On June 24, 2016, WikiLeaks DMed Guccifer 2.0 about Celebrating Brexit

Among the Roger Stone-related warrants released last night is one, dated November 6, 2017, that obtained the WikiLeaks and Julian Assange Twitter accounts.

On or about June 24, 2016, Guccifer 2.0 wrote to Target Account 1, “How can we chat? Do u have jabber or something like that?” I know from my training and experience that “Jabber” is an instant messaging service. Target Account 1 wrote back, “Yes, we have everything. We’ ve been busy celebrating Brexit. You can also email an encrypted message to [email protected]. They key is here.” 1 A web link was attached to the message. I know from my training and experience that an encryption “key” is a string of information created for scrambling and unscrambling data.

On July 6 — the day when WikiLeaks asked for Hillary materials — Guccifer 2.0 bitched about WikiLeaks’ slow submission process and claimed to have sent Brexit-related documents days earlier.

On or about July 6, 2016, Guccifer 2.0 wrote to Target Account 1, “have u received my parcel?” Target Account 1 responded, “Not unless it was very recent. [we haven’t checked in 24h].”2 Guccifer 2.0 replied, “I sent it yesterday, an archive of about 1 gb. via [website link]. [A]nd check your email.” Target Account 1 wrote back, “Wil[l] check, thanks.” Guccifer 2.0 responded, ” let me know the results.” Target Account 1 wrote back, “Please don’t make anything you send to us public. It’s a lot of work to go through it and the impact is severely reduced if we are not the first to publish.” Guccifer 2.0 replied, “agreed. How much time will it take?” Target Account 1 responded, ” likely sometime today.” Guccifer 2.0 wrote back, “will u announce a publication? and what about 3 docs [I] sent u earlier?” Target Account 1 responded, ” I don’t believe we received them. Nothing on ‘Brexit’ for example.” Guccifer 2.0 wrote back, “wow. have you checked ur mail?” Target Account 1 replied, “At least not as of 4 days ago . . . . For security reasons mail cannot be checked for some hours.” Guccifer 2.0 wrote back, “fuck, [I] sent 4 docs on brexit on jun 29, an archive in gpg[.] ur submission form is too fucking slow, [I] spent the whole day uploading 1 gb.”

Later that day, amid an ongoing discussion about how to best target Clinton, including WikiLeaks’ request for Clinton Foundation documents, Guccifer 2.0 wrote back and claimed to have sent Brexit documents successfully.

On or about that same day, Guccifer 2.0 sent Target Account 1 a message reading, “sent brexit docs successfully.”

The affidavit, as whole, provides more details about how WikiLeaks and Guccifer 2.0 communicated. But it also suggests that, in addition to playing to their mutual loathing for Hillary Clinton, Guccifer 2.0 also tried to appeal to WikiLeaks’ claimed support for Brexit.

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27 replies
  1. Pete says:

    Why do you think Mueller didn’t interview Assange? One would think that he would have, at least to close out the conspiracy angle those on the right bring up from time to time.

      • Pete says:

        Ask Assange? He was supposedly wanting to give testimony in exchange for a deal and that deal was shut down by Comey for some reason. If no deal, then subpoena him. Mueller knew where he was, like the entire world did. Perhaps Ecuador wouldn’t have given much trouble given how Assange wanted to testify. Yet, no attempts were even made. So, why? Is there some reason why Mueller would not want to interview Assange given that Assange was an important cog in the Clinton email/Russia interference scheme? It just fuels the Trumpistas.

        • bmaz says:

          This is fucking laughable. Assange wanted a pardon and a free ride, and, no, nobody in their right mind would give that to him. It was just yet another of his craven attempts to blackmail and extort the US. You have no idea in the world what Mueller did, despite your consistent bleating that you do, because that is protected information, whether under Rule 6 or the ongoing investigation exception. And, yeah, it is seriously an ongoing investigation. You also understand that there are certain regulations and proscriptions about chatting with direct grand jury targets, right? But, hey, thanks for dropping by to peddle some Assanginista bunk!

        • Pete says:

          Mueller didn’t even try to talk to Assange. One would think that he would have at least tried, if he wanted to find out the truth. But perhaps your automatic discounting of it will work with the faithful.

          [Welcome to emptywheel. Please use a more differentiated username when you comment next as we have several community members named ” Pete” or “Peter.” Thanks. /~Rayne]

        • bmaz says:

          Or maybe you are a flyby here and do not really know squat about the facts or applicable law and protocols. And I feel extremely comfortable saying that is indeed the case, given your comment agenda. Thanks for playing though! For the record, here we are informed, not “the faithful”.

