Yesterday, news leaked that the Democratic National Committee’s opposition research file on Trump had been hacked by Russian state-sponsored hackers. Today, what appears to be that same file — 200+ pages on how to take down Trump — has been leaked to news outlets by a self-proclaimed hacker.
Both Gawker.com and The Smoking Gun have published the same file today. They say they were sent it by a hacker calling himself “Guccifer 2.0,” a reference to the infamous Romanian hacker who penetrated the networks of senior politicians (including Hillary Clinton) in 2013, and is now in the custody of the FBI.
According to Gawker, his motive is to be “a fighter against all those illuminati that captured our world.”
The document published by Gawker is a detailed, 200-page dossier on Trump. It outlines Trump’s past statements, including anything that could be used against him, or to undermine his current policy positions. It also compiles a list of strategies and weak points that can be targeted, none of which are particularly surprising or novel.
It’s difficult to say exactly who this document is more damaging for. The dossier doesn’t have a lot of “dirt” — on first glance, everything is a matter of public record, and there’s no smoking gun to fraud or fake hair extensions.
But for the DNC, evidence of a serious hack would be embarrassing, to say the least. The authenticity of the document is still in question, but Gawker says it also received a number of other documents from the hacker, which look to also be from the DNC. In total, the hacker is claiming to have 100GB of data from the DNC.
Given Clinton’s background with cybersecurity, a leak from the DNC — even if it’s not an organization directly under her control — is going to be bad PR. If the remainder of the documents leak (and there’s anything juicy in there), this could turn into a full-blown disaster for the Democrats.
