Wikileaks verifies stolen Macron e-mails

RAPHAEL SATTER

PARIS — Roughly 20,000 e-mails allegedly stolen from French President Emmanuel Macron’s campaign have been digitally verified and published to WikiLeaks, the group said Monday.

The e-mails caused a stir when they were initially published just two days before France’s May 7 presidential runoff, which pitted Macron against French farright leader Marine Le Pen. But unlike the leaks that rattled the 2016 American presidential race, the French e-mail leak had little if any impact and Macron still handily beat Le Pen.

The messages have since been picked over by the French press, although WikiLeaks’ move may draw new attention to them.

In a statement, Macron’s political party accused WikiLeaks of taking up the “destabilization operation” launched in May and said it would inform prosecutors.

The question of who was responsible for the initial leak of the Macron campaign e-mails remains unsolved.

The head of France’s cybersecurity agency ANSSI said in June there was no evidence tying the hacking of the Macron campaign e-mails to any particular actor, saying it “really could be anyone.”

WikiLeaks said it verified its batch of e-mails using DomainKeys Identified Mail — or DKIM — signatures, a cryptographic protocol that acts like a digital shipping manifest and has become an increasingly popular way for researchers and tech-savvy journalists to prove that e-mails are authentic.

WikiLeaks said the rest of the e-mails — about 50,000 of them — were being included “for context.”