          [Also, and I will say this to you exactly once: differentiate your screen name; “Pete” is too common. We have a contributor and multiple longer term commenters that we don’t want to have to be confused with your
          assanginista bunk. Maybe you can go back to your original handle, “Peter Klein”. Or pick another one and announce it. Whatever, but make a change]

        • emptywheel says:

          Pete:

          You might familiarize yourself with 1) the public record 2) the ways Mueller obtained testimony from those who were unwilling to testify with him.

          Until then, please don’t ask questions that would explain why Mueller didn’t interview Assange.

  2. PhoneInducedPinkEye says:

    It’s increasingly difficult for WikiLeaks cheerleaders to honestly separate the journalistic function of WL from Assange’s personal political motives, but boy will they try.

    • emptywheel says:

      This was the WikiLeaks account, not Assange, so not necessarily him. Still, I find it shocking that that account would embrace Brexit like that, and do so so forwardly when speaking to someone claiming to be a Russian cut-out.

  3. Chetnolian says:

    You will I hope forgive me if I say that I am much more interested in what the Brexit documents might have been,and why they might be significant, given that this was after the referendum had been held? Or have I not been concentrating and do we (the Emptywheel community) think we already know.

    I ask because our government seems to be using COVID 19 as a cover for going for the most hard-right, uncompromising Brexit possible while no one is looking and industry, which will be most prejudiced, is simply concerned about mass insolvency arising from the virus lockdown

  4. vicks says:

    Looking at this from as safe a distance as possible, how can there NOT be the equivalent of a super villain coordinating this?
    Seriously, who is Assagne reporting to?
    How about Steve Bannon? And god help us, William Barr?
    Bard Parscale in is the news again today, the “web guy” who figured out micro targeting and won Trump the election? Where the heck did he come from?
    Roger Stone is an idiot, and yet seemingly intelligent people who I’m sure saw him as hugh risk worked with him anyway?
    Since the beginning I have felt that Russia was far too savvy to allow boneheads like Trump, or members of his crew like Cohen or Kushner anywhere near the more serious work of getting Trump elected.
    Trump winning the election (and re-election) was important to an awful lot of people for various reasons. Some as “innocent” as the pro life movement or the grift of lobbying groups like the NRA.
    Why do they have the same stink as Brexit?
    Why does it always seem like we learn about a dot that oddly seems to connect one or two of them?

    • Ken says:

      I think it may be a coalition of so called “fellow travelers.” Right wing Groups like the Family, The Koch Brothers, The Atlas Network, The Father/Daughter nut job think tank the Trump’s election team had ties to (Covered extensively at this site, but the name won’t come to me) and Putin, etc. The right wing billionaires have meetings throughout the year, each and every year, to figure out how to push their agendas. Remove laws in their way (Deregulation), purchase the media (Whoever the media controls the message), etc.

      The last time they tried this, when they tried to overthrow FDR, they realized they moved too fast and too openly. They learned instead to take their time and erode society from the inside out like the most insidious cultural cancer their evil minds could create. What we’re seeing now is their endgame that they have been working toward for decades. That’s why McConnell’s only goal is to stack the courts with sycophants.

      Unfortunately, even if we win this November, I don’t see any of this stopping until they have triumphed. I say that, because so far, for decades there hasn’t been any actual consequences for their behavior. As such, the beatings will continue until morale improves.

    • Tom Marney says:

      It’s because Trump is the Golden Child of triggering right-wing authoritarians, and leaving the core of the Trump project intact was clearly judged more important to certain players than actually getting him elected, which was always an extremely iffy proposition. For the Russians especially, the more likely outcome would’ve been that President Clinton and the entire upper echelons of the national security establishment would’ve been loaded for bear, so to speak, but that incessant attacks by both the Trumpian right and the Bernian left, starting with the “rigged” election and leading god knows where, would’ve paralyzed the nation politically.

      Beyond that, there’s the likelihood that the purpose of what the bad guys are doing is actually to convince the three percent of Americans who own half the firearms in our vastly-overarmed society to start killing people. I wouldn’t be surprised if Putin took a look at ’90’s Yugoslavia and thought, “Hmm, how could we make this happen in the United States? We should work on that.” And Trump was the missing piece of that puzzle.

  5. harpie says:

    Like Chetnolian, I wonder what the significance of the BREXIT docs [mis-sent on June 29 and finally sent/received on July 6] might be.

