This weekend's blockbuster news came courtesy of the Wall Street Journal: A well-known Republican operative who asserted he was working for Trump campaign adviser Michael Flynn was actively seeking hacker help in obtaining private emails from Hillary Clinton's server, and intelligence agencies had intercepted discussions from Russian hackers at how to provide such help and transmit it back to Michael Flynn and his operatives.
This was immediately followed by a United Kingdom cybersecurity expert coming forward to confirm that he, personally, had been recruited by the operative, Peter Smith to help "validate" copies of "emails from Secretary Clinton's private server" that an unnamed source was offering to provide Smith.
This was not another data dump of documents from the DNC being disseminated through WikiLeaks; this was an effort to obtain information from Clinton's own email server, and came immediately on the heels of candidate Donald Trump publicly calling on Russian hackers to "find" those emails during what would be the last press conference of his entire campaign. Smith appeared to have a deep knowledge of internal campaign deliberations, Smith appeared to have a "reckless lack of interest" in whether or not he was working with the Russian's own hacking efforts, and the documents Smith provided to the expert outlining who would be managing the "research" included not just Flynn, but top campaign officials Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway.
This, then, would be the precise sort of "collusion" with foreign intelligence efforts that probes of the Trump campaign's association with Russian election hacks have been exploring. It links the campaign to hacking efforts through the one White House figure other than himself Donald Trump has gone to any effort to protect: Trump and associates had apparently contacted multiple top government officials in an effort to stop or delay the FBI investigation into Flynn before Trump made the sudden decision to fire the FBI director outright.
As evidence of campaign collusion with Russian hackers mounts, Donald Trump is falling apart
This was immediately followed by a United Kingdom cybersecurity expert coming forward to confirm that he, personally, had been recruited by the operative, Peter Smith to help "validate" copies of "emails from Secretary Clinton's private server" that an unnamed source was offering to provide Smith.
This was not another data dump of documents from the DNC being disseminated through WikiLeaks; this was an effort to obtain information from Clinton's own email server, and came immediately on the heels of candidate Donald Trump publicly calling on Russian hackers to "find" those emails during what would be the last press conference of his entire campaign. Smith appeared to have a deep knowledge of internal campaign deliberations, Smith appeared to have a "reckless lack of interest" in whether or not he was working with the Russian's own hacking efforts, and the documents Smith provided to the expert outlining who would be managing the "research" included not just Flynn, but top campaign officials Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway.
This, then, would be the precise sort of "collusion" with foreign intelligence efforts that probes of the Trump campaign's association with Russian election hacks have been exploring. It links the campaign to hacking efforts through the one White House figure other than himself Donald Trump has gone to any effort to protect: Trump and associates had apparently contacted multiple top government officials in an effort to stop or delay the FBI investigation into Flynn before Trump made the sudden decision to fire the FBI director outright.
As evidence of campaign collusion with Russian hackers mounts, Donald Trump is falling apart
