The Podesta Emails

John Podesta, who had been White House chief of staff to President Bill Clinton from 1998 to 2001, chaired Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign. Between 7 October and 7 November 2016 — the eve of the presidential election — I released emails from his personal email account in 33 tranches, amounting to more than 50,000 documents, according to the Special Counsel's report.

The releases included excerpts from Clinton's paid speeches to Wall Street firms, which had not previously been made public and which her primary rival Bernie Sanders had called on her to release, as well as internal communications among senior campaign staff and correspondence relating to the Clinton Foundation (Mueller report; The Guardian). The first tranche appeared less than an hour after a US media outlet released video considered damaging to the Republican candidate, Donald Trump (Mueller report).

According to the July 2018 indictment of 12 GRU officers, on or about 19 March 2016 a GRU officer sent the campaign chairman a spearphishing email disguised as a Google security notification; its instructions were followed, and on or about 21 March the conspirators stole the contents of the account, more than 50,000 emails. The last email I released from the account was dated 21 March 2016. The Mueller report concluded that the GRU released stolen Clinton campaign and DNC documents through its own online personas and later through WikiLeaks.

The Clinton campaign declined to confirm or deny the authenticity of the documents at the time (The Guardian). I have not identified our source; I stated in January 2017 that the source was not a state party, a claim the Mueller report said was discredited by the evidence it had gathered.