A Republican opposition researcher who tried to obtain emails he thought were stolen from Hillary Clinton’s email server implied to people he sought to participate in the effort that he was connected to several Trump campaign officials, according to a new report.
The operative, Peter W. Smith, named the Trump officials, including Steve Bannon, Mike Flynn, and Kellyanne Conway, in a recruitment document for his effort, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday night.
The Journal said the stolen emails in question were likely hacked by Russians.
Smith and people he recruited said they were communicating with several groups of hackers, including two from Russia they suspected were tied to the Kremlin, in an effort to find any stolen emails and potentially harm Clinton’s prospects in the 2016 election.
Smith, 81, died about a week and a half after he gave an interview with the Journal, the newspaper reported.
The Journal reported Thursday that Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser, was cited more extensively in Smith’s communications related to the effort.
Flynn’s actual role in the project is unknown, the Journal reported.
Bannon, now chief strategist for Trump, denied any involvement with Smith telling the Journal he never heard of him.
Conway, now a counselor to Trump, told the Journal she knew Smith from Republican politics but hadn’t spoken to him in years. “I never met with him” during the campaign, Conway said. “There were no calls, no meetings, no nothing.”
Also cited in Smith’s recruiting document was Sam Clovis, a policy adviser to the Trump campaign and now a senior adviser at the Agriculture Department.
The Journal previously reported that U.S. investigators, as part of the probe of Russia’s election interference, have examined reports from intelligence agencies that describe Russian hackers discussing how to obtain emails from Clinton’s server and then give them to Flynn through an intermediary.
Smith was targeting 33,000 emails that Clinton said were deleted — and not provided to investigators — because they were personal.
Smith thought the emails might have been obtained by hackers and that they actually concerned official matters Clinton wanted to hide.
Former FBI Director James Comey has said there is no evidence Clinton’s private server has been hacked, but he left open the possibility it might have been.
Flynn is a central figure of investigations into Russia election interference and possible collusion with the Trump campaign. He was fired from his role as national security adviser after admitting he had misled the vice president and other White House officials about the contents of a phone call he had with the Russian ambassador to the U.S. weeks before Trump’s inauguration.
