Michael Flynn, Conservative Activists, Russian Hackers, and the Search for the “Missing” Clinton Emails
This article describes attempts during the 2016 election by a network of conservative activists, including Michael Flynn, Peter W. Smith and Barbara Ledeen, to obtain through contacts with foreign, including Russian, hackers Hillary Clinton’s deleted emails from her tenure at the State Department.
It is the third installment of the series “Michael Flynn, Information Operations, and the Search for Hillary’s Missing Emails.”
The first article describes the biography of Michael Flynn, from the War on Terror, to his connections with Russia, to his support of the Trump campaign.
The second article describes Flynn’s links to the Israeli private intelligence world, and a GRU-backed coup in Montenegro.
This article is an excerpt from my book, While We Slept: Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, and the Corruption of American Democracy, available here.
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In early July of 2017, news outlets reported that Michael Flynn was under consideration as Trump’s Vice Presidential candidate.
On July 18th, Flynn made one of the more memorable speeches at the Republican National Conventions, leading the crowd in chants of “Lock Her Up!”
The chant would become a staple of Trump’s rallies.
“Lock her up! Lock her up! Damn right! Exactly right!” Flynn shouted along with the crowd. “There is nothing wrong with that!”
Michael Flynn engaging in the “Lock her up” chant at the 2016 Republican National Convention
On July 27th, after his infamous “Russia, if you’re listening,” statement, Trump personally asked Flynn to take charge and find Hillary Clinton’s missing 30,000 emails.
Flynn told Trump that he could “use his intelligence sources” to get a hold of the emails.
One of the first people he turned to was the longtime conservative activist Barbara Ledeen, who worked as a staff member on the Senate Judiciary Committee for the Republican Senator from Iowa, Chuck Grassley.
Michael Flynn and the Ledeen’s
Ledeen had been engaged in an effort to retrieve the missing 30,000 emails from the Clinton server potentially as early as December of 2015.
Flynn knew Barbara Ledeen through her husband, Michael, who had been involved in several decades worth of Washington scandals.
In April of 2011, Flynn and Ledeen met at a private Washington, DC luncheon held at the members-only Army and Navy Club. The two bonded over their mutual disdain for Iran, a country which the neoconservative Ledeen had been fixated on since the 1980s.
Flynn and Ledeen struck up a friendship and Ledeen later co-wrote Flynn’s book The Field of Fight.
Nicholas Schmidle of The New Yorker found that dozens of passages matched with Ledeen’s earlier writings on Iran.
Michael Ledeen has a long history of involvement in both election antics and high level Washington scandals.
Ledeen worked as a correspondent for The New Republic in Rome. In 1979, he and Arnaud de Borchgrave, later editor of the conservative Washington Times, authored a series of articles on then-President Jimmy Carter’s brother, Billy Carter, and his relationship with Libya.
One of the articles by Ledeen falsely asserted that Billy Carter had attended a party in which he impersonated his brother and promised to provide military technology to Libyan dictator Qaddafi.
Another article co-authored by Ledeen asserted that Billy Carter had met with the head of the Palestinian Liberation Organization Yasser Arafat.
According to The Wall Street Journal, Ledeen wrote the articles as part of a disinformation campaign coordinated with SISMI, Italian military intelligence, to tilt the 1980 election towards Ronald Reagan.
The US Ambassador to Italy at the time, Richard N. Gardner, later wrote that Ledeen had been under contract as a consultant to General Giuseppe Santovito, the chief of Italian military intelligence.
The SISMI advisor who assisted Ladeen with the “Billygate” articles, Francesco Pazienza, was later charged with extortion, possession of cocaine, leaking state secrets, and criminal associations with the mafia.
While Ledeen was never charged with a crime, he was mentioned in Pazienza’s indictment.
“With the illicit support of SISMI and in collaboration with the well known ‘Italianist’ Michael Ledeen,” the indictment read, “Pazienza succeeded in extorting, also using fraudulent means, information — then published with great evidence in the international press — on the Libyan business of Billy Carter, the brother of the then-President of the United States.”
After Reagan won, Ledeen and Pazienza established themselves as liaisons between Italian political figures and the new Reagan administration. Ledeen was reportedly rewarded for his activities by being given a position under Reagan’s Secretary of State Alexander Haig.
In 1981, Ledeen may have been involved in a disinformation campaign regarding the so-called “Bulgarian Connection,” which claimed that the 1981 assassination attempt of Pope John Paul II by a right wing Turkish terrorist named Mehmet Ali Agca had been orchestrated by the KGB.
Despite the fact the major source behind the theory was Agca himself, whose delusions included thinking that he was Jesus Chrsit, Ledeen became a vocal proponent of the theory.
