Danil Shamkin/NurPhoto via ZUMA
Spencer Ackerman and Kevin Poulsen have some interesting news:
Guccifer 2.0, the “lone hacker” who took credit for providing WikiLeaks with stolen emails from the Democratic National Committee, was in fact an officer of Russia’s military intelligence directorate (GRU), The Daily Beast has learned. It’s an attribution that resulted from a fleeting but critical slip-up in GRU tradecraft.
The US intelligence community long ago concluded that Russia was behind the DNC hacks and that Guccifer 2.0 was a persona invented by GRU, so in one sense this is nothing new. But if the CIA and NSA knew that the DNC hacker was a GRU officer, then they certainly must have briefed President Trump about it. And yet he continued to insist in public that no one really knew for sure if the Russians were behind the campaign hacks.
Then there’s the fact that Trump confidante Roger Stone has admitted to conversations with Guccifer 2.0. Did Stone know that he was a GRU agent? I’ll bet Robert Mueller is trying to find out.
