Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
SoFla link in leaked data
Plantation man got, shared ‘ton of stuff’ hacked from Democrats
One more sliver of information about last year’s hacking of the Democrats came into the open Thursday. And it involves a South Florida connection.
Aaron Nevins, of Plantation, was the recipient of a trove of information from Guccifer 2.0, a hacker that stole information from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the national campaign organization that helps its party’s congressional candidates.
Nevins outlined in a Sun Sentinel interview how — and why — he obtained and disseminated the information. His identity was first revealed in an article by a team of reporters at The Wall Street Journal.
Like many people with an interest in politics, Nevins said, he was riveted by the hacking that afflicted the Democratic Party last year. When Guccifer 2.0 issued an open invitation to any journalist who wanted information, Nevins
said he responded affirmatively through a Twitter message. He said he didn’t follow up and didn’t hear anything for 10 days.
Guccifer 2.0 responded shortly before the Florida primary contests in August, he said. Guccifer 2.0 wanted to know his email capacity, and Nevins said he set up a Dropbox account that allowed him to receive a large volume of data — which the hacker deposited there.
“So I get it. And there was a ton of stuff,” he said.
Nevins, a Republican, operates in multiple worlds. Currently, he said he primarily engages in organizing grass-roots campaigns on behalf of clients. He has worked as a registered lobbyist but said he didn’t do any lobbying in 2017. And he’s also worked as a campaign consultant, but none that would have affected by the data that came from Guccifer 2.0.
Nevins said he was acting as a journalist. Until Thursday, he’d operated anonymously as “Mark Miewurd’s HelloFLA!” website. (The name is a play on “mark my words.”)
Guccifer 2.0 is better known for the widely publicized hacking into the Democratic National Committee and providing internal party information to WikiLeaks. Internal emails that showed DNC staffers favored Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders for the Democratic presidential nomination led to the resignation of U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Weston as chairwoman of the DNC.
It’s been widely reported that U.S. government intelligence community believes Guccifer 2.0 was created by Russia.
After Nevins reviewed the information about the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee — not the Democratic National Committee — Nevins said he quickly realized several things:
• The information appeared accurate, based on his knowledge of Florida politics and the details in the information. He said someone operating far away couldn’t have made up the information because there was too much local nuance.
• It was too much to process with the Aug. 30 primaries for congressional, state and local offices just days away.
• He needed to publish as much as he could as quickly as possible.
“I took off my [political] operative’s hat and put on my journalist’s hat,” he said. He said he was receiving and publishing information, regardless of where it came from. He said he didn’t want to sit on the information, and be accused of being in possession of stolen documents. He said he didn’t supply it to any campaigns or political operatives.
Besides publishing on his own, he said he farmed out some information to reporters in other areas of Florida, providing information that might be interesting to news organizations where there might be upcoming congressional primaries. “It’s a scoop,” Nevins said. There was all sorts of information, including analyses of data about places and kinds of people that Democrats figured were their biggest sources of voters who could be persuaded to vote their way. And there was also research that revealed what the Democrats saw as vulnerabilities of their own candidates.
Another document showed how the Democratic committee massaged information from an internal poll, eliminating information that looked bad for Clinton, before releasing a sanitized version to the news media.
For reasons Nevins doesn’t know, the Democratic campaign committee stored much of its statewide information in a file labeled for U.S. Rep. Alcee Hastings, the Broward-Palm Beach County Democrat who never faces serious challenges to his re-election.
The information fit with what he said he likes to post on HelloFLA.com, which Nevins said he’s tried to style as a combination of Page Six — the well-known New York Post gossip page — and TMZ, the celebrity website that’s often filled with sensational stories.
“It’s true news. I think a lot of people confuse sensationalism with so called fake news. The difference is essentially it’s not the Weekly World News where Hillary Clinton is endorsed by a space alien. It’s just a grittier, more raw side of politics,” he said. “There’s a lot of stuff that goes on behind the scenes.”
Nevins, 36, is well known in political circles in South Florida. He has two companies, Chelsea Road Consulting and Painted Dog Productions, and is affiliated with Richardson Partners, a political consultancy in Boca Raton. Nevins was the chief of staff for Ellyn Bogdanoff when she was a Republican state senator and state representatives. He is also the son of former Sun Sentinel political columnist Buddy Nevins.
Aaron Nevins wasn’t widely known as the operator of his HelloFLA.com website — until Thursday.
There’s another South Florida element.
The Wall Street Journal reported that Guccifer 2.0 sent a link with a HelloFLA article to Roger Stone, who told the reporters he didn’t forward the hacked material to anyone. Stone, a longtime associate of President Donald Trump whose political activities go back to former President Richard Nixon, lives in Fort Lauderdale.
Stone’s name has repeatedly cropped up in connection with investigations into Russian hacking of the U.S. election. Stone has emphatically denied any involvement with Russians or hacking. He did not respond to an email Thursday afternoon seeking comment.
Nevins said he didn’t have any dealings with Stone about the material. He said he had a group dinner with Stone three or four years ago and hasn’t seen or spoken to him since.
Nevins said he doesn’t believe he is facing any legal jeopardy over the matter, and he has not been contacted by any investigating authorities.
“The way I look at it, I was acting as a journalist. And my actions would show evidence of that. I was sending it out to journalists, not to political campaigns,” he said. “I, to some extent, felt forced to publish it.”
He said he is not concerned about getting in legal trouble or becoming the subject of an investigation.
“I’m not going to live my life concerned about that. I don’t think that I did anything illegal,” he said. “I think if I held onto the data and if I used it for a political campaign without releasing it or if I just ended up sending it to political operatives around the state, we would be having a different conversation, probably from a jail cell.”