter operation against the GRU. The DNC declined, perhaps reluctant to have two intelligence agencies playing capture-the-flag in their systems five months before a presidential election.The DNC later authorized Crowdstrike to share full copies of the hacked servers with the bureau, giving the FBI access to the same evidence Crowdstrike had.

“With regards to our investigation of the DNC hack in 2016, we provided all forensic evidence and analysis to the FBI,” Crowdstrike said in a statement Wednesday. “As we’ve stated before, we stand by our findings and conclusions that have been fully supported by the US Intelligence community.”...

AN 119

Stone, veteran Republican Party operative and a long-time confidant of President Donald Trump, has been indicted on seven felony charges in connection with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. Around 5 a.m. EST today, a group of well-armed FBI agents showed up at the 66-year-old Stone’s home in Fort Lauderdale, Florida with an arrest warrant. And the charges include five counts of making false statements, one count of obstruction of justice and one count of witness tampering.

Here are some of the most shocking revelations in the indictment and arrest of Trump’s long-time ally.

Stone’s arrest was completely unannounced

Although journalists who have been reporting on Mueller’s probe have been predicting that Stone would be arrested at some point, the way in which he was arrested this morning nonetheless comes as somewhat of a shock. Other Trump associates who have faced felony charges in connection with Russiagate moreless turned themselves in at their convenience; the FBI didn’t show up unannounced in the wee hours. But Stone was the target of the type of pre-dawn arrest that occurs when FBI agents fear that valuable evidence could be destroyed. This was the type of arrest that takes place when the FBI wants to surprise suspects and catch them off guard.

Stone is accused of obstructing the House Intelligence Committee’s Russia investigation

Mueller’s team aren’t the only ones who have been investigating Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election; the House Intelligence Committee and the FBI, among others, have investigated the matter as well—in fact, they were doing so before Mueller launched his investigation in 2017. And Stone, in the indictment, is accused of obstructing the House Intelligence Committee’s investigation.

The indictment notes, “After the 2016 U.S. presidential election, the U.S. House of Representatives Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (“HPSCI”), the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (“SSCI”), and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (“FBI”) opened or announced their respective investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, which included investigating STONE’s claims of contact with Organization 1.”

Organization 1 in the indictment is believed to be WikiLeaks

The indictment of Stone specifically mentions an organization that is identified as “Organization 1,” and Organization is widely believed to be WikiLeaks—a major target of Mueller’s probe. In 2016, a hacker who went by Guccifer 2.0stole the e-mails of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Democrat Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, John Podesta, and those stolen e-mails were published online by WikiLeaks. Stone is suspected of knowing, in 2016, that the hacking had occurred and that the Democratic e-mails would be published online. Although Mueller believes that Guccifer 2.0 is a Russian intelligence official based in Moscow, Stone has claimed that there is no proof that Guccifer was part of the Russian government.

The indictment of Stone states, “By in or around May 2016, the Democratic National Committee (“DNC”) and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (“DCCC”) became aware that their computer systems had been compromised by unauthorized intrusions and hired a security company (“Company 1”) [CROWDSTRIKE?] to identify the extent of the intrusions…. On or about June 14, 2016, the DNC—through Company 1—publicly announced that it had been hacked by Russian government actors.”

Stone is accused of discussing WikiLeaks’ activities with ‘senior Trump campaign officials’ in 2016

The indictment of Stone states, “During the summer of 2016, STONE spoke to senior Trump Campaign officials about Organization 1 and information it might have had that would be damaging to the Clinton Campaign. STONE was contacted by senior Trump Campaign officials to inquire about future releases by Organization 1…. By in or around early August 2016, STONE was claiming both publicly and privately to have communicated with Organization 1.”

The head of ‘Organization 1’ is believed to be Julian Assange

The person described as the head of “Organization 1” in the indictment is widely believed to be WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange. The indictment states, “By in or around June and July 2016, STONE informed senior Trump Campaign officials that he had information indicating Organization 1 had documents whose release would be damaging to the Clinton Campaign. The head of Organization 1 was located at all relevant times at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, United Kingdom.”

London’s Ecuadorian Embassy, of course, is where Assange has been seeking refuge. The indictment of Stone goes on to allege that in 2016, “STONE also corresponded with associates about contacting Organization 1 in order to obtain additional e-mails damaging to the Clinton Campaign.”

huffpo

A little more than halfway through the new 29-page indictment handed up by the grand jury investigating Russia’s interference in the 2016 election is an intriguing tidbit: An unnamed congressional candidate reached out to Russian intelligence operatives posing as a hacker named Guccifer 2.0, seeking dirt on their opponent.

The outreach came on Aug. 15, 2016, after it was clear Guccifier 2.0 ― whom the indictment identifies as part of GRU, a Russian Federation intelligence agency within the Russian military ― had hacked the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

The Russian intelligence operatives responded to the request with information related to the candidate’s opponent, according to the relevant portion of the indictment, pictured below:

Special counsel Robert Mueller’s team didn’t reveal who the candidate was, and while several GOP congressional candidates benefited from the DCCC hack, the details don’t quite match up with previously reported incidents.

One name that has come up is Pennsylvania GOP Rep. Ryan Costello. The operatives posing as Guccifer leaked documents revealing that Costello’s Democratic opponent, Mike Parrish, was not the top choice of national Democratic operatives to challenge the Republican. The documents, which were leaked to The Hill and the subject of an Aug. 23, 2016, story, showed DCCC operatives attempting to recruit another Democratic candidate into the race.

But Costello’s team said it opted to not use the damaging material ― he was a heavy favorite to win re-election.

“When news broke that this material had likely been stolen by a foreign actor, we immediately said, ‘We’re not going to use it,’” Vince Galko, a strategist who worked for Costello, told The Atlantic earlier this year.

Costello’s congressional communications director, Natalie McLaughlin, had a blunt response when asked if Costello was the candidate who reached out to Guccifer 2.0: “Absolutely not." The other candidates to benefit from the DCCC hack were clustered in Florida: GOP Reps. Carlos Curbelo, Ron DeSantis and Brian Mast. But the information on their opponents appeared to be posted independently by Aaron Nevins, a Florida lobbyist and journalist.

Nevins is mentioned in the next paragraph of the indictment as the “then-registered state lobbyist and online source of political news” who received 2.5 gigabytes of data stolen from the DCCC, including “donor records and personal identifying information for more than 2,000 Democratic donors.”

The data Nevins received from Guccifer was extremely valuable, and contained information on the two candidates running in a primary to challenge Curbelo. An operative for Mast admitted to The Wall Street Journal he adjusted his strategy after the leaks. “I did adjust some voting targets based on some data I saw,” Mast consultant Anthony Bustamante said.

Florida GOP consultant turned #NeverTrump talking head Rick Wilson pointed a finger at Mast as the candidate mentioned in the indictment. A spokesman for Mast denied any contact with the hackers: “Congressman Mast and his campaign 100 percent did not have any contact with Guccifer.”

A spokeswoman for Curbelo issued a similar denial and added that Curbelo hoped the Justice Department would reveal who the candidate who requested the information was.

“Neither he nor anyone on his campaign has ever contacted any foreign agent to request illegally obtained documents or information,” Curbelo spokeswoman Joanna Rodriguez told the Miami Herald.

DeSantis, who represents a safely Republican district in north Florida, is now running in the GOP primary for Florida governor with President Donald Trump’s endorsement and has repeatedly tried to end special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.He’s also denied any contact with Guccifer 2.0.

