Hackers working for the Russian government stole opposition research information about Republican candidate Donald Trump from the computers of the Democratic National Committee. The Washington Post reports on the hack that hit systems from across the political spectrum:
Russian government hackers penetrated the computer network of the Democratic National Committee and gained access to the entire database of opposition research on GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump, according to committee officials and security experts who responded to the breach. The intruders so thoroughly compromised the DNC’s system that they also were able to read all email and chat traffic, said DNC officials and the security experts. The intrusion into the DNC was one of several targeting American political organizations. The networks of presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were also targeted by Russian spies, as were the computers of some GOP political action committees, U.S. officials said. But details on those cases were not available.
Both Trump and Vladimir Putin have been friendly toward each other, unusual for the Russian president and an American White House aspirant. CNN even dubbed the relationship a “bromance.”
And one Trump’s top campaign aides, Paul Manafort, has worked for pro-Putin international clients in the past:
Less innocently, Manafort encouraged candidate Yanukovych to stoke the underlying tensions within Ukraine by blasting the incumbent government’s cooperation with NATO and by repeating trumped up stories of the nation’s Russian speakers being abused. It may have helped Yanukovych win the election, but it also helped tear the country apart. Manafort’s firm, Davis Manafort, had worked on behalf of Yanukovych’s political benefactor, Ukrainian oligarch Rinat Akhmetov, since around 2005. Akhmetov, like Yanukovych, is an ally of, if not a proxy for, Russian president Vladimir Putin. For his part, Manafort maintains the work was nothing more than routine international political consulting. “The role that I played in that administration was to help bring Ukraine into Europe, and we did,” Manafort told Fox News Sunday last month. That’s a curious claim, since Yanukovych’s election—engineered in large part by Manafort—meant plans for Ukraine to join NATO were scrapped. Without the rise and fall of Yanukovych, Crimea might not have fallen into Putin’s hands.
