Russian hackers may have obtained files from Hillary Clinton and top aide Sidney Blumenthal by hacking Guccifer, the Romanian man who first breached Clinton’s private server, according to sources involved with House and Senate intelligence committees quoted in PJMedia.
Committee aides indicated the files might be publicly available on the “dark web,” which is accessible through Internet browsers like Tor that mask a user’s IP address. The documents would include both classified and unclassified information Clinton held on her homebrew network when Guccifer was active, prior to his arrest in January 2014.
Guccifer, known offline as Marcel Lazar Lehel, was extradited from Romania to Virginia earlier this year, and sentenced in September to serve 52 months in prison in the United States. Despite a claim to have successfully breached Clinton’s server, law enforcement officials insisted Lazar could provide no evidence.
Sources alleged to PJMedia that FBI Director James Comey was aware of the claim Clinton’s files had been exfiltrated by foreign hackers weeks before he announced in July that his agency would not recommend charging Clinton for the exposure of classified information.
Comey claimed at the time that if Clinton’s server had been breached, his agency would be ignorant of the incident. “With respect to potential computer intrusion by hostile actors, we did not find direct evidence that Secretary Clinton’s personal email domain in its various configurations since 2009 was hacked successfully.
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“But given the nature of the system and of the actors potentially involved, we assess we would be unlikely to see such direct evidence,” he added.
It’s possible the documents from Clinton’s server could become public even without the latest discovery. Lazar’s exploits inspired a more recent persona to assume the online identity of “Guccifer 2.0” to claim credit for the release of documents obtained from the Democratic National Committee and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which have included thousands of internal files from 2010 to September of this year.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has promised to release up to 100,000 pages of additional information before the November election, potentially including documents not only from Clinton’s private server, but also Clinton’s campaign, the philanthropic Clinton Foundation, and the State Department.