The publicly available trail of breadcrumbs ends there. There are no other indications of who the candidate who requested the information could be. House Speaker Paul Ryan’s office says it doesn’t know anything beyond what’s in the indictment, and Democratic operatives are similarly baffled.

Kevin Robillard is a senior political reporter for HuffPost. Do you have information or theories on the mystery candidate? Reach Kevin at kevin.robillard@huffpost.com.

RELATED COVERAGE

https://www.salon.com/2017/03/03/how-much-did-russian-hacking-affect-congressional-races-and-how-deeply-was-the-gop-involved/

digby

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HEATHER DIGBY PARTON

MARCH 3, 2017 1:10PM (UTC)

If there's one thing you can say about the Donald Trump presidency so far, it isn't boring. From horror stories at the border to Trump's semi-triumphant teleprompter speech and Attorney General Jeff Sessions being personally connected to the growing Russia scandal, this week has been a doozy.

I was not surprised that Sessions finally recused himself from the campaign scandal. It was absurd that he was not required to do so before he was confirmed. What finally forced him to take the step was the report that he had met with the Russian ambassador twice during the summer and fall, after having told the Judiciary Committee that he had not had contact with any Russian officials during the campaign. Top Democrats are now calling for Sessions' resignation, and the story of his contacts with the Russian ambassador is still unfolding with new details about whether he discussed the Trump campaign.

The upshot is that at the very least Sessions showed appalling judgment in agreeing to meet the Russian ambassador the day after The Wall Street Journal reported that the director of national intelligence had declared that the Russian government was behind the hacking of the Democratic National Committee. It's very hard to believe that this didn't come up in the conversation. Even if the two men were unaware of that comment, they must have been aware of the discussion the previous night in a presidential town hall forum with Matt Lauer, in which Trump praised Vladimir Putin in such florid terms that The New York Times story that morning began this way:

Donald J. Trump’s campaign on Thursday reaffirmed its extraordinary embrace of Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, signaling a preference for the leadership of an authoritarian adversary over that of America’s own president, despite a cascade of criticism from Democrats and expressions of discomfort among Republicans.

One of those discomfited was House Speaker Paul Ryan who was quoted in the article saying, “Vladimir Putin is an aggressor who does not share our interests,” and accusing the Russian leader of “conducting state-sponsored cyberattacks” on our political system.[but then his superpac used it congrsssional]

This was just one of the many times Ryan zigged and zagged during the campaign, constantly calibrating how far he could go in criticizing Trump while keeping Trump's passionate voters off his back. This particular issue was a tough one, since until quite recently the Republicans had been inveterate Russia hawks and the abrupt switch to dovish goodwill was undeniably disorienting.

Prior to Sessions' recusal on Thursday morning, Ryan held a press conference in which he blamed the Democrats for "setting their hair on fire" to prompt the press to cover the story. That was ridiculous. The press needs no prodding to cover this scandal; it's as juicy as they get. Ryan also pooh-poohed the idea that Sessions had any obligation to remove himself from the investigation unless he was personally implicated and robotically repeated the contention that nobody had seen any evidence that there was collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians.

That may be true, and presumably we'll find out sooner or later. But it's important to remember that DNC and Hillary Clinton's campaign chair, John Podesta, were not the only targets of hacking. Russian agents also allegedly hacked the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. That story has been scandalously undercovered, something for which Paul Ryan is no doubt very grateful.

On Dec. 13 The New York Times published an article that laid out how the hacked material was used in various House races. At first the hackers just released a lot of personal information, which was used by hostile individuals to harass and threaten the candidates. Then the hacks and dumps by the person or group known as Guccifer 2.0 became more sophisticated and targeted certain close races, releasing politically valuable tactical information:

The seats that Guccifer 2.0 targeted in the document dumps were hardly random: They were some of the most competitive House races in the country. In [Annette] Taddeo’s district [in Florida], the House seat is held by a Republican, even though the district leans Democratic and Mrs. Clinton won it this year by a large majority.

To prepare for the race, the D.C.C.C. had done candid evaluations of the two candidates vying in the primary for the nomination. Those inside documents, bluntly describing each candidate’s weaknesses, are considered routine research inside political campaigns. But suddenly they were being aired in public.

Taddeo lost her primary race to another Democrat named Joe Garcia who used the hacked material against her. And then this happened:

After Mr. Garcia defeated Ms. Taddeo in the primary using the material unearthed in the hacking, the National Republican Campaign Committee and a second Republican group with ties to the House speaker, Paul Ryan, turned to the hacked material to attack him.

In Florida, Guccifer 2.0’s most important partner was an obscure political website run by an anonymous blogger called HelloFLA!, run by a former Florida legislative aide turned Republican lobbyist. The blogger sent direct messages via Twitter to Guccifer 2.0 asking for copies of any additional Florida documents.

By September, the hacker had released documents in close House races in Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Ohio, Illinois and North Carolina, working with Republican bloggers who disseminated the information for them. They also posted information on Rep. Ben Ray Luján, D-N.M., the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chair, even though he was effectively running unopposed.

Both Luján and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi wrote letters to Ryan asking him not to use the material and received no response. His spokeswoman told the Times that Ryan had no control over how the stolen information was used. Nonetheless, there were some Republicans who refused to do so, saying it was inappropriate. They were rare.

I don't think anyone believes it's likely that Paul Ryan personally colluded with the Russians in this operation. The fact that many Republicans, some affiliated with the National Republican Congressional Committee and a group closely affiliated with Ryan, eagerly used it to win their campaigns is not surprising. But it is highly unlikely that Republican strategists or party officials with strong knowledge of the House campaigns didn't collude with the hackers at some point, because it's difficult to believe that Russians would have which House races to target without some help from people with expertise concerning the 2016 map.

Republican congressional leaders must be thanking their lucky stars daily that the Trump administration is such a scandal-ridden Dumpster fire. If things ever calm down in the White House, somebody might just turn his or her attention to the question of what Paul Ryan knew and when.

**https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/13/**us/politics/house-democrats-hacking-dccc.html

2016 hack

many lnx

Democratic House Candidates Were Also Targets of Russian Hacking

Image

Annette Taddeo lost a Democratic primary for a House seat in Florida after documents uncovered by Russian hackers were published by reporters and bloggers

By Eric Lipton and Scott Shane

Dec. 13, 2016

WASHINGTON — South Florida has long been a laboratory for some of the nation’s roughest politics, with techniques like phantom candidates created by political rivals to siphon off votes from their opponents, or so-called boleteras hired to illegally fill out stacks of absentee ballots on behalf of elderly or disabled voters.

But there was never anything quite like the 2016 election campaign, when a handful of Democratic House candidates became targets of a Russian influence operation that made thousands of pages of documents stolen by hackers from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in Washington available to Florida reporters and bloggers.

“It was like I was standing out there naked,” said Annette Taddeo, a Democrat who lost her primary race after secret campaign documents were made public. “I just can’t describe it any other way. Our entire internal strategy plan was made public, and suddenly all this material was out there and could be used against me.”

The impact of the information released by the hackers on candidates like Ms. Taddeo in Florida and others in nearly a dozen House races around the country was largely lost in the focus on the hacking attacks against the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. But this untold story underscores the effect the Russian operation had on the American electoral system.

“This is not a traditional tit-for-tat on a partisan political campaign, where one side hits the other and then you respond,” said Kelly Ward, executive director of the D.C.C.C. “This is an attack by a foreign actor that had the intent to disrupt our election, and we were the victims of it.”

Following the Links From Russian Hackers to the U.S. Election

How U.S. intelligence officials have connected the Russian government to an attempt to disrupt the 2016 presidential election.

