Special counsel Robert Mueller interviewed a cybersecurity expert who claims to have been recruited to collude with the Russians by a Republican opposition researcher tied to President Trump’s campaign.
As part of the federal investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and possible collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin, Mueller spoke to Matt Tait, a security analyst who used to work at Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters, several weeks ago, a source told Business Insider.
Tait revealed himself to be an unnamed source in Wall Street Journal reports over the summer about Republican opposition researcher Peter W. Smith, who reportedly tried to obtain emails thought to be stolen from Hillary Clinton’s private email server, and his ties to former national security adviser Mike Flynn and other Trump officials. Flynn was fired in May after it was revealed he had misled the Trump administration about his contacts with Russian officials.
Smith, who died of apparent suicide about a week and a half after he spoke with the Journal, said he had no connections to the Trump campaign. He reportedly had been seeking the more than 30,000 emails from Clinton’s unauthorized server as secretary of state that she said were personal and were deleted rather than handed over to investigators. Though there is no evidence that Clinton’s server had been hacked, former FBI Director James Comey said it is possible that it was breached.
Tait described in a blog post at the end of June, titled, “The Time I Got Recruited to Collude with the Russians,” a number of factors he believes show Smith was working with Trump’s blessing when Smith reached out to him to verify emails obtained by dark-web hackers. That included Smith’s apparent knowledge of the inner workings of Trump’s campaign, an opposition research document with a “Trump campaign” group, and the repeated references to needing to avoid campaign reporting.
The House Intelligence Committee, conducting its own Russia probe, has also interviewed Tait, CNN reported. The House intelligence panel and the Senate intelligence panel have reportedly interviewed a number of security experts who said to be tied to the Smith email hunt.
