From Russia with Chaos
Report: DNC hacker Guccifer 2.0 is a Russian intelligence officer
Guccifer 2.0, the hacker who says he provided WikiLeaks with emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee in 2016, is a Russian intelligence officer, The Daily Beast reports.
Special Counsel Robert Mueller is investigating Guccifer 2.0, and the FBI agents who determined his identity are on Mueller's team, The Daily Beast says. Guccifer 2.0 made his online debut June 15, 2016, only a few hours after a computer security firm tied the DNC hack to Russia. Claiming to be a lone hacker, Guccifer 2.0 posted and tweeted DNC documents, while "projecting an image as an independent Romanian," The Daily Beast says. He denied that Russia was involved in the attack, and a few days before Trump's inauguration, he stopped posting online.
Not many people believed that Guccifer 2.0 was Romanian, and after he forgot to connect online using an anonymizing service, investigators were able to track his real IP address to Moscow, The Daily Beast reports. From that, they identified Guccifer 2.0 as a specific GRU officer, working out of the military intelligence department's headquarters (his name was not disclosed to The Daily Beast). It has also been determined that one person launched the Guccifer 2.0 persona, then passed it off to someone with a better grasp of the English language. Read more about how leaks from Guccifer 2.0 helped a Florida Republican, and how Trump adviser Roger Stone ties into the story, at The Daily Beast.