July 27, 2016

Why the Russian government might care about these unglamorous House races is a source of bafflement for some of the lawmakers who were targeted. But if the goal of Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, was to make American democracy a less attractive model to his own citizens and to Russia’s neighbors, then entangling congressional races in accusations of leaks and subterfuge was a step in the right direction.

The intrusions in House races in states including Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Ohio, Illinois, New Mexico and North Carolina can be traced to tens of thousands of pages of documents taken from the D.C.C.C., which shares a Capitol Hill office building with the Democratic National Committee.

The document dump’s effectiveness was due in part to a de facto alliance that formed between the Russian hackers and political bloggers and newspapers across the United States. The hackers, working under the made-up name of Guccifer 2.0, used social media tools to invite individual reporters to request specific caches of documents, handing them out the way political operatives distribute scoops. It was an arrangement that proved irresistible to many news outlets — and amplified the consequences of the cyberattack.

“It’s time for new revelations now,” the Guccifer 2.0 website proclaimed, as it began to pass out the D.C.C.C. documents, trying to entice reporters to look at them on their own. “All of you may have heard about the D.C.C.C. hack. As you see I wasn’t wasting my time! It was even easier than in the case of the D.N.C. breach.”

Cybersecurity consultants believe the hacking of the D.C.C.C. took place around March or April of 2016 after a staffer clicked on a so-called phishing email. The D.C.C.C. shut down its computer system for a week — from the moment it learned of the attack in June. But it was already too late to close the door. The consequences started to become clear in August when the hackers released the home addresses, cellphone numbers and personal email addresses of Democratic House members.

The D.C.C.C. Responds to the Hack

Letters from Democratic Party leaders responding to the cyberattack on servers of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the subsequent release of personal and professional information of lawmakers and staff members.

Dec. 13, 2016

“As you are aware, the D.C.C.C. and other Democratic Party entities have been the target of cybersecurity intrusions — an electronic Watergate break-in,” the House minority leader, Nancy Pelosi, wrote in an email the day after the personal information was released. The email continued, “It has been widely reported that this cybersecurity incident is part of a Russian cyberattack which appears to be an attempt to interfere with our elections. We take this troubling situation very seriously and have notified the appropriate authorities, including the F.B.I. and Sergeant-at-Arms.”

State troopers were sent to the homes of House Democrats across the United States, and they were urged to immediately change their cellphone numbers and personal email addresses, although this took place after many received a series of obscene calls, texts and emails.

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The House minority leader, Nancy Pelosi, warned colleagues of “obscene” messages, after a hack released their personal contact information.

But it turned out this was just a warning shot.

Guccifer 2.0 followed up on the release of lawmakers’ personal data with large caches of internal party documents, starting with some documents related to House races in Florida, including Ms. Taddeo’s contest.

The seats that Guccifer 2.0 targeted in the document dumps were hardly random: They were some of the most competitive House races in the country. In Ms. Taddeo’s district, the House seat is held by a Republican, even though the district leans Democratic and Mrs. Clinton won it this year by a large majority.

To prepare for the race, the D.C.C.C. had done candid evaluations of the two candidates vying in the primary for the nomination. Those inside documents, bluntly describing each candidate’s weaknesses, are considered routine research inside political campaigns. But suddenly they were being aired in public.

Ms. Taddeo, one of the internal D.C.C.C. documents noted, had “proven to be a somewhat poor fund-raiser and she has gained a reputation as an inadequate campaigner among some of the talkers in the community.”

Her Democratic opponent in the August primary, Joe Garcia, “also made a large misstep during the campaign saying ‘communism works,’which did not sit well in an area with a large Cuban refugee population,” the document says. “More embarrassingly, Garcia was caught on a C-Span feed picking his earwax and seemingly eating it, and the video made the rounds on the internet.”

Mr. Garcia was the first to use the material as a tool to attack his opponent, showing up at a televised debate with a printout of the documents and accusing Ms. Taddeo of hiring a private detective to follow him, an allegation she disputed. It was the first of many attacks based on the leaked material.

“I can send you some docs via email,” Guccifer 2.0 replied on Aug. 22, according to a cellphone screen shot of the message that the blogger, who writes under the pen name Mark Miewurd, provided to The New York Times. “Great! Editor@hellofla.com. I’m just getting my kid from school but I’ll be able to get it up pretty quick after I get it. Thanks!”

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A blogger who anonymously runs HelloFLA! contacted hackers working under the made-up name of Guccifer 2.0 using direct messages on Twitter to request documents about Ms. Taddeo.

“Do u have a size limit?” Guccifer 2.0 replied, a question that led the Florida blogger to set up an anonymous Dropbox account so he could take thousands of pages of stolen information from the Russian operative, data that the blogger immediately recognized would have an extremely high strategic value for the Republicans.

“I don’t think you realize what you gave me,” the blogger said, looking at the costly internal D.C.C.C. political research that he had just been provided. “This is probably worth millions of dollars.”

Guccifer 2.0 wrote back: “Hmmm. ok. u owe me a million.”

By September, Guccifer 2.0 had expanded his releases to include documents related to House races in Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Ohio, Illinois and North Carolina, working with individual political bloggers like Miscellany Blue in New Hampshire.

“Exclusive: Leaked D.C.C.C. documents reveal effort to replace Shea-Porter with ‘fresh face for 2016,’” said one of the first dispatches posted in New Hampshire, on Miscellany Blue, referring to Carol Shea-Porter, the Democratic candidate for the House, who ended up narrowly winning the seat, despite the intense criticism directed at her by Democratic leaders that was revealed by the leaks.

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Carol Shea-Porter, a Democrat in New Hampshire, won her House seat despite intense criticism of her candidacy by her own party leaders revealed in the hacks.CreditThomas Roy/The Union Leader, via Associated Press

In Pennsylvania, the leaked documents showed that Democratic Party officials did not like their own candidate for one House seat — a local businessman named Mike Parrish — and worked aggressively to recruit an alternative. Mr. Parrish, the internal party documents noted, owned a company in Pennsylvania that had been sued eight times, had been delinquent on his taxes and had been named in a 2013 lawsuit “alleging racketeering and corruption,” the D.C.C.C. internal report said.

Concerned, the party tried to recruit a local businesswoman, Marian Moskowitz, to challenge Mr. Parrish. But Ms. Moskowitz ultimately declined to run for the seat, so the party was left with Mr. Parrish, whose standing was further hurt when the details about the Democrats’ misgivings about him drew coverage from bloggers and newspapers.

Mr. Parrish lost his bid for the seat.

Guccifer 2.0 even posted a cache of confidential documents focusing on Representative Ben Ray Luján, Democrat of New Mexico, the chairman of the D.C.C.C., who faced no serious challenger this year. Mr. Luján said it was a clear effort to send a message to the party leadership — that the hackers wanted to try to hurt Democrats at all levels of the party, from lesser known races in Florida to the leadership.

After the first political advertisement appeared using the hacked material, Mr. Luján wrote a letter to his Republican counterpart at the National Republican Congressional Committee urging him to not use this stolen material in the 2016 campaign.

“The N.R.C.C.’s use of documents stolen by the Russians plays right into the hands of one of the United States’ most dangerous adversaries,” Mr. Luján’s Aug. 29 letter said. “Put simply, if this action continues, the N.R.C.C. will be complicit in aiding the Russian government in its effort to influence American elections.”

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Representative Ben Ray Luján, Democrat of New Mexico and chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, was targeted by Guccifer 2.0 even though he faced no serious challenger.

