What Mueller Indictment Reveals About WikiLeaks' Ties to Russia
By Raffi Khatchadourian
July 24, 2018
... The latest indictment issued by Robert Mueller, the special counsel, charged twelve members of the G.R.U., Russia’s military-intelligence directorate, with hacking and disseminating Democratic e-mails and other files during the election. It is a highly detailed document, in many ways remarkable. In it, we learn, for instance, that Western intelligence officers had penetrated the G.R.U. so thoroughly that they could track the keystrokes of individual Russian operatives at their desks in a Moscow building. We learn that these G.R.U. staff members essentially Googled vulnerabilities in the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee before hacking into it. We learn that, from within the D.C.C.C., the G.R.U. hackers moved into the D.N.C. We learn that D.N.C. data were relayed to an American server in Illinois as they were being exfiltrated. We learn that G.R.U. officers used cryptocurrency to pay people around the world to provide things that the operation required—domain names, access to virtual private networks (V.P.N.s). The indictment may only be an accusation, but it hints at the remarkably granular forensic intelligence that has been gathered ...
In 2016, the G.R.U. began a spear-phishing campaign that targeted hundreds of Democratic operatives. People affiliated with Hillary Clinton were targeted as early as March 10th. Podesta, her campaign’s chairman, was targeted nine days later, and his e-mails were stolen on March 21st. The G.R.U. created multiple false online identities to aid its work. By April, it began to set up a mechanism to publish hacked material, a Web site called DCLeaks, purportedly run by American “hacktivists.” The site went live on June 8th, after Clinton became the presumptive Democratic nominee, and published tens of thousands of e-mails from at least seven Clinton-campaign staffers, along with other American officials ...
It is worth taking a closer look at what happened in the spring and summer of 2016 to understand how the indictment’s sequence of facts and allegations leaves open some intriguing possibilities. On April 18th, the G.R.U. hacked the D.N.C. computers, and began to extract gigabytes’ worth of files, including opposition research, but it did not penetrate the D.N.C.’s Microsoft Exchange Server, to access its e-mails, until later. The indictment argues that the e-mails were stolen at some point between May 25th and June 1st ...
... Then, on June 12th, four days after DCLeaks went live, Assange gave an interview to Britain’s ITV, in which he declared, “We have upcoming leaks in relation to Hillary Clinton, which is great. WikiLeaks has a very big year ahead.” A bit later in the interview, he added, “We have e-mails related to Hillary Clinton which are pending publication” ...
... Finally, on July 14th, Guccifer 2.0 sent WikiLeaks an encrypted attachment that, according to the indictment, contained “instructions on how to access an online archive of stolen DNC documents.” Four days later, WikiLeaks confirmed that it had accessed the archive and claimed that it would release the material that week ...
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/what-the-latest-mueller-indictment-reveals-about-wikileaks-ties-to-russia-and-what-it-doesnt
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