The New York Times takes a closer look at Special Counsel Robert Mueller's latest indictment of 12 Russian intelligence officers for 2016 election interference and the role their fake digital persona named Guccifer 2.0 played in spreading material stolen from the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and the Clinton Campaign.
The effort by the team that posed as Guccifer to disseminate the fruits of the audacious cyberattack shows how aggressively the Russian operatives worked in 2016 to interfere with the presidential election. They showed dexterity in navigating their way through the national political debate and an increasingly sophisticated understanding of American electoral politics.
In addition to WikiLeaks, the Russians made contact with Americans who held sway both in Republican circles and with Mr. Trump, the indictment says. It does not assert that the Americans knew that Guccifer 2.0 was a creation of Russian spies.
Those figures included Roger J. Stone Jr., the longtime Trump friend who exchanged messages with Guccifer during the campaign but said in an interview on Saturday that he did not believe at the time that Russian state actors were behind it ...
There was Lee Stranahan, who is now a co-host of “Fault Lines” on the Russian-owned Sputnik radio network but back then was at Breitbart News, whose chief during that period, Stephen K. Bannon, joined Mr. Trump’s campaign that August.
The indictment mentions that Guccifer 2.0 had sent some documents to a lobbyist in Florida, which had been previously reported. But it also reveals that a congressional candidate whom it did not name connected with the operatives, looking for stolen documents about a political opponent, which were then sent.
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The G.R.U. was no newcomer to attacks in the United States: It had been central to previous thefts of emails from the unclassified systems at the State Department, the White House and, later, the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
“Anybody who was sophisticated about Russian behavior immediately spotted what this was — it was not like you needed forensic data or any real insight,” said Andrew S. Weiss, a Russia specialist at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a former staff member of the National Security Council.
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Guccifer 2.0 made its first public appearance ... on June 15, just days after the last Republican primaries. On its newly created website, the Guccifer persona announced it was releasing “just a few docs from many thousands I extracted when hacking into DNC’s network.” The new blog post included the Democratic Party’s secret research dossier on Mr. Trump.
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Five days after the first Guccifer 2.0 blog post, the military unit believed to be behind it sent out its first message under its connected Twitter account: “Hi! I’m on Twitter now! this is my official account!”
By June 22, Guccifer was encouraging anyone to communicate directly with its hacker avatar — and, as the indictment shows, it immediately drew in a host of Americans with influence in the media and Republican politics.
Some of the cache was particularly valuable because it included reports that the Democrats had compiled on vulnerabilities involving their own candidates — a due-diligence check to bolster their defenses — and never intended to make public.
Full story: Tracing Guccifer 2.0’s Many Tentacles in the 2016 Election (NYT)