The News Herald (Willoughby, OH)
Indictment accuses Moscow of meddling
12 Russians accused of hacking Clinton campaign and Dems
WASHINGTON » Twelve Russian military intelligence officers hacked into the Clinton presidential campaign and Democratic Party and released tens of thousands of private communications in a sweeping conspiracy by the Kremlin to meddle in the 2016 U.S. election, according to an indictment announced days before President Donald Trump’s summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The indictment represents special counsel Robert Mueller’s first charges against Russian government officials for interfering in American politics, an effort U.S. intelligence agencies say was aimed at helping the Trump campaign and harming the election bid of his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton.
The 29-page indictment lays out how, months before Americans went to the polls, Russian officers schemed to break into key Democratic email accounts, including those belonging to Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Politically damaging emails for Clinton appeared on WikiLeaks in the election’s critical final stretch.
The charges allege the Russian defendants, using a persona known as Guccifer 2.0, in August 2016 contacted a person close to the Trump campaign to offer help. And they say that the hackers, hours after Trump in a speech encouraged Russia to find missing Clinton emails, tried for the first time to break into email accounts used by Clinton’s personal office, along with 76 Clinton campaign email addresses.
The indictment does not allege that Trump campaign associates were involved in the hacking effort or that Americans were knowingly in touch with Russian officers, and it does not allege that any vote tallies were altered by hacking. The White House seized on those points in a statement that offered no condemnation of the alleged Russian conspiracy.
It was unclear whether the indictment might factor into Trump’s meeting with Putin on Monday. He has repeatedly expressed skepticism about Russian involvement in the hacking and has been accused by Democrats of cozying up to the Russian president. Trump complained anew about the Russia investigation before the indictment, saying the “stupidity” was making it “very hard to do something with Russia.”
The Kremlin, meanwhile, denied anew that it tried to sway the election. “The Russian state has never interfered and has no intention of interfering in the U.S. elections,” Putin’s foreign affairs adviser, Yuri Ushakov, said Friday.
If the involvement of the officers in the Russian intelligence agency known as the GRU is proved, it would shatter the Kremlin denials of the Russian state’s involvement in the U.S. elections given that the GRU is part of the state machine.
The Russian defendants are not in custody, and it is not clear they will ever appear in an American courtroom, though the Justice Department in recent years has seen value in indicting foreign hackers in absentia as public deterrence.
The indictment identifies the defendants as officers with Russia’s Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff, also known as GRU. It accuses them, starting in March 2016, of covertly monitoring the computers of dozens of Democratic officials and volunteers, implanting malicious computer code known as malware to explore the networks and steal data and using phishing emails to gain access to accounts.