Russian Hackers Went After Hillary Clinton's Emails 5 Hours After Trump 'Joked' About It
Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s partially-redacted report of his investigation was loaded with glimpses into TrumpWorld's vast corruption. And one of the most shocking is that back in 2016, when Trump urged Russia to hack Hillary Clinton during the election, Kremlin operatives were all ears and moved to attack Clinton just five hours later.
Russia breached dozens of Democratic National Committee and Democratic Congressional Committee computers and stole hundreds of gigabytes of data from the organizations during the presidential elections. In a July 2016 press conference, held after the DNC revealed that it had been compromised by Russian hackers, Trump told reporters that he hoped the cybercriminals had obtained the thousands of emails deleted from the candidate's private email server.
"They probably have her 33,000 emails that she lost and deleted," he said. "Because you’d see some beauties there."
"I will tell you this," Trump infamously concluded, "Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”
Trump's administration would later claim the president was joking, but according to Mueller’s report, here’s what hackers affiliated with the Russian military did hours later:
Within approximately five hours of Trump’s statement, GRU officers targeted for the first time Clinton’s personal office. After candidate Trump’s remarks, Unit 26165 created and sent malicious links targeting 15 email accounts at the domain [redacted] including an email account account belonging to Clinton aide [redacted.] The investigation did not find evidence of earlier attempts to compromise email accounts hosted on this domain.
The report also found that Trump asked members of his own campaign to find the Clinton emails for him.
According to Mueller, while Russia worked to boost Trump’s chances at winning the presidency and his campaign was both aware of and pleased about that fact, none of the interactions between Russia and Trump associates rose to the level of conspiracy. Still, the report didn’t exonerate Trump nearly as thoroughly as Attorney General William Barr's Thursday morning press conference suggested. "While the investigation identified numerous links between individuals with ties to the Russian government and individuals associated with the Trump Campaign,” reads the report, "the evidence was not sufficient to support criminal charges."
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