GOP Researcher Who Sought Clinton Emails Had Alt-Right Help
Peter Smith’s quixotic effort to obtain Hillary Clinton’s deleted emails from Russian hackers got a boost from a pro-Trump activist with White House ties.
By BEN SCHRECKINGER July 11, 2017
The saga of Peter Smith’s quest to obtain 33,000 emails deleted by Hillary Clinton—an effort now at the center of intrigue swirling around the Donald Trump campaign’s ties to Russia— keeps getting weirder.
In his Hail Mary bid to tip the election to Trump, the Republican private equity executive enlisted two controversial alt-right activists to help him understand the workings of the internet and make contacts in Trump’s orbit, according to interviews with those involved and emails obtained by POLITICO.
The activists, the journalist-turned-entrepreneur Charles Johnson and his former business partner Pax Dickinson, agreed to help Smith’s quixotic mission, which failed to track down copies of Clinton’s emails. Johnson is a polarizing figure who was banned from Twitter in 2015 after promoting an effort to “take out” a Black Lives Matter activist but maintains ties to White House officials. Smith also reached out to “Guccifer 2.0”—an alias the U.S. intelligence community has linked to Russian state hackers—and was advised to seek the help of a white nationalist hacker who lives in Ukraine.
Smith’s doomed effort, which brought him into contact with hackers he believed were tied to the Kremlin and was first reported last month by the Wall Street Journal, has emerged as a topic of intense interest as investigators probe ties between the Trump campaign and Russia. Understanding Smith’s relationships could hold the key to the question of whether or not Trump’s campaign colluded with the Kremlin: Federal investigators are probing an apparent attempt by Russian government hackers to obtain the deleted emails and provide them to former national security adviser Michael Flynn through a third party, the Journal also reported. The paper was unable to identify the Russians’ intended intermediary, but suggested it may have been Smith, who had boasted of his ties to Flynn.
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http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/07/11/gop-researcher-who-sought-clinton-emails-had-alt-right-help-215359