    June 22 WL message to GU2.0 “[s]end any new material here for us to review and it will have a much higher impact than what you are doing”
    June 23 Brexit referendum
    July 24 WL to GU2.0 “We’ve been busy celebrating Brexit”
    June 29 GU2.0 sends to WL “4 docs on brexit on jun 29, an archive in gpg[.]” [it evidently is not received]
    July 5 GU2.0 sends “parcel” to WL; “an archive of about 1 gb. via [website link]”
    July 6 Conversation bet. GU2.0 and WL July 5 “parcel” has arrived, [they discuss], but June 29 docs [4 docs on brexit […] an archive in gpg[.]] have not:
    WL to GU2.0 “I don’t believe we received them. Nothing on ‘Brexit’ for example.” Later that day the docs are successfully sent/received.
    Around July 19: [Marcy:] Fresh off dining with some Brexiteers, Stone calls Trump and tells him, “within a couple of days, there would be a massive dump of emails that would damage Hillary Clinton’s campaign,” to which Trump responds, “wouldn’t that be great.”
    August 8 Stone: [tweet] 12:33 AM – 8 Aug 2016 When I had dinner with Nigel Farage who lead the Brexit campaign in the UK he told me the polls had been rigged in that fight. MSM trick.

    It’s probably nothing, but there are quotes around the word Brexit on 7/6.

    Some observations from Carole Cadwalladr about a December 2016 meeting at Trump Tower:
    https://twitter.com/carolecadwalla/status/1069364058976067591
    2:53 PM – 2 Dec 2018

    This is amazing. Watch @nigel_farage greet Robert Mercer in lobby of Trump tower, Dec 15, 2016.

    Amazing for many reasons:
    1) Mercer bankrolled Trump, Breitbart UK & Cambridge Analytica
    2) @andywigmore told @ObserverUK Mercer helped them because Brexit was “petri dish” for Trump
    3) @andywigmore & @arron_banks told @ObserverUK they visited Russian embassy on Nov 18, 2016 – 6 days after first visit with Farage to Trump tower. And one month before this one. If you want a possible communication channel between the Kremlin & Trump, there’s one right here

    • Vicks says:

      I am on a”need to know basis” with anything tech related so sorry if this question is obvious, how does one ‘misssend” something like the Brexit docs they are referring to?
      One would think that when transferring stolen data something “check the address twice hit send once” would be taught in hacker 101.
      Did it go into someones spam folder or some Amazon cloud?
      Second question is the Aug 8th Stone tweet about the Brexit polls being fixed.
      Is this old news?
      The polls got the Brexit vote wrong but just like much of the polling just before the 2016 Election it was within the margin of error
      Has it been established that this tweet about msm and fixed polls was Stone playing games or is there something more to his comment?

    • Rayne says:

      I want to leave a memo/reminder here that these interrelated operations — Brexit and the election of Trump — had a rather high concentration of people who were in investment banking and hedge funds. That photo the day of the Brexit results showing a giddy Nigel Farage pointing to a monitor displaying the British pound sterling collapsed is important. It provides a clue as to how the parties may have reimbursed their investments, paid accomplices, and funded the next operation by shorting the pound since they already knew the outcome.

      The breadth of rigged polls may not have been seen outside social media; they could have been pushed at Facebook users to encourage/discourage voting depending on who the microtargeted voter was. The local news also made a lot of covering both the local polling stations and the weather, further depressing youth voters who were more likely to vote after work rather than earlier in the day.

      We can expect exactly these plays again this fall given how much Sinclair has acquired of local television and how absolutely awful Facebook has been about policing ads and content to prevent manipulation of voters.

      • Vicks says:

        Where do polling companies get their contact lists?
        A little of that “micro targeting” could easily locate the names and contact info of people that most likely would answer questions I a predictable way.
        You wouldn’t have to manipulate the results, or ask questions in a leading way.

  6. Cat Silver says:

    It’s hard to see who really benefits from Brexit, other than racists and people who can make a lot of money betting that the pound will tank. As it is, the farmers have had to fly workers in from Romania despite the pandemic, because it turns out the majority of British people can’t afford to work 12-hour days for minimum wage while paying accommodation costs for a wonky caravan in the middle of nowhere. Who would have thunk it?

    Westminster has done such a terrible job with Covid-19 that it must be difficult for even the most enthusiastic Brexiteers to consider pushing the economy further down the dumper at the end of this year. Certainly Dominic Raab, an arch Leaver and a man who makes a bag of hammers look like a Mensa candidate, got very twitchy when Keir Starmer raised it during Prime