Guccifer 2.0 Cleaned Up His “Collusion” Three Months after the Fact

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I discovered something curious when I was working on a timeline recently.

Most posts on the Guccifer 2.0 site appear to have been modified only in the immediate timeframe after publishing (though, significantly, the first post was modified after the some of the first documents were recorded as being tweaked). But one post was modified, very slightly, months after it was posted.

That’s the Guccifer FAQ post. When it was first published on June 30, 2016 and as late as September 27 of that year, a paragraph on Hillary in the post read this way:

As for me, I see great differences between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Hillary seems so much false to me, she got all her money from political activities and lobbying, she is a slave of moguls, she is bought and sold. She never had to work hard and never risked everything she had. Her words don’t meet her actions. And her collision with the DNC turned the primaries into farce. [my emphasis]

On October 2, 2016, that paragraph was corrected to read like this:

As for me, I see great differences between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Hillary seems so much false to me, she got all her money from political activities and lobbying, she is a slave of moguls, she is bought and sold. She never had to work hard and never risked everything she had. Her words don’t meet her actions. And her collusion with the DNC turned the primaries into farce. [my emphasis]

That is, over three months after the post was originally posted, someone went back in and changed “collision” into the word that has taken on such loaded meaning since, “collusion.” Probably, “collusion” was the word intended from the start; perhaps either a keyboard fat-finger (on an English language keyboard, with the “u” and the “i” adjacent) or an autocorrect produced “collision” instead. While the paragraph and the post are rife with the linguistic inaccuracies — such as the use of “mogul” in the same paragraph — seen in other Guccifer 2.0 posts, in context “collusion” is the word that makes sense.

To be clear: I’m not making a big deal about any likely explanations for the incorrect word in the first place, nor am I making a big deal that that word — “collusion” — is the one thing that someone cared enough about to correct months later. “Collusion” is not a word Guccifer 2.0 used elsewhere, not even in posts where it might have been easy to do so. I’m not ascribing any grand significance to this change. I just find it curious.

As I disclosed in July, I provided information to the FBI on issues related to the Mueller investigation, so I’m going to include disclosure statements on Mueller investigation posts from here on out. I will include the disclosure whether or not the stuff I shared with the FBI pertains to the subject of the post. 

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11 replies
  2. Kevin says:

    I’m trying to find some significance in the fact that the mistake was probably a result of using an English language keyboard. But that seems like the most likely thing anyone would use for English language stuff, including GRU officers.

  3. gedouttahear says:

    So when t has been yelling “no collusion” all this time, he was referring to the Guccifer June 30 post! It would have been so much simpler if he simply said, “collision yes, but no collusion.” Then he wouldn’t have been contradicted. (And of course he could have made reference to the Guccifer post.)

  4. Rayne says:

    Interesting. I wonder when Team Trump decided to project the conspiracy onto Hillary and the DNC? Doing a search for “Hillary DNC collusion” brings up nearly two years of concerted right-wing talking points to this end.

    Nearly.

    Was G.2.0’s content revised to sync with the rest of the disinformation op because it didn’t come up in search?

  6. pseudonymous in nc says:

    Updated: 2016-10-02T19:19:15+00:00, so 22:15 Moscow time. Or 15:19 EDT.

    The “we hacked the Clinton Foundation” post was probably being drafted at the time. And as EW noted last year before the GRU indictment, there’s a Roger Stone connection to the timing of that post:

    https://www.emptywheel.net/2017/09/01/guccifer-2-0-what-about-those-dccc-and-clinton-foundation-documents/

    Almost as if a native English speaker pointed out the typo to someone with access to the WP backend.

    • emptywheel says:

      Yes, the coincidence of the Clinton Foundation head fake is interesting. The word collusion does show up in a pingback from a fake news site in that post, the headline of which dates back to 2011 or something, based off the earlier hack of Clinton.

  7. orionATL says:

    the importance, the message, is in the meticulous attention to detail. someone considered it a matter of substantial concern to straighten this out. normally, rapid reading would cause us to fail to notice and skip right over a small matter like this. then again, maybe the gru hired themselves a technical writer.

  8. Michael Keenan says:

    It has come to light that FBI knew that Seth Rich was in regular contact with Wikileaks. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYzB96_EK7s&t=59s. Could Guccufer timeline possibly match this FBI timeline of Seth activitie? As per your last archived Ray McGovern article and Assange report here: https://www.emptywheel.net/2018/09/21/the-assange-exfiltration-would-have-taken-place-in-the-wake-of-joshua-schulte-tor-activity/ – where are we a year later. New information like this Sy Hersh tape has some bearing on your new hack-and-leak. The technical issue of download capacity for a hack or leak and use of vault 7 software to lay down a false track of true hacker does not appear to have been addressed by you Marcy. I would be happy to be brought up to date by my favorite potty-mouth,

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