September 30, 2016 | No Comments
A website with ties to the Russian government on Friday leaked the private emails of two more people.
The email dumps were posted as password-protected files on the purported anti-secrecy site DC Leaks, which security researchers believe to be a front for the Russian intelligence hackers suspected in a summer-long digital assault on the U.S. election.
DC Leaks, which previously exposed the personal emails of Colin Powell, provided POLITICO with the passwords to access two new caches of emails. One allegedly is from an account for Sarah Stoll, a State Department employee. The other is allegedly the personal emails of Beanca Nicholson, who volunteered for Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
An initial review of the leaks did not yield any eyebrow-raising messages.
The Stoll emails stretch from June 2015 to this past June, while Nicholson’s emails date from last December to July.
Nicholson’s emails resembled those of another government staffer, Ian Mellul, whose Gmail account was exposed on DC Leaks.
Like Mellul, a White House advance staffer who volunteered for the Clinton campaign, Nicholson exchanged emails with Clinton’s advance staffers that contained detailed information about campaign events.
One Nicholson email shows the campaign’s “movements document” for a June 27 trip to Chicago, while another announces a conference call to plan trips to Nevada, New York and Illinois.
In a March 14 email, Clinton staffer Jason Chung flagged a reporter’s tweet about activists’ plans to fly anti-Clinton banners during a Chicago trip. “Need a tight tight protest plan,” Chung wrote.
Several of the group email threads in Nicholson’s inbox include Clinton campaign volunteer Sarah Hamilton, one of the first people to have their emails leaked this summer.
The other email dump features messages from Stoll, now an assistant general manager at Blair House, the government-owned residence across from the White House.
She previously served in the military under Gen. Philip Breedlove, the former supreme commander of NATO forces in Europe, whose emails DC Leaks posted in July.
In an Aug. 11, 2015, email to Randell Bumgardner, the general manager of Blair House, Stoll — who was then applying for her current job — listed Breedlove as a reference.
“I will provide him with your contact information, so he can contact you while he is traveling,” she wrote. “For security purposes, I do not want to give out his info.”
Bumgardner confirmed to POLITICO that Stoll still worked at Blair House.
A private cybersecurity firm has publicly linked DC Leaks to Russia. Privately, U.S. officials have reportedly reached the same conclusion.
It’s believed the site is used to launder emails that suspected Moscow-backed hackers have stolen during a widespread cyber campaign that has compromised Democratic organizations, party officials, the personal emails of Clinton campaign staffers and even state voter registration databases.
The intelligence community reportedly has high confidence that Moscow had a hand in at least a digital intrusion at the Democratic National Committee.
The DNC hack likely led to the release of nearly 20,000 internal emails on WikiLeaks. The trove of messages fueled allegations that the supposedly impartial DNC had favored Clinton’s presidential campaign of that of insurgent rival Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). Former DNC Chairman Debbie Wasserman Schultz resigned in the wake of the leak.