Ms. Pelosi sent a similar letter in early September to Mr. Ryan. Neither received a response. By October, the Congressional Leadership Fund, a “super PAC” tied to Mr. Ryan, had used the stolen material in another advertisement, attacking Mr. Garcia during the general election in Florida.

AshLee Strong, a spokeswoman for Mr. Ryan, said he did not control how the material was used in the ad, although she did not dispute that the material had been stolen as part of an act of Russian espionage. “Speaker Ryan has said for months that foreign intervention in our elections is unacceptable,” she said in a written statement.

At least some Republican players turned down a chance to exploit the material, including Representative Ryan Costello of Pennsylvania, who was running for re-election in a contest where he faced off against Mr. Parrish and was aware of the unflattering material about his opponent that had become public.

“We believed it was neither necessary nor appropriate,” said Vincent Galko, a campaign consultant to Mr. Costello, “to use information from a possible foreign source to influence the election.”

Still, Mr. Parrish, in an interview Tuesday, said he believed that the document dumps hurt his candidacy. But as a former Army cavalry troop commander who served in West Germany in the final years of the Cold War, he said he was not surprised to learn that the Russians were behind the cyberattack.

“I’ve have been fighting Russians my entire life,” he said. “To me this is just a continued punch-counterpunch; the Cold War games are still being played.”

https://www.alternet.org/meet-12-russians-us-government-indicted-last-week

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12 Russian officials who were indicted by the Grand Juryof the District of Columbia. It is the fact that these people were indicted that prompted Russian President Vladimir Putin to insist that American President Donald Trump turn over Americans like one of our former ambassadors, Michael McFaul, over to his government in order to be interrogated.

The key difference, of course, is that Putin is fabricating charges against McFaul and others like whistleblower Bill Browder, while the accusations against the 12 Russian officials are rooted in serious investigative work. Yet who are these dozen Russians that have been identified by Robert Mueller's investigation?

According to the indictment, the Russian officials singled out by the government were Boris Alekseyevich Antonov, Dmitriy Sergeyevich Badin, Anatoliy Sergeyevich Kovalev, Nikolay Yuryevich Kozachek, Aleksey Viktorovich Lukashev, Artem Andreyevich Malyshev, Sergey Aleksandrovich Morgachev, Viktor Borisovich Netyksho, Aleksandr Vladimirovich Osadchuk, Aleksey Aleksandrovich Potemkin, Ivan Sergeyevich Yermakov and Pavel Vyacheslavovich Yershov. With the exception of Kovalev, the indictment describes all of these individuals as "GRU officers who knowingly and intentionally conspired with each other, and with persons known and unknown to the Grand Jury (collectively the 'Conspirators'), to gain unauthorized access (to 'hack') into the computers of U.S. persons and entities involved in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, steal documents from those computers, and stage releases of the stolen documents to interfere with the 2016 U.S. presidential election."

The indictment claims that these individuals hacked the email accounts of staffers and volunteers at Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign by at least March 2016, hacked into the computer networks of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and Democratic National Committee by at least April 2016 and began releasing tens of thousands of stolen emails and documents by at least June 2016, continuing to do so through the month of the presidential election.

And who are they specifically?

According to the indictment,Netyksho is a Russian military officer whose unit (Unit 26165) "had primary responsibility for hacking the DCCC and DNC,as well as the email accounts of individuals affiliated with the Clinton Campaign." Antonov was assigned to that same unit and oversaw a department within it that was "dedicated to targeting military, political, governmental, and non-governmental organizations with spearphishing emails and other computer intrusion activity." Antonov is accused of having "supervised other co-conspirators who targeted the DCCC, DNC, and individuals affiliated with the Clinton Campaign." Badin held the title of "Assistant Head of Department" in that unit and supervised various attacks on the Democratic and Clinton-related targets chosen by the Russian government.

Then there is Yermakov, who the indictment claims was a master of aliases, using "various online personas" in order to engage in a number of hacking operations. These names included "Kate S. Milton," "James McMorgans" and "Karen W. Millen."Lukashev was a senior lieutenant in the Russian military and, like Yermakov, used a number of online pseudonyms, including "Den Katenberg" and "Yuliana Martynova." Lukashev "sent spearphishing emails to members of the Clinton Campaign and affiliated individuals, including the chairman of the Clinton Campaign."Morgachev, by contrast, was in charge of a department at the unit that developed and managed malware, including one hacking tool called "X-Agent," and is charged with supervising the agents who implanted the X-Agent malware on DCCC and DNC computers and then monitored it.

Kozachek is described in the indictment as a lieutenant captain who had been assigned to Morgachev's department within Unit 26165 and employed pseudonyms like "kazak" and "blablabla1234565" in order to do his job. He also "developed, customized, and monitored X-Agent malware used to hack the DCCC and DNC networks beginning in or around April 2016." Yershov, meanwhile, is accused of having "assisted Kozachek and other co-conspirators in testing and customizing X-Agent malware before actual deployment and use." Malyshev, on the other hand, was a second lieutenant whose work for Morgachev's department involved monitoring X-Agent malware that had been implanted on Democratic Party machines. He used pseudonyms like "djangomagicdev" and "realblatr."

Osadchuk is a Russian colonel and the commanding officer of Unit 74455, which "assisted in the release of stolen documents through theDCLeaks and Guccifer 2.0personas, the promotion of those releases, and the publication of anti-Clinton content on social media accounts operated by the GRU." Meanwhile Potemkin was a Russian military officer assigned to Unit 74455 who supervised a department "responsible for the administration of computer infrastructure used in cyber operations. Infrastructure and social media accounts administered by Potemkin's department were used, among other things, to assist in the release of stolen documents through the DCLeaks and Guccifer 2.0 personas."

Throughout the document, considerable detail is given about how various email accounts owned by either the Clinton campaign or other Democratic Party bodies were deliberately targeted by individuals or groups of individuals on this list. It explains how they hacked into these accounts and what they ultimately gained from doing so. Kovalev specifically is accused, among other things, of hacking the website of a state board of elections and stealing information about roughly 500,000 voters "including names, addresses, partial social security numbers, dates of birth, and driver’s license numbers." He is also accused of hacking into the computers of a company that supplied voter registration verification software, targeting "state and county offices responsible for administering the 2016 US. elections" and visiting the websites of counties in states like Florida, Georgia and Iowa in order to find vulnerabilities.

It is worth reminding the reader, at this point, of what McFaul told Salon earlier in the week — namely, that Putin is trying to create a false equivalency between the crimes he ordered committed by Russian officials and the fabricated charges he has created against McFaul and Browder.

"But let's be clear: What Putin was doing was assigning moral equivalency to a legitimate indictment with lots of evidence against several Russian military intelligence officers for violating American sovereignty in 2016 during the presidential elections, with a completely fabricated, cockamamie story invented by Putin," McFaul told Salon. "To even, for a moment, give any kind of dignity to what President Putin proposed was not in America's national interest, from my point of view."

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/13/us/politics/mueller-indictment-russian-intelligence-hacking.html

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/rod-rosenstein-expected-to-announce-new-indictment-by-mueller/2018/07/13/bc565582-86a9-11e8-8553-a3ce89036c78_story.html

no lnx

A dozen Russian military intelligence officers were indicted Friday on charges they hacked Democrats’ computers, stole their data and published those files to disrupt the 2016 election— the clearest connection to the Kremlin established so far by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation of interference in the presidential campaign.

The indictment against members of the Russian military agency known as the GRUmarks the first time Mueller has taken direct aim at the Russian government, accusing specific military units and their named officers of a sophisticated, sustained effort to hack the computer networks of Democratic organizations and the Hillary Clinton campaign.

Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein announced the charges at a midday news conference. Mueller, as has been his practice, did not attend the announcement. Court records show that a grand jury that Mueller has been using returned an indictment Friday morning.

The suspects “covertly monitored the computers, implanted hundreds of files containing malicious computer code, and stole emails and other documents,” Rosenstein said. “The goal of the conspirators was to have an impact on the election. What impact they may have had .?.?. is a matter of speculation; that’s not our responsibility.”

The indictment comes days before President Trump is due to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Finland. Rosenstein said he briefed Trump earlier this week on the charges.

Trump’s lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani said on Twitter that the indictments “are good news for all Americans. The Russians are nailed. No Americans are involved.” He then called on Mueller “to end this pursuit of the president and say President Trump is completely innocent.”

Who has been charged in Russia probe and why VIEW GRAPHIC

The 11-count, 29-page indictment describes in granular detail a carefully planned and executed attack on the information security of Democrats, as Russian government hackers implanted hundreds of malware files on Democrats’ computer systems to steal information. The hackers then laundered the pilfered material through fake personas calledDC Leaks and Guccifer 2.0,as well as others, to try to influence voters.

One of their conduits, identified in the indictment only as “Organization 1,” was WikiLeaks, the global anti-secrecy group led by Julian Assange, according to people familiar with the case. The indictment describes WikiLeaks communicating with Guccifer 2.0 to obtain material.

On July 6, 2016, according to the indictment, WikiLeaks wrote, “if you have anything Hillary related we want it in the next tweo [sic] days prefable [sic] because the DNC [Democratic National Convention] is approaching and she will solidify bernie supporters behind her after,” referring to Clinton’s rival for the Democratic nomination, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). WikiLeaks explained, “we think trump has only a 25% chance of winning against hillary .?.?. so conflict between bernie and hillary is interesting.”

WikiLeaks released nearly 20,000 Democratic National Committee emails on the eve of the convention later that month, providing an embarrassing look at party operations and attitudes toward the Sanders campaign.

[Read the indictment of 12 Russians charged with hacking Democrats]

2:43

Rod Rosenstein announces indictment of 12 Russian agents

The deputy attorney general announces the indictment of 12 Russian intelligence agents in connection with hacking during the 2016 election. (The Washington Post)

A former Justice Department official who was previously involved in the Russia probe said the charges should serve as a warning for the United States to buttress its election security as Americans prepare to vote in congressional elections in November.

“The detailed charges in this indictment make it unmistakably clear that the United States faces an aggressive, sophisticated adversary bent on using cyber means to subvert our democratic processes and institutions,” said David Laufman, a former chief of the Justice Department’s Counterintelligence and Export Control Section. “Now is the time for unequivocal recognition of this threat by both the executive branch and Congress, and for a unified and well coordinated commitment to confront it.”

The indictment offers troubling new accusations about the extent of Russian hacking efforts and interactions with Americans.

“On or about August 15, 2016, the conspirators, posing asGuccifer 2.0, received a request for stolen documents from a candidate for the U.S. Congress,” the indictment states. “The conspirators responded using the Guccifer 2.0 persona and sent the candidate stolen documents related to the candidate’s opponent.” The indictment does not identify the candidate.

The indictment also describes an online conversation between the GRU, posing as Guccifer 2.0, and a “person who was in regular contact with senior members of the presidential campaign of Donald J. Trump.”

People familiar with the case said that person is longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone. In August 2016, the hacker persona wrote: “please tell me if i can help u anyhow .?.?. it would be a great pleasure to me.”

Stone’s lawyer Grant Smith said, “It is clear from the indictment issued today that our client, Roger Stone, was not in any way involved with any of the alleged hacking of the 2016 election. As he testified before the House Intelligence Committee under oath, his 24-word exchange with someone on Twitter claiming to be Guccifer 2.0 is benign, based on its content, context and timing.”

U.S. officials identified one of the GRU sections that carried out the operations as Unit 26165, which worked out of a building about four miles from the Kremlin. It was responsible for hacking the DNC and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, according to the indictment, which accuses Viktor Netykshoof being the military officer in command of Unit 26165 at the time.

Although the DNC was able to partially kick the Russian hackers out of its system in June 2016, the indictment says three months later, the GRU “successfully gained access to DNC computers hosted on a third-party cloud-computing service” which held “test applications related to the DNC’s analytics,” according to the indictment. The hacker stole that data from the DNC, the indictment said.

Another group of Russian military officers, Unit 74455, working out of a building that GRU officers referred to as the “Tower,” used fake online personas to spread stolen files, officials charged. The indictment identifies Col. Aleksandr Osadchuk as the commanding officer of that unit.

The indictment also notes an interesting development on July 27, 2016 — the day then-candidate Trump gave a press conference declaring his hope that missing Clinton emails would be found and made public, saying: “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.”

The indictment says “on or about” that same day, “the conspirators attempted after hours to spearphish for the first time email accounts at a domain hosted by a third-party provider and used by Clinton’s personal office. At or around the same time, they also targeted seventy-six email addresses at the domain for the Clinton campaign.”

The Russian Foreign Ministry rejected the indictment’s allegations as lacking evidence and described the charges as a clear effort to derail the Trump-Putin summit in Helsinki.

“It is unfortunate that distributing false information has become the norm in Washington, and that criminal cases are being initiated based on clearly political motives,” the ministry said. Referring to the Mueller investigation, the statement went on: “The question remains how long this shameful comedy that is embarrassing the United States will go on.”

Rosenstein said the hackers interacted with some Americans in the course of their efforts but noted that those people had not been charged with a crime.

“When we confront foreign interference in American elections, it is important for us to avoid thinking politically as Republicans or Democrats and instead to think patriotically as Americans. Our response must not depend on who was victimized,” he said. “There will always be adversaries who work to exacerbate domestic differences and try to confuse, divide and conquer us. So long as we are united in our commitment to the values enshrined in the Constitution, they will not succeed.”

Mueller and a team of prosecutors have been working since May 2017 to determine whether any Trump associates conspired with Russia to interfere in the election. With the new indictment, his office has filed charges against 32 people on crimes including hacking, money laundering and lying to the FBI. Twenty-six of those charged are Russians who are unlikely to ever be put on trial in the United States.

In February, Mueller indicted a group of Russian Internet trolls who worked out of theInternet Research Agency, a company based in St. Petersburg and owned by a wealthy associate of Putin.

[Russian troll farm, 13 suspects indicted in 2016 election interference]

Trump’s former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, is in jail in Alexandria, Va., awaiting trial this month on financial fraud charges brought by Mueller but stemming from activities that predated the Trump campaign.

Mueller’s probe has come under sustained attack from Trump and at a press conference in England on Friday before Rosenstein spoke, the president again labeled the investigation a “witch hunt.”

“I think that we’re being hurt very badly by the — I would call it the witch hunt,” said Trump as he stood beside British Prime Minister Theresa May. “It really hurts our relationship with Russia.”

Rosenstein said of his decision to brief Trump, “It was important for the president to know what information we’ve uncovered because he’s got to make very important decisions for the country. He needs to understand what evidence we have of foreign election interference.”

https://www.thedailybeast.com/exclusive-lone-dnc-hacker-guccifer-20-slipped-up-and-revealed-he-was-a-russian-intelligence-officer

Guccifer 2.0, the “lone hacker” who took credit for providing WikiLeaks with stolen emails from the Democratic National Committee, was in fact an officer of Russia’s military intelligence directorate (GRU), The Daily Beast has learned. It’s an attribution that resulted from a fleeting but critical slip-up in GRU tradecraft.