In later interviews, Francesco Pazienza, admittedly a dubious source at best, claimed that Ledeen had invented the “Bulgarian Connection” and had worked with the SISMI team that coached Agca on his testimony.
Ledeen denies the charges.
Several years later, Ledeen played a central role in the Iran-Contra scandal. As special advisor to Secretary of State Haig, he was tasked with keeping tabs on the Socialist International, an organization of political parties seeking to establish democratic socialism.
In this capacity, Ledeen developed a relationship with the leader of the Israeli Labor Party, Shimon Peres.
After working for Haig, Ledeen became a part time consultant to National Security Advisor Robert McFarlane and worked in the counterterrorism office operated by lieutenant colonel Oliver North.
After being told by a Western intelligence official that the political situation within U.S. arch-nemesis Iran was fluid and that the Israelis had the best intelligence on the situation, Ledeen received permission from McFarlane to approach then-Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres to discuss the situation.
Ledeen met Peres in May 1985, who put him in contact with the former head of the Israeli military intelligence Shlomo Gazit.
The Israeli’s introduced Ledeen to an expatriate Iranian arms dealer and former SAVAK agent (the Iranian secret police under the Shah) Manucher Ghorbanifar.
Despite the fact that the CIA believed that Ghorbanifar couldn’t be trusted, Ledeen met with him anyways to discuss selling American made weapons via Israel in July and September of 1985.
It was an important step that ultimately set in motion illegal arms sales to Iran, the proceeds of which were illegally funnelled to the right wing Contra paramilitaries in Nicaragua.
During his meetings with Ghorbanifar, Ledeen was accompanied by the former deputy director of the MOSSAD, David Kimche, a Shimon Peres advisor named Adolf “Al” Schwimmer, and an Israeli arms dealer named Yaacov Nimrodi.
Ghorbanifar, who the Washington Report on Middle Eastern Affairs described as an Israeli double agent, argued that the US should sell weapons to certain elements of the Iranian regime, which Ledeen supported.
When Lawrence E. Walsh appointed Independent Counsel and tasked with investigating the Iran Contra Affair, he took a special interest in Ledeen, describing him as “more than a messenger,” but rather acting as a spokesperson for the Israeli arms merchants and for Ghorbanifar in Washington.
Walsh looked into whether Ledeen was guilty of any criminal conduct and investigated suspicions that he may have been paid off by either Ghorbanifar or the Israelis.
While Walsh and his investigators did not have access to Swiss or Israeli bank records, the documents Ledeen did provide showed no evidence of unexplained wealth.
According to author and 60 Minutes producer Alan Weisman, Ledeen “has long been suspected of having an ongoing relationship with Israeli intelligence and SISMI, the Italian intelligence service.”
Ledeen later became a member of a group of neoconservative intellectuals in Washington who advocated for regime change in Iraq and Iran.
In the aftermath of the Iraq War, a number of reporters and former intelligence professionals alleged that Ledeen used his connections with Italian intelligence to set up meetings in which forged documents falsely claiming Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had attempted to buy yellow cake Uranium from Niger were passed along and used by the Bush White House to justify the American invasion of Iraq.
Ledeen denies these charges.
In July of 2016, shortly after the release of his book co-authored by Ledeen, Michael Flynn turned to Ledeen’s wife, Barbara.
As mentioned, Barbara Ledeen had long served as Republican staffer for Senator Chuck Grassley on the Senate Judiciary Committee.
As early as December of 2015, she had been engaged in an effort to obtain Hillary Clinton’s 30,000 missing emails on the dark web.
On December 3rd, 2015, she contacted another Republican activist named Peter Smith regarding the operation.
“Here is the proposal I briefly mentioned to you,” Ledeen wrote to Smith.
“The person I described to you would be happy to talk with you either in person or over the phone. The person can get the emails which 1. Were classified and 2. Were purloined by our enemies. That would demonstrate what needs to be demonstrated.”
Peter W. Smith, Russian Hackers, and the Clinton Email Reconnaissance Initiative
Peter W. Smith was a Chicago-based investment banker and an early fundraiser for Newt Gingrich.
A longtime Republican foe of the Clinton’s, Smith played a key role in the early 1990s promoting the unsubstantiated “Troopergate” scandal in which four Arkansas state troopers alleged that then-Governor Bill Clinton had used them to arrange for sexual liaisons with various women.
Reporting on “Troopergate,” which Smith helped facilitate, surfaced the name of Paula Jones to the public, a woman who accused Clinton of sexual harassment.
Jones’ subsequent lawsuit against President Bill Clinton led to a deposition in which his false answers given under oath regarding his relationship with Monica Lewinsky led directly to his impeachment.
Ledeen shared a 25-page document with Smith that described a “Multi-Phase Email Recovery Approach” to find Hillary’s emails.
