Could this US presidential election get any more bizarre? Internal Democratic Party emails, leaked on Friday clearly intended to sow dissent within the party, show how officials tried to tip the scales in favour of Hillary Clinton during the primary.
The Clinton camp has blamed the leak on “Russian state actors” for passing the information to hackers in an effort to help Republican Donald Trump win the election because he has pro-Russian policies and is an admirer of Vladimir Putin.
Another reason for the Russian help, according to her campaign team, is because his campaign has removed language in the party’s policy platform relating to Ukraine that would have upset Russia and because Trump’s campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, worked as a lobbyist for the Russian-backed former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovich.
The leak comes days after Trump made remarks that raised alarm bells in Europe. If elected president, he said, the US would not defend Nato allies against Russian aggression if they had not “fulfilled” their financial obligations to the country.
The emails, which surfaced on Wikileaks, have led to the resignation of Democratic Party chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz and stirred up tensions between the Clinton camp and supporters of Vermont democratic socialist senator Bernie Sanders, whose supporters – despite his endorsement of Clinton earlier this month – are furious as their suspicions of a “rigged” primary election against their candidate are confirmed. This Democratic convention could not have started on a worse note.
Sinister turn
If Russian hackers, backed by the Kremlin, forced the resignation of a major American political figure on the eve of a landmark election event to assist her opponent, then it would be one of the biggest scalps taken in cyber war between the US and Russia, and mark a deeply sinister turn in the US presidential election.
Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook on Sunday claimed the emails were leaked “by the Russians for the purpose of helping Donald Trump”.
He cited “experts” as the basis of his accusation without naming them.
Asked again about this at the first press conference that kicked off the convention on Monday, he referred to experts cited in the New York Times and the Washington Post, both of which have written extensively on the hacking.
Donald Trump Jr went on cable news television on Sunday questioning the Clinton camp’s “moral compass” for this latest allegation and even suggested that Mook may have heard about the Russian link from “his house cat”.
“It’s disgusting, it’s so phoney,” the younger Trump told CNN.
At a Republican pre-Democratic convention spoiler in Philadelphia that night, Manafort dismissed the Clinton camp’s accusation as “pretty desperate”.
“It’s a far reach, obviously,” the Trump campaign chief told reporters.
“To lead their convention with that tells me they really are trying to move away from what the issues are going to be in this campaign. It’s pretty absurd.”
Nonetheless, the FBI is investigating the leak. It acknowledged for the first time on Monday that it was looking into the matter.
Focus will be on the alleged involvement of Russian government hackers.
The hack is suspected to be part of a wider offensive of Russian cyber-attacks against political organisations in Washington.
Smokescreen
The Democratic national committee and cyber security firm CrowdStrike said last month that hackers, likely to be working for Russian intelligence agencies, had broken into the party’s computers and stolen a database of opposition research against Trump.
Subsequently, a hacker self-identifying as Guccifer2 took responsibility for the hack, saying it had nothing to do with Moscow.
The hacker maintained they were Romanian but security analysts quoted by several US media outlets believe this was a smokescreen to protect the involvement of the GRU, Russian military intelligence, and the FSB, the main successor agency of the Kremlin’s KGB.
CrowdStrike have said they believe two hackers, Fancy Bear, which obtained access to the Democratic servers in April, and Cozy Bear, which first stole information in the summer of 2015, are controlled by GRU and FSB respectively.
Regardless of who hacked and leaked the information, the damage has been done.
A party that arrived in Philadelphia hoping to present itself as far more unified than the Republicans were in Cleveland last week under a divisive nominee is now trying to put out a raging inferno and blame Russian cyber spies for starting the fire.