DNC Email Archive

On 22 July 2016 I published 19,252 emails and 8,034 attachments from the accounts of seven senior staff of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), the governing body of the US Democratic Party, among them its communications director and several finance officials. The emails date from January 2015 to 25 May 2016. A later second publication brought the archive to 44,053 emails and 17,761 attachments.

Coverage centred on emails in which DNC officials spoke disparagingly of Senator Bernie Sanders' campaign during the primary contest with Hillary Clinton, including one questioning his religious belief (The Guardian). On 24 July 2016, on the eve of the party's national convention in Philadelphia, the DNC chair, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, announced that she would step down after the convention.

The release became a central episode in subsequent US investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

In June 2016 the DNC and a cybersecurity firm it had engaged said Russian hackers had breached its systems, and a persona calling itself 'Guccifer 2.0' claimed to have done so (The Guardian). On 13 July 2018 a federal grand jury in Washington indicted 12 officers of Russia's military intelligence agency, the GRU, alleging that they hacked the DNC and staged releases of stolen documents, including through an organisation identified as 'Organization 1', which released over 20,000 DNC emails and other documents on 22 July 2016 without disclosing Guccifer 2.0's role. Special Counsel Robert Mueller's report (2019) named WikiLeaks, describing GRU officers sending us an encrypted archive via the Guccifer 2.0 persona on 14 July 2016 and us confirming on 18 July that we had 'the 1Gb or so archive'.

I have not identified our source. In January 2017 I said that 'our source is not the Russian government and it is not a state party' (Fox News). The Mueller report stated that file-transfer evidence and other information 'discredit WikiLeaks's claims about the source of material that it posted', while noting that it could not rule out the transfer of documents through intermediaries. The indictment and the Mueller report treat the published emails as genuine DNC material stolen by the GRU.