“Clinton email server was, in all likelihood, breached long ago,” Ledeen wrote to Smith, claiming further that the Chinese, Russian or Iranian intelligence services could “re-assemble the server’s email content.”
Ledeen proposed a three-phase approach to gaining access to the emails, the first two of which involved open source analysis while the third phase called for reaching out to contacts in the intelligence community “that have access through liaison work with various foreign services” to see if any foreign intelligence agencies had gained access to the Clinton server.
“Even if a single email was recovered and the providence [sic] of that email was a foreign service,” the proposal noted, “it would be catastrophic to the Clinton campaign[.]”
Smith forwarded Ledeen’s proposal to several colleagues, writing “we can discuss to whom it should be referred.”
That same month, a Smith associate named John Szobocsan met with Ledeen and her business partner Don Berlin to discuss the initiative.
“[T]here was really nothing of substance there,” Szobocsan later said of the meeting. “They were kind of like: Just give us a pile of money and we’ll go out there and look for Clinton’s emails. The whole prospect was: Let’s go out there. We knew she had an unsecure email server, probably picked up by some intelligence agency someplace, and this could be in the deep and dark web.”
In mid-December, Smith wrote to Ledeen declining to participate, saying of the proposed initiative that he “gave it a very hard look, but we do not feel this is a viable alternative for us to support.”
Despite his initial refusal to participate, Smith became involved in a similar but separate venture later in 2016.
Nor was Smith the only person Barbara Ledeen reached out to. She also contacted former Republican Speaker of the House and Presidential candidate Newt Gingrich.
According to the FBI, Gingrich “wanted to speak to others about the project” and contacted the conservative activist group Judicial Watch.
Judicial Watch then got in contact with an as-yet unidentified contractor familiar with the “deep web and dark web” to begin the search for the Clinton emails.
The project was shelved, however, after questions arose about the legal consequences of finding emails that could contain classified information.
On May 24th, 2016, in a partially redacted email that was later released following a BuzzFeed News FOIA request, Ledeen contacted Fox News’ chief intelligence correspondent Catherine Herridge, who had covered Hillary Clinton almost exclusively for the broadcaster.
“By way of introduction,” Ledeen wrote to Herridge, “we know a number of the same people — Newt Gingrich, Gen. Mike Flynn, [REDACTED] and a host of others. I do not want to cc them here because of the nature of the subject. A colleague and I would like to brief you on material we have found on the deep and dark web regarding stories you have been pursuing. The material we have found is exclusive so far and we hope that we can brief you before it disappears and is locked up because of its sensitivity.”
There is no publicly available information on the nature of the materials Ledeen possessed, nor whether Herridge took Ledeen up on her offer.
As she indicated to Herridge, Ledeen was also in contact with Michael Flynn around this time.
On June 16th, Ledeen emailed Flynn informing him that he had received an email over the end-to-end encrypted messaging app Signal.
While it is not exactly clear what the file was, the Senate Intelligence Committee speculated that it may have been the 25-page “Multi-Phase Email Recovery Approach” proposal Ledeen had sent earlier to Peter Smith.
“[P]lease tell Don [Berin], I received and was able to download the file … amazing!” Flynn replied to Ledeen later that day. “I’ll speak more off line with you about it this evening or tomorrow.”
Following Trump’s request to Flynn to use his contacts in the intelligence world and elsewhere to find Hillary’s “missing” emails, Flynn contacted both Barbara Ledeen and Peter W. Smith.
Flynn and Smith had a previous relationship. In November and December of 2015, they had been discussing potential cybersecurity business opportunities.
On November 25th, 2015, Flynn, his son Michael Flynn Jr. and partner Bijan Kian met with Smith and Szobocsan at the Army Navy Club. Two weeks later, on December 7th, a conference call took place between Flynn, Kian, Smith and Szobocsan.
While no definitive business deals emerged from these discussions, Flynn and Smith remained in contact afterwards.
Smith’s activities dedicated toward finding Hillary’s emails began to take shape in August of 2016.
On August 12th, just as he was gearing up his own operation to seek out the Clinton emails, Smith’s own emails were leaked by a Russian military intelligence created cutout and online avatar known as Guccifer 2.0.
The website used was DCLeaks.com, where Russian military intelligence first “leaked” their purloined materials before switching to Wikileaks.
Earlier in June, the FBI had informed the Illinois Republican Party that it had been hacked.
Among the hacked and released emails were communications between Smith and Illinois state Republican committeeman Richard Porter in which Smith described discussions he had with Breitbart reporter Matthew Boyle about a potential primary challenger to then-Republican Speaker of the House John Bohener.