That forensic determination has substantial implications for the criminal probe into potential collusion between President Donald Trump and Russia. The Daily Beast has learned that the special counsel in that investigation, Robert Mueller, has taken over the probe into Guccifer and brought the FBI agents who worked to track the persona onto his team.

While it’s unclear what Mueller plans to do with Guccifer, his last round of indictments charged 13 Russians tied to the Internet Research Agency troll farm with a conspiracy “for the purpose of interfering with the U.S. political and electoral processes, including the presidential election of 2016.” It was Mueller’s first move establishing Russian interference in the election within a criminal context, but it stopped short of directly implicating the Putin regime.

Mueller’s office declined to comment for this story. But the attribution of Guccifer 2.0 as an officer of Russia’s largest foreign intelligence agency would cross the Kremlin threshold—and move the investigation closer to Trump himself.

Trump’s longtime political adviser Roger Stone admitted being in touch with Guccifer over Twitter’s direct messaging service. And in August 2016, Stone published an article on the pro-Trump-friendly Breitbart News calling on his political opponents to “Stop Blaming Russia” for the hack. “I have some news for Hillary and Democrats—I think I’ve got the real culprit,” he wrote. “It doesn’t seem to be the Russians that hacked the DNC, but instead a hacker who goes by the name of Guccifer 2.0.”

Five months later, in January 2017, the CIA, NSA, and FBIassessed “with high confidence” that “Russian military intelligence (General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate or GRU) used the Guccifer 2.0 persona and DCLeaks.com to release US victim data.” But the assessment did not directly call Guccifer a Russian intelligence officer. Nor did it provide any evidence for its assertions.

It turns out there is a powerful reason to connect Guccifer to the GRU.

Guccifer 2.0 sprang into existence on June 15, 2016, hours after a report by a computer security firm forensically tied Russia to an intrusion at the Democratic National Committee. In a series of blog posts and tweets over the following seven months—conspicuously ending right as Trump took office and not resuming—the Guccifer persona published a smattering of the DNC documents while gamely projecting an image as an independent Romanian hacktivist who’d breached the DNC on a lark. As Stone’s Breitbart piece demonstrated, Guccifer provided Moscow with a counter-narrative for the election interference.

Guccifer famously pretended to be a “lone hacker” who perpetrated the digital DNC break-in. From the outset, few believed it. Motherboard conducted a devastating interview with Guccifer that exploded the account’s claims of being a native Romanian speaker. Based on forensic clues in some of Guccifer’s leaks, and other evidence, a consensus quickly formed among security experts that Guccifer was completely notional.

“Almost immediately various cyber security companies and individuals were skeptical of Guccifer 2.0 and the backstory that he had generated for himself,” said Kyle Ehmke, an intelligence researcher at the cyber security firm ThreatConnect. “We started seeing these inconsistencies that led back to the idea that he was created hastily… by the individual or individuals that affected the DNC compromise.”

Proving that link definitively was harder. Ehmke led an investigation at ThreatConnect that tried to track down Guccifer from the metadata in his emails. But the trail always ended at the same data center in France. Ehmke eventually uncovered that Guccifer was connecting through an anonymizing service called Elite VPN, a virtual private networking service that had an exit point in France but was headquartered in Russia.

But on one occasion, The Daily Beast has learned, Guccifer failed to activate the VPN client before logging on. As a result, he left a real, Moscow-based Internet Protocol address in the server logs of an American social media company, according to a source familiar with the government’s Guccifer investigation. Twitter and WordPress were Guccifer 2.0’s favored outlets. Neither company would comment for this story, and Guccifer did not respond to a direct message on Twitter

Working off the IP address, U.S. investigators identified Guccifer 2.0 as a particular GRU officer working out of the agency’s headquarters on Grizodubovoy Street in Security firms and declassified U.S. intelligence findings previously identified the GRU as the agency running “Fancy Bear,” the ten-year-old hacking organization behind the DNC email theft, as well as breaches at NATO, Obama’s White House, a French television station, the World Anti-Doping Agency, and countless NGOs, and militaries and civilian agencies in Europe, Central Asia, and the Caucasus. ...Timestamps in Guccifer 2.0’s first leaks show they were packaged for release over the course of a single day in June 2016, beginning just hours after the DNC intrusion and its attribution to Russia were made public. The moniker was an homage to Romanian hacker Marcel Lazăr Lehel, who as “Guccifer” achieved notoriety in 2013 for a string of hacks against celebrities and politicians. In his inaugural blog post, Guccifer 2.0 disputed Russia’s involvement and claimed credit personally for the DNC breach, positioning himself as a one-time hacking operation working to expose “the Illuminati.” The post included the world’s first glimpse of the enormous cache of documents siphoned from the DNC’s network, including the Democrats’ opposition research report on Trump. Presaging the leaks that would roil the election, Guccifer 2.0 declared that he’d already sent the bulk of the stolen material to WikiLeaks—which has spent the time since obfuscating whether Guccifer was its source.

On July 22, 2016, WikiLeaks began releasing its cache of approximately 19,000 emails and 8,000 attachments stolen in the hack. While Trump promoted the leak on Twitter and in rallies, his surrogate Roger Stone pushed back against the Kremlin attribution. In his August 2016 article for Breitbart, he argued that Guccifer 2.0 was the Romanian hacktivist he claimed to be. “Guccifer 2.0 is the real deal,” he wrote.

Last May, Stone admitted that he’d also exchanged direct messages with the Guccifer 2.0 persona, and he released what he claimed was a complete transcript of his communications with the account. The transcript is brief and banal, showing Stone congratulating Guccifer 2.0 on returning to Twitter after a brief suspension, and then mostly ignoring him. Then and since, Stone has consistently denied that Guccifer was connected to the Kremlin.

“I myself had no contacts or communications with the Russian State, Russian Intelligence or anyone fronting for them or acting as intermediaries for them,” he wrote.

Guccifer 2.0 maintained a sporadic online presence throughout the election, posting to his dedicated WordPress blog and on Twitter, and spilling more DNC documents, sometimes in private emails to journalists.

While the national election clearly interested him (“Democrats prepare new provocation against Trump,” he thundered in October 2016), Guccifer 2.0 reached down the ballot as well, posting documents from the Democrats’ national campaign committee on his WordPress blog. There, readers could find internal Democratic candidate assessments relevant to battleground states like Pennsylvania and Florida; internal assessments of key congressional districts, with granular analyses of their demographics; and campaign recruitment material.

The GRU officer was eager to share this trove, as well. A GOP political operative in Florida, Aaron Nevins, DM’d Guccifer 2.0 a request for “any Florida based information” and received 2.5 gigabytes’ worth, according to *The Wall Street Journal*. The data, he enthused to Guccifer 2.0, was “probably worth millions of dollars.” A consultant for a successful Florida Republican congressional candidate told the paper, “I did adjust some voting targets based on some data I saw from the leaks.” ...Sometime after its hasty launch, the Guccifer persona was handed off to a more experienced GRU officer, according to a source familiar with the matter. The timing of that handoff is unclear, but Guccifer 2.0’s last blog post, from Jan. 12, 2017, evinced a far greater command of English than the persona’s earlier efforts.

“It’s obvious that the intelligence agencies are deliberately falsifying evidence,” the post read. “In my opinion, they’re playing into the hands of the Democrats who are trying to blame foreign actors for their failure.”

(Contrast that with the language from a June 2016 post: “I made some conclusions from the Marcel’s story and decided not to put all eggs in one basket. Moreover, other cases weren’t so successful and didn’t bring me the glory.”)

