The US intelligence community has “high confidence” that the DCLeaks hacktivist website, which published emails from former four-star general and secretary of state Colin Powell last September, operated as a front of sorts for Russian intelligence efforts, according to a report published Friday by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
“We assess with high confidence that Russian military intelligence (General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate or GRU) used the Guccifer 2.0 persona and DCLeaks.com to release US victim data obtained in cyber operations publicly and in exclusives to media outlets,” the report, “Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections,” reads in part.
“Content that we assess was taken from e-mail accounts targeted by the GRU in March 2016 appeared on DCLeaks.com starting in June,” the DNI report states. DCLeaks did not immediately return a request for comment from TheDC.
The DNI report notes that the “high confidence” label “generally indicates that judgments are based on high-quality information from multiple sources. High confidence in a judgment does not imply that the assessment is a fact or a certainty; such judgments might be wrong.”
The Daily Caller was the first to report that Colin Powell’s hacked emails had been published by DCLeaks. Liberal outlets like The New York Times later used DCLeaks to report on the contents of Powell’s emails. In a story titled, “Colin Powell, in Hacked Emails, Shows Scorn for Trump and Irritation at Clinton,” the Times’ Michael Shear noted that “It is unclear who operates DCLeaks.com.” (RELATED: Exclusive: Colin Powell’s Personal Email Hacked)
DCLeaks also published hacked documents from liberal financier George Soros’s Open Society Foundations in August. (RELATED: Leaked Soros Memo Says ‘Globalization’ Will ‘Increase Migration Pressures’)