12 Russians indicted by Mueller for presidential hacking offenses

RT
Fri, 13 Jul 2018 17:52 UTC

© Yuri Gripas / Reuters

Twelve Russian intelligence officers were indicted for hacking the Democratic party and the Hillary Clinton campaign, the US Department of Justice announced.

The suspects are members of the GRU, the Russian military intelligence, and are alleged to have hacked into the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), the Democratic National Committee (DNC), and the Clinton campaign during the 2016 presidential election.

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein announced the indictment on Friday in a press conference, accusing the twelve of "conspiring to interfere with the 2016 presidential election."

The hackers infiltrated their targets by using spear phishing and malware, and created fictitious online personas 'DCLeaks' and 'Guccifer 2.0' to disseminate the hacked materials. "Both were created and controlled by the Russian GRU," Rosenstein claimed.

The indictment does not mention WikiLeaks by name, but refers to it as "Organization 1" that "had previously posted documents stolen from US persons, entities and the US government."

It was WikiLeaks that published the emails from the private account of Clinton campaign manager John Podesta, starting in October 2016.

"There is no allegation in this indictment that any american citizen committed a crime" or that anything affected the vote count or election results, Rosenstein said.

Named in the indictment are members of alleged GRU Units 26165 and 74455, based in Moscow: Viktor Netyksho, Boris Antonov, Dmitry Badin, Ivan Yermakov, Aleksey Lukashev, Sergey Morgachev, Nikolay Kozachek, Pavel Yershov, Artem Malyshev, Aleksandr Osadchuk, and Aleksey Potemkin.

The announcement comes just days before the Monday summit between US President Donald Trump and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin in Finland.

Comment: Russian's Foreign Ministry has accurately branded this indictment as a politically motivated attempt to spoil the upcoming Helsinki summit:

"It is regrettable that spreading false information has become the norm in Washington, and [the] indictments are based on openly political motives," the ministry said on Friday, responding to the announcement by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. "The question is for how long will they continue to flog this shameful comedy that disgraces the US."

Claiming that the people indicted are intelligence officers and hackers does not make them either, the ministry said, adding that the allegation of illegal entry into Democratic Party computers is not backed by any factual evidence.

"The goal of this 'information attack' is obviously to spoil the atmosphere prior to the Russian-American summit," the ministry said in a statement, referring to the forthcoming meeting between Russian President Vladimir Putin and US leader Donald Trump. "The influential political forces in the US, that are opposed to the normalization of relations between our countries and have spread open slander for the past two years, are desperately trying to make the best use of yet another fake," it added.

The ministry also warned that "sooner or later, the initiators of these lies will have to answer for the damage they have done to American democracy, undermining trust in it for their own personal gains."