As part of his “political reconnaissance” into the Clinton emails, Smith established the Delaware-based KLS Research, LLC, to raise money for an effort to “determine when the emails which Sec. Clinton had on her personal server and deleted will emerge from sources that managed to capture those, because of the nature of the server itself and the failure of the server to be protected.”
Smith drafted cyber security experts, lawyers and a Russian speaking investigator to assist him.
Starting on August 25th, Smith arranged for a daily conference call with “a dozen individuals and organizations with interest in learning of third parties which had access to these [Clinton’s 30,000 “missing” State Department] emails.”
“[Peter W. Smith] will be near DC tomorrow and Sunday,” Smith associate John Scoboczan wrote in an August 26th email, “allegedly reviewing some Wikileaks related documents.”
Scoboczan later told the Senate Intelligence Committee that Smith reviewed documents not yet in the possession of Wikileaks but rather held by independent hackers and that Smith wanted to obtain the documents and then pass them to Wikileaks himself.
Smith met in DC with hackers that he described to Scoboczan as “nervous acting students he thought were from Russia” who “were concerned about Putin.”
While Scoboczan said in a contemporaneous email that “nothing worthwhile” came of the meetings, he also mentioned that Michael Flynn Jr. had been involved.
The Wall Street Journal later reported that US intelligence agencies had information that Russian hackers were discussing among themselves ways to steal emails from Clinton’s server and then transmit them to Flynn through an intermediary, though it was unclear if those hackers were the same as the ones Smith interacted with in August of 2016.
“On the weekend of August 27th-28th,” Smith wrote in a later email, “KSL organized four meetings in Virginia with such parties who claim to have access [to Clinton’s “missing” emails], and separate meetings with the parties were conducted.”
“Our conclusion was that this access was made by more than these groups, all of whom are non-state players. The parties having the access are motivated by the desire to receive compensation. We stated that our desire was not to purchase such, and specifically avoided any discussion of sums that such parties may seek, and made clear that we were not a source of compensation to them.”
“Our advice to these parties, was that they needed to demonstrate that they indeed did have access, and that the emails that they have were not altered or have any deletions been made. Despite this, the parties seek to remain engaged, and we plan subsequent contact to verify authenticity, as if such could be demonstrated, then the market would exist for them.”
“These parties have ties and affiliations to Russia. and have concerns about their safety.”
Smith then alludes to a potential trip to Moscow, which never actually took place. Despite Smith’s multiple claims that these meetings took place, the Special Counsel’s investigation was unable to establish that Smith had in fact met with Russian hackers.
In his testimony on these events before the Senate Intelligence Committee, John Scoboczan stated, “I get the call in the morning: I’m not going to be in the office; I’m going to be gone; I’m in Washington. He comes back, he tells me he had this meeting in this hotel. It was like really clandestine. He’s trying to make it up, and all these things.”
Scoboczan continued, “He goes out and he said that they were meeting in separate rooms and they were looking about getting these Clinton emails that these hackers had recovered. And — one of them he thought might have been a Russian group, with like Russian students, but they were real fearful of Putin and all this stuff, that they might get caught; and another group, and all these things.”
On August 28th, Smith sent an encrypted email with the subject “Sec. Clinton’s unsecured private email server” in which he described his activities to a group of undisclosed recipients that included Trump campaign co-chair and policy advisor Sam Clovis.
Sam Clovis was in regular contact with George Papadapoulos, who was told by Joseph Mifsud just over four months earlier on April 26th that the Russians had dirt on Hillary Clinton in the form of emails.
While Clovis later claimed that he “could not recall” Papadopoulos telling him about the Russians being in possession of the emails, it seems likely that Papadopoulos did tell him and they later both lied about it.
Read my description of Clovis’s interactions with George Papadopoulos here.
The Senate Intelligence Committee sent a criminal referral to the DOJ accusing Clovis of lying to them under oath about his contacts with Smith.
Smith distributed another email on August 31st with the subject “2016 Political Reconnaissance” in which he provided a description, quoted above, of his efforts to reach out to hackers, including some that were Russian. KLS Research LLC was established on September 2nd, and it received $30,000 to cover the expenses of the Clinton email search.
Over the course of the initiative, Smith recruited numerous cyber security experts to both search for the Clinton emails and authenticate the ones they found.
On September 5th, Smith reached out to a British cybersecurity researcher named Matt Tait, who had been commenting via Twitter on disclosures from the State Department regarding Clinton’s email practices during her tenure as Secretary of State.
Tait initially thought that Smith was contacting him about the DNC emails that had been leaked by Wikileaks in July.
“Yet Smith had not contacted me about the DNC hack,” Tait later wrote, “but rather about his conviction that Clinton’s private email server had been hacked — in his view almost certainly both by the Russian government and likely by multiple other hackers too — and his desire to ensure that the fruits of those hacks were exposed prior to the election. Over the course of a long phone call, he mentioned that he had been contacted by someone on the “Dark Web” who claimed to have a copy of emails from Secretary Clinton’s private server, and this was why he had contacted me; he wanted me to help validate whether or not the emails were genuine.”