Today the most popular counter-narrative surrounding Guccifer 2.0 concedes that the account was a fake persona but posits that it was created by the DNC to support a false-flag operation implicating Russia. In this theory, advanced in two widely cited anonymous blogs, Guccifer 2.0 was the DNC posing as Russia posing as a Romanian hack

trms 12/27/17 dccc hacks used in down ballot house races eg florida

stone said soon be Al franken's turn in the barrell before news broke?

Investigative reporter Michael Isikoff of Yahoo News dropped a small bombshell this quiet holiday week that hasn't really exploded yet but might just explain the GOP's recent full-court press to discredit the FBI and special counsel Robert Mueller's team. Rep. Francis Rooney, a Florida Republican, explained:

I would like to see the directors of those agencies [the DOJ and FBI] purge it and say, "Look, we’ve got a lot of great agents, a lot of great lawyers here." Those are the people to see and know the good work’s being done, not these people who are kind of the deep state.

On Wednesday, Rep. Ron DeSantis, another Florida Republican, went on "Fox & Friends" and backed up his colleague's sentiments, saying,"You look at a guy like Peter Strzok [the FBI agent demoted for sending derogatory texts about many politicians including Trump]. If he’s gonna say that it’s his job as an FBI to prevent a certain candidate from getting elected. ... Anyone who turns up in that situation, I think they should get another line of work.”

For what it's worth, Strzok is a counterintelligence agent who appeared concerned that the "certain candidate" might be acting as an agent of a foreign adversary, which was important information the nation didn't have before the election. In any case, from what we can gather, these Republican congressmen identify nefarious "deep state" actors as those who cannot swear that they are not now and have never been a... Democrat.

As one can imagine, the use of the word "purge" brought forth some rather unfortunate historical images. We haven't seen evidence that they plan the usual accompanying show trials, but give them time. Republicans in Congress are working feverishly to prepare hearings on the Hillary Clinton "Russian uranium email treason" hearings so there's a chance we'll see some kind of facsimile before 2018.

The hysteria that's now raging seems a bit of an outsized reaction for this particular phase of the scandal, especially considering that Mueller actually did remove the offending "deep-staters." Isikoff may have come across a different motivation than simple loyalty to President Trump. He wrote:

In just the last few weeks, his prosecutors have begun questioning Republican National Committee staffers about the party digital operation that worked with the Trump campaign to target voters in key swing states. They are seeking to determine if the joint effort was related to the activities of Russian trolls and bots aimed at influencing the American electorate, according to two of the sources.

It would not be surprising if certain Republicans were to become a bit nervous when the investigation into Russian interference turned in that particular direction. It's flown under the radar since the election, but the fact is that it wasn't only the Democratic National Committee and John Podesta's email accounts that were hacked. The intelligence community identified the same group of Russian-affiliated hackers as behind the hacking of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

I've been intrigued by this aspectof the Russian hacking story since the New York Times published an early report about it back in November of 2016. Recall that at first the hacker known as Guccifer 2.0 released personal information that was used to intimidate Democratic candidates, but then he/she/they suddenly became more sophisticated and targeted, dumping valuable tactical information:

The seats that Guccifer 2.0 targeted in the document dumps were hardly random: They were some of the most competitive House races in the country.

People have wondered ever since if the hacker(s) might have gotten some expert assistance.

Perhaps it's a coincidence that so much of the information in question was republished on a website called HelloFLA by a Florida Republican and former congressional staffer named Aaron Nevins, who was connected to Trump associate and longtime political operative Roger Stone. It could be completely random that among the core group of Mueller antagonists, those calling the probe a "coup d'état" and demanding purges of members of the "deep state" are Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., who proposed that Mueller's funding be cut off, and the aforementioned Rep. Francis Rooney, who's been all over TV talking about purging the FBI.

Indeed, as journalist Marcy Wheeler pointed out a while back, one of the ringleaders of the movement to discredit the Department of Justice and Robert Mueller, Rep. DeSantis, directly benefited from Guccifer 2.0’s leak to Nevins after the latter published five documents regarding the DCCC’s recruitment of DeSantis’ Democratic opponent, George Pappas. According to The Wall Street Journal, Guccifer 2.0 even sent a link with a HelloFLA article directly to Roger Stone, who told reporters he didn’t forward the hacked material to anyone -- the answer to a question nobody asked,

Donald Trump may think their vociferous attacks on Mueller are all about loyalty to him personally. After all, this group all flew down to Florida together on Air Force One earlier this month. But these guys have skin in the game now and may very well be caught up in the maw of the Russia investigation themselves.If Mueller's team is looking into the digital operation and Roger Stone's interactions with Guccifer 2.0, as one would expect them to do, then these shenanigans in Florida are also coming into view. That may explain why this little circle of Sunshine State GOP congressmen are so anxious to shut him down.

They might not be the only ones. According to The New York Times, material from the DCCC hack was first used by Miami-area Democrat Joe Garcia, a former congressman, to win a tight primary race. Then "the National Republican Campaign Committee and a second Republican group with ties to the House speaker, Paul Ryan, turned to the hacked material" to undermine Garcia and re-elect Rep. Carlos Curbelo,the Republican incumbent.

It should be noted that there were some candidates who refused to use the hacked material against their opponents. This gang of Florida Republicans who are now so loudly attacking the FBI for its supposedly unethical behavior were not among them. As we all know, neither was Donald "I love WikiLeaks" Trump.

digby

factcheck march?

A Timeline

Stone, a longtime political operative who says he has no problem being called “a dirty trickster” with “sharp elbows,” was employed by the Trump campaign for several months early in the presidential campaign. Stone parted ways with the campaign in August 2015 — Trump said he fired him; Stone said he resigned because he felt he could more effectively help Trump’s cause outside the campaign, and that he remained in regular contact with Trump.

In June of the following year, the Democratic National Committee announced that its computers had been hacked by operatives of the Russian government. U.S. intelligence agencies say Russian intelligence had access to DNC computers for nearly a year, from July 2015 to June 2016.

The following day, a self-described hacker identified as Guccifer 2.0 took credit for the hack, and boasted that thousands of files and emails were provided to WikiLeaks.

On Aug. 5, Stone penned a story for the conservative website Breitbart, arguing that the Clinton campaign was scapegoating the Russians to hide the embarrassment of being hacked by a single individual. Stone’s story was based on public tweets and blog posts from Guccifer 2.0. Stone did communicate with Guccifer 2.0 in 2016 in a series of Twitter messages between Aug. 14 and Sept. 9 that Stone says he has since published in their entirety. In a lengthy interview with Stone published by *Politico* on March 27, Stone said that after he posted his Breitbart article, he learned that Guccifer 2.0 — who he said he does not believe to be a Russian agent — was banned from Twitter, and then was reinstated. Stone said he reached out to give Guccifer a social media “high-five,” expressing his support for Guccifer’s reinstatement “because I’m against censorship.”

The rest of the messages, Stone says, are pretty innocuous. In one, Guccifer 2.0 writes, “please tell me if I can help u anyhow.” But there is no record that Stone replied to that message. Twice, Stone asks Guccifer 2.0 to retweet his articles, and in one, Guccifer makes a benign comment about an article on election strategy, which Stone replies is “Pretty Standard.”

Stone also revealed during a speech to the Southwest Broward Republican Organization on Aug. 8 that he had “communicated with Assange.”

“I believe the next tranche of his documents pertain to the Clinton Foundation but there’s no telling what the October surprise may be,” Stone said.

Stone later clarified that he never spoke directly with Assange, but that the two have a mutual journalist friend — or what Stone referred to in a tea party speech as a “back-channel intermediary” — who told him in August that Assange “has the mother lode on Hillary [Clinton]” and that those emails would be released in October.

Stone said the information he received was no more specific than that, but enough to prompt him to make repeated statements and social media messages predicting upcoming bombshells related to Clinton. Stone said he also speculated that the hacked emails were related to the Clinton Foundation.

Stone says his Aug. 21 tweet about Podesta — that it would soon be Podesta’s “time in the barrel” — had nothing to do with hacked emails, though. Two days prior, Trump’s campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, quit the campaign amid media reports about prior business dealings with Russia-aligned leaders in Ukraine.

Stone said he was aware that Podesta also had business ties to Russia, and that journalists were beginning to look into those. That’s what prompted the tweet, he said.

Indeed, earlier that year, media accounts based on the so-called Panama Papers reported that Podesta’s company, the Podesta Group, had been hired to lobby on behalf of one of Russia’s biggest financial institutions. And in October, the Wall Street Journalpublished an opinion piece on business ties between Podesta and a Russia-backed investment firm.

In an Oct. 19 story for Breitbart, Stone said Podesta’s business ties to Russia were the motivation for the tweet.

mojo

Hackers and Hacks

Julian Assange

Conservatives once called for the WikiLeaks founder to be locked up. During the 2016 campaign, Trump allies, including Roger Stone and Alex Jones, hailed him as a hero for releasing hacked emails from the DNC and Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta. (Stone claimed to have “back-channel communications” with the hacktivist during the campaign.) Assange—who has taken refuge in Ecuador’s London Embassy since 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden over rape allegations (the case was dropped in May)—has claimed the source for the hacked messages was not the Russian government. The US intelligence community begs to differ. WikiLeaks’ release of the first batch of Podesta’s emails was curiously timed: It dropped less than an hour after a video clip of Trump bragging about sexual assault went public. Thereafter, the material was released in daily batches—that is, in a manner designed to inflict maximum harm to the Clinton campaign.

Guccifer 2.0

Guccifer was the handle of a notorious Romanian hacker who was sentenced to 52 months in prison in 2016. Guccifer 2.0 is the online persona that surfaced in June 2016 to take credit for hacking the DNC. The persona has claimed to be a lone wolf from Romania, but the intelligence community and outside experts have concluded that Guccifer 2.0 (which direct-messaged with Stone) is almost certainly a front for Russian intelligence. It’s a misogynistic one at that. “I’ve never met a female hacker of the highest level,” Guccifer 2.0 wrote last year. “Girls, don’t get offended, I love you.”

DC Leaks

The mysterious website and its associated Twitter feed popped up in June 2016. Over the course of the campaign, it published the hacked emails of military and political targets, including Colin Powell, NATO commander General Philip Breedlove, and the campaign staffs of Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham. The people behind DC Leaks, which is no longer active, claimed to be “American hacktivists,” but the US intelligence community reported that the site was a front for Russia’s military intelligence service.

Trump is already guilty in the Russia scandal—here’s the evidence

RT and Sputnik

In its joint report on Moscow’s election meddling, the US intelligence community described RT, the TV network formerly known as Russia Today, as “the Kremlin’s principal international propaganda outlet.” The report noted it “has actively collaborated with WikiLeaks”; Assange hosted a show for the network in 2012. RT also has controversial ties to Flynn, who was paid to speak at a 2015 gala for RT in Moscow and frequently appeared as an analyst on the network. Another Kremlin-supported outlet, Sputnik, spread fake news while boosting Trump and attacking Clinton. In late May, newly elected French President Emmanuel Macron confronted Putin about Russian meddling in the French elections and slammed the two news outlets as instruments of “lying propaganda.”

Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear

The shadowy groups are affiliated with different branches of the Russian security apparatus. Cozy Bear has been linked to a variety of cyberattacks against government and corporate targets throughout the world, including a 2015 spear-phishing attack on the Joint Chiefs of Staff. According to CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity firm hired by the DNC, Cozy Bear first targeted the DNC in the summer of 2015. Fancy Bear penetrated the DNC’s network in April 2016, apparently unaware Cozy Bear had gotten there first. The group’s targets have ranged from the World Anti-Doping Agency to the German parliament.

he U.S. intelligence community has long since concluded Russia meddled in the 2016 election, and it was reported shortly after the 2016 presidential election that a GOP superPAC linked to Paul Ryan used illegally hacked material to attack Democratic House candidates. But a bombshell report published on Thursday confirms that Republican political operatives were working with the Russian government to hurt Hillary Clinton and Democrats during the election — the first direct evidence of so-called collusion.

The Wall Street Journal reported that hacked information was posted on a blog run by Aaron Nevins, the political operative, and then passed along to top Trump adviser Roger Stone during the campaign. The Republican operative in Florida received a trove of Democratic documents from the allegedly Kremlin-linked hacker, Guccifer 2.0. For months, both Congress and the FBI have been scrutinizing evidence that associates of Trump may have colluded with Russia during the campaign.

Nevins confirmed to the Journal that he told hacker Guccifer 2.0 to “feel free to send any Florida based information” after learning that the hacker had tapped into Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) computers last summer. From the DCCC, Guccifer 2.0 released internal assessments of Democratic congressional candidates, known as “self-opposition research,” to GOP operatives using social media. Nevins told the Journal that, after receiving the stolen documents from the hacker, he “realized it was a lot more than even Guccifer knew that he had.” The stolen DCCC documents also contained sensitive information on voters in key Florida districts, breaking down how many people were considered dependable Democratic voters, undecided Democrats, Republican voters and the like. Nevins made a war analogy, describing the data he received to Guccifer 2.0 as akin to a “map to where all the troops are deployed.”

After Nevins published some of the material on the blog HelloFLA.com, using his own pseudonym, Guccifer 2.0 sent a link of the information to close Trump associate Roger Stone — who is currently under federal investigation for potential collusion with Russia.

“I just threw an arrow in the dark,” Nevins, who set up a Dropbox account for Guccifer 2.0 to transfer data, told the Journal. “If your interests align,” the operative concluded, “never shut any doors in politics.”

Stone told the Journal that while he did receive a link to Nevins’s blog from Guccifer 2.0, he didn’t share the stolen data published on the blog with anyone.

In addition to receiving hacked information about Democratic races in Florida, Nevins also received internal details about congressional districts in Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia and West Virginia. The Congressional Leadership Fund, a super PAC with close ties to House Speaker Paul Ryan, eventually used the material that was stolen by hackers in attack ads against several Democrats.

Anthony Bustamante, a Republican campaign consultant for Rep. Brian Mast (R-FL), told the Journal that he used the stolen information to plan ad buys and better target a mailer effort: “I did adjust some voting targets based on some data I saw from the leaks.”

Republicans ignored Democrats’ pleas not to use the hacked material for political gain.

After Guccifer 2.0 targeted the chair of the DCCC, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi sent a letter to Paul Ryan arguing that “the NRCC’s use of documents stolen by the Russians plays right into the hands of one of the United States’ most dangerous adversaries,” and if the National Republican Campaign Committee continued using the materials, the GOP “will be complicit in aiding the Russian government in its effort to influence American elections.” Ryan never responded.

For his part, Trump has repeatedly denied any coordination with Russian officials. The Kremlin has also rejected any connection to Guccifer 2.0. But both the Department of Homeland Security and Director of National Intelligence believe Guccifer 2.0 is tied to Russian military intelligence.

Sophia Tesfaye is the Deputy Politics Editor at Salon.