As Tait refused to sign a non-disclosure agreement with Smith, he never got to see the emails or find out who Smith’s contact from the “Dark Web” was.
Tait explained to Smith that he believed the hack of the DNC had been orchestrated by the Russian government, which was using the stolen documents in an influence campaign against the US.
He warned Smith that it was possible the individual he met on the dark web was involved in that very effort.
“Smith, however, didn’t seem to care,” Tait later wrote. “From his perspective it didn’t matter who had taken the emails, or their motives for doing so. He never expressed to me any discomfort with the possibility that the emails he was seeking were potentially from a Russian front, a likelihood he was happy to acknowledge. If they were genuine, they would hurt Clinton’s chances, and therefore help Trump.”
Tait ultimately declined to participate.
“We have engaged the e-discovery team of a prominent DC law firm to work over the Labor Day weekend,” Smith wrote in early September, “to “Test Match” two separate email files captured from the Clinton private server by two different third parties. The purpose is to insure [sic] the integrity of the data by random check points in same locations of each file as we determine that nothing has been “added” or “left out.””
An assistant to Smith later told the Senate Intelligence Committee that he “possibly” engaged with a DC lawyer, whose name remains non-public information, to pursue this task.
It remains unknown what, if anything, they discovered about the purported Clinton emails.
Neither the Special Counsel’s Office, nor the Senate Intelligence Committee, were ever able to determine whether Smith ever came into possession of the actual 30,000 emails deleted from Clinton’s personal server.
Smith reconnected with Barbara Ledeen, who had been in touch with Michael Flynn.
On September 10th, Ledeen wrote to Flynn, “We are at the point of rubber hitting the road re the project you know I have been working on.”
Five days later, Ledeen replied to an email sent by Smith.
“Saw the very interesting note below and was wondering if you had some more detailed reports or memos or other data you could share because we have come a long way in our efforts since we last visited. I think that if we had a chance to review what the UK folks surfaced, we could contribute on our side and give you an update on new findings. We would need as much technical discussion as possible so we could marry it against the new data we have found and then could share it back to you “your eyes only.”
Ledeen believed that she had come into possession of Clinton’s missing 30,000 emails via the dark web.
She then turned to Erik Prince, who paid for a tech advisor to attempt to authenticate emails. Prince later told the Special Counsel’s Office that the advisor determined that the emails were not authentic.
Read my in-depth description of Erik Prince and his role in arranging a meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and Israeli private intelligence company Psy Group and a pedophile representing two Gulf princes here.
In addition to his communications with Ledeen, Smith’s effort purported to involve members of the Trump campaign and the Republican establishment.
In early September, Smith distributed a document that summarized his efforts entitled the “Clinton Email Reconnaissance Initiative.
The document stated that Smith and KLS Research LLC were working “in coordination” with the Trump campaign, “to the extent permitted as an independent expenditure organization.”
The document claimed that Smith was working with the following members of the Trump campaign: Steve Bannon, Kellyann Conway, Sam Clovis and Michael Flynn.
Beyond the Trump campaign, Smith also claimed to be coordinating with the Republican National Committee, Judicial Watch, Citizens United and a conservative activist named James O’Keefe.
The extent of these individuals and organizations participation in the “Clinton Email Reconnaissance Initiative,” or if some of them were even involved at all, remains largely unknown.
While there are no known communications between Smith and Bannon, Smith was in contact with Charles “Chuck” C. Johnson, a former Breitbart reporter who knew Bannon.
Similar to Bannon, there are also no known communications between Smith and Kellyanne Conway.
Kellyanne’s (no former) husband, George Conway, ran in the same circles and was involved in the same anti-Bill Clinton activities as Smith in the early 1990s and they may have known one another from those days.
As mentioned above, Sam Clovis had been among the recipients of an August 28th email sent by Smith.
“Although it wasn’t initially clear to me how independent Smith’s operation was from Flynn or the Trump campaign,” Matt Tait later wrote, “it was immediately apparent that Smith was both well connected within the top echelons of the campaign and he seemed to know both Lt. Gen. Flynn and his son well. Smith routinely talked about the goings on at the top of the Trump team, offering deep insights into the bizarre world at the top of the Trump campaign. Smith told of Flynn’s deep dislike of DNI Clapper, whom Flynn blamed for his dismissal by President Obama. Smith told of Flynn’s moves to position himself to become CIA Director under Trump, but also that Flynn had been persuaded that the Senate confirmation process would be prohibitively difficult. He would instead therefore become National Security Advisor should Trump win the election, Smith said.”
There is no publicly available information linking the Smith email operation to the Republican National Committee.
He had, however, been involved in fundraising efforts for the RNC and therefore would have had contacts in the organization.
Judicial Watch, as was explained earlier, was briefly involved in the Barbara Ledeen effort along with Newt Gingrich, but appears to have walked away over legal concerns.
Smith did communicate directly with David Bossie, the President and Chairman of Citizens United.
“Congratulations,” Smith wrote to Bossie on September 6th, the day Bossie had been named Trump campaign deputy chairman, “for your continued front line work on the search for the missing/deleted Clinton emails. We have our own initiative on this that I would like to discuss with you by phone, as we believe these were taken from the totally unsecured clintonmail account by numerous parties, several of whom we have contacted.”
While there is no evidence of conservative activist James O’Keefe’s involvement in the Peter Smith email hunt, he would later be found to be involved in hijinks perpetrated by individuals who were.
O’Keefe is the founder of the controversial conservative activist group Project Veritas, which engages in dirty tricks, undercover operations and deceptively edited video production targeting mainstream media organizations, liberal politicians and progressive political groups.
In 2017, Erik Prince, who partially funded the Barbara Ledeen effort, connected O’Keefe’s Project Veritas with former American and British intelligence operatives, including an ex-MI6 spy named Ricahrd Seddon, to help him infiltrate Democratic congressional campaigns and labor organizations.
O’Keefe also worked with Ledeen and Seddon in an effort to discredit H.R. McMaster, the National Security Advisor who replaced Michael Flynn following his resignation from the office in early 2017.
Smith further claimed in an email sent on September 20th that the “Kushner Group is behind the initiative.”
No evidence has come to light substantiating that claim.
At some point, Smith connected with Charles C. Johnson, a 28-year old, somewhat infamous figure then associated with the online alt-right who had worked for a time at Breitbart under Steve Bannon.
Johnson was well connected to influential elements within the conservative movement, including Rebekah Mercer. Johnson knew Peter Thiel, having become acquainted with him during Theil’s fight to destroy the liberal gossip website Gawker.
Johnson first met Smith in 2013, when the two worked together compiling opposition research against Barack Obama.
Interestingly, in the Smith emails leaked by the GRU on the website DCLeaks.com in August of 2016, Smith can be seen forwarding articles from Johnson’s conservative news website GotNews.
The leaked emails also show that Smith received the contact information for Breitbart reporter Peter Boyle from Johnson.
“He wanted me to introduce him to Bannon, to a few others, and I sort of demurred on some of that,” Johnson later said of Smith, in an interview with Politico Magazine. “I didn’t think his operation was as sophisticated as it needed to be, and I thought it was good to keep the campaign as insulated as possible.”
Instead, Johnson contacted a “hidden oppo network” of right wing researchers and informed them of Smith’s efforts to find the missing Clinton emails.
“The magnitude of what he was trying to do was kind of impressive,” Johnson told Politico. “He had people running around Europe, had people talking to Guccifer.”
Johnson’s claim that Smith was in contact with Guccifer2.0, an online avatar operated by Russian military intelligence, has yet to be corroborated.
Johnson later refused to cooperate with the Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigation.
Johnson also claims to have put Smith in contact with Andrew Auernheimer, also known by online alias “weev,” a notorious hacker and troll, an an alleged Neo-Nazi.
After being imprisoned for hacking activities that revealed a flaw in AT&T’s security that exposed that data of 114,000 iPad users, Auernheimer was released from prison in 2014 radicalized and sporting a Swastika tattoo.
Upon leaving prison, Auernheimer fled the United States and moved to Ukraine where he served as the chief technical officer for the Neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer, which after being kicked off American servers was briefly hosted by a Russian server.
The Daily Stormer’s founder Andrew Anglin, a Neo-Nazi Putin sycophant, has lived in Russia and voted from Trump in an absentee ballot sent from the Russian city of Krasnodar.
Despite Anglin’s claims that the site is unaffiliated with the Russian government, networks of social media accounts and botnets that appeared to originate from Russia have promoted the site’s content.
While it is unclear whether Smith and Auernheimer collaborated, Auernheimer does appear to have been involved in a 2017 effort to interfere in the French presidential election by leaking fake documents designed to hurt the candidacy of Kremlin critic Emmanuel Macron.
Charles Johnson had several links to Wikileaks.
On September 20th, 2016, he published an article on his GotNews website at 9:30 Eastern time in which Johnson claimed he had, “obtained a memo from a George Soros-tied PR firm that is launching a website to spread conspiracy theories about Donald Trump’s connections to Russia.”
Johnson further stated that [t]he site, PutinTrump.org, is set to be launched tomorrow morning on Wednesday, September 21, by public relations firm Ripple Strategies.”
Johnson operated a Slack chat group which included among its members a Florida-based lawyer named Jason Fishbein, who had done work for Assange throughout 2015 and 2016.
After someone on the group discovered the password to the site and posted it on the chat group, Fishbein sent it to a contact of his at Wikileaks.
Within two hours, Wikileaks shared the PutinTrump.org URL and its password in a tweet from their official account.
“About 2 hours after our original article, Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks repeated our discoveries,” Johnson subsequently tweeted. “Guess which big leaks organization reads GotNews & WeSearchr on the downlow! Come on Julian, let’s work together. WikiLeaks & WeSearchr is a match made in heaven. We can take down Hillary together.”
Shortly after midnight, Wikileaks sent a private Twitter message to Donald Trump Jr. that contained a link to the site, to which he responded.
In August of 2017, Johnson travelled with Republican Representative Dana Rohrabacher to the Ecuadorian Embassy in London where, in a meeting that they claimed was held with Trump’s knowledge.
They met with Assange and offered him a presidential pardon if he would deny Russian involvement in the DNC hack-and-leak operation.
Read my article that contains a section describing the many connections Dana Rohrabacher has with Russia here.
The day before Wikileaks began releasing John Podesta’s stolen emails, the Smith associate John Scoboczan wrote to Johnson describing a “distribution arrangement” with Wikileaks.
“We have not seen the content,” Johnson replied to Scoboczan. “This is all done by third parties. We believe the emails are accurate but are unable to definitely confirm such.”
Johnson continued, “The distribution arrangements involve a sharing with Wikileaks, who would then release them. The second means of distribution is to identify these emails through key phrase/sentence identifiers in the dark and deep web.”
In the subsequent investigations into the Smith operation, questions were raised as to whether he may have gotten his hands on the Podesta emails before they were released by Wikileaks.
This issue is made confusing by the fact that Smith was looking for Hillary Clinton’s “missing” 30,000 emails from her days as Secretary of State, rather than the DNC and Podesta emails that Wiileaks ultimately released.
In particular, the Special Counsel’s Office exhumed two files from a backup of Smith’s computer that had originally been attachments from the Podesta emails.
The creation date of the files was October 2nd, five days before Wikileaks released them publicly. A forensic examination, however, established the creation date was not the same as when Smith downloaded the file, the timing of which could not be determined.
According to The Wall Street Journal, a person close to Smith reported that he repeatedly claimed that he knew ahead of time about the release of the Podesta emails.
On October 7th, Wikileaks began releasing the Podesta emails, coinciding with the public exposure of the Access Hollywood tape.
Peter Smith “batch downloaded” each daily Wikileaks release and expressed a desire to connect with Julian Assange.
On October 10th, Smith sent an email to “supporters and prospective supporters” providing updates on the Wikileaks release and soliciting further funding. Smith forwarded the email to Michael Flynn Jr.
“We were fortunate enough to have had the Clinton-related emails which came to our attention from several separate sources placed in Wikileaks hands,” Smith wrote in an October 15th email to Michael Flynn, Flynn Jr., Barbara Ledeen and Sam Clovis, “which we are certain they had from countless other parties. In a few week period we identified a handful of individuals that had obtained access to the unprotected Clinton emails. All were relatively inexperienced persons looking for notoriety. This is similar to the novice level hackers groups who with ease accessed commercial email accounts of senior national security figures.”
Two weeks later, on October 24th, Smith’s relationship with Charles Johnson appears to have soured.
“I talked to Steve,” Johnson wrote to Smith, likely referring to Steve Bannon, “who will compel you to turn over to us all 30,000 emails you located and referred to Wikileaks. BB [Breitbart] wants to publish them first.”
Johnson continued, “We do not give a rats ass what happens to you, and will turn you over [to] the Feds for prosecution if you do not comply.”
It’s unclear if Smith replied to Johnson, though obviously Breitbart never came into possession of Hillary’s emails.
Four days later, on October 28th Smith described in an email a “tug-of-war going on within WikiLeaks over its planned releases in the next few days.”
Smith further suggested that Wikileaks “has maintained that it will save its best revelations for last, under the theory this allows little time for response prior to the U.S. election November 8.”
According to an attachment to the email, Wikileaks would have “All 33k deleted Emails” by “November 1st.”
This, as we know, did not happen.
Smith, however, maintained contact with Wikileaks. On November 7th, the day before the election, he described in an email to an associate “contact I had with one of its [WikiLeaks] legal team members.”
As stated earlier, none of the subsequent investigations were able to establish whether Peter Smith ever actually came into possession of the 30,000 emails.
As we have seen, he represented that he had done so to his supporters, including to members of the Trump campaign, and Steve Bannon and Charles Johnson appeared at one point to believe that there was a strong possibility he had.
The Special Counsel investigation was unable to establish if Peter Smith was in contact with Russian hackers or if he or Barbara Ledeen ever laid their hands on Clinton’s “missing” 30,000 emails.
Nor was the Senate Intelligence Committee able to find evidence that Smith gained access to any Wikileaks materials before their public release or gained access to the “missing emails.”
One explanation for this was put forward by a friend of Smith’s named Thomas Lipscomb.
“I knew Peter Smith for 14 years and watched him devolve from a canny financier and a player in the Chicago GOP to a bankrupt octogenarian,” Lipscomb wrote in Real Clear Politics, “cadging money from his friends and trying to raise funds on a loopy mission to somehow get his hands on the 33,000 deleted Hillary Clinton emails he was sure would guarantee Trump’s election. The man who helped finance David Brock’s Troopergate 25 years earlier wanted his last hurrah.”
There may be other reasons that the investigators couldn’t get their hands on evidence to substantiate the claims Smith made, and figures like Steve Bannon and Charles Johnson appeared to believe, that in fact he had met with Russian hackers, and did get his hands on the 30,000 emails.
Smith used a gmail account operating under the pseudonym Robert Tyler, which could be accessed by several people.
Smith occasionally asked that people convey messages to him by accessing the account and saving a note as a draft, a means to prevent the actual sending of a message that could later be seen by investigators.
This faulty method of concealment, known as foldering, was also used by Paul Manafort and Konstantin Kilimnik.
While investigators were able to gain access to the foldered messages to Smith, they were never able to determine who actually wrote them.
One message from the Robert Tyler account seen by The Wall Street Journal, dated October 11th with subject “Wire Instructions — Clinton Email Reconnaissance Initiative,” suggested that Smith had managed to raise $100,000 from four financiers and pitched in another $50,000 himself for an unknown purpose.
An unknown sender, identifying himself only as ROB, wrote the following message to Smith, “This $100k total with the $50k received from you will allow us to fund the Washington Scholarship Fund for the Russian students for the promised $150K.”
The Journal was unable to determine whether such a scholarship fund exists. “The students are very pleased with the email releases they have seen,” the unknown sender continued, “and are thrilled with their educational advancement opportunities.”
Northern Trust Suspicious Activity Reports leaked to BuzzFeed News show that between January 2016 and April 2017, 88 suspicious cash withdrawals were made from nine accounts controlled by Peter Smith for a total of $140,000.
In addition to his Robert Tyler email address, Smith also used a commercially available encrypted address. The computer drives used by Smith, that were later seized by the FBI, were also encrypted.
Furthermore, the entire purpose of finding a hacker on the dark web is to conceal your communications and activities from law enforcement and Federal Investigators.
On May 14th, 2017, ten days after he had been contacted by The Wall Street Journal and asked about his activities during the 2016 election, Peter W. Smith checked into a Rochester, Minnesota hotel and proceeded to place a bag over his head that was attached to a source of helium.
His body was discovered nine days later, with a suicide note stating that “NO FOUL PLAY WHATSOEVER” had been involved in his death. Smith wrote that he had decided to end things because of a “RECENT BAD TURN IN HEALTH SINCE JANUARY, 2017,” with the timing related “TO LIFE INSURANCE OF $5 MILLION EXPIRING.”
Michael Flynn later pleaded the Fifth Amendment, invoking his right against self-incrimination to avoid testifying before the Senate Intelligence Committee.
On November 2nd, 2016, less than a week before his candidate Donald Trump was going to be elected President, Flynn sent out a cryptic tweet: “U decide — NYPD Blows Whistle on New Hillary Emails: Money Laudering, Sex Crimes W Children, etc… MUST READ!”
The Tweet linked to a false story that had been spreading online alleging that an NYPD detective had discovered a Democratic Party child sex ring while searching through Anthony Weiner’s emails.
The remarkable implications of Flynn’s tweet are unmistakable, he was accusing the Democratic nominee for President Hillary Clinton of involvement with pedophilia.
This false conspiracy theory would later morph into yet another fabricated conspiracy theory that came to be known as Pizzagate that was propagated on the online image board 4Chan.
The theory alleged that in the John Podesta emails leaked by Wikileaks there were coded references to a child sex ring being operated out of popular Washington, DC-based restaurant Comet Pizza.
From here, it was only a few short steps to what would ultimately become the widely subscribed to QAnon conspiracy theory, among whose chief proponents was Michael Flynn and Michael Flynn Jr.
That still lay in the future, immediately following the election of Trump, Flynn was tapped to be the incoming National Security Advisor and had plenty of business beyond child sex ring conspiracy theories to deal with, in particular, he had business regarding sanctions with the Russian Ambassador, Sergey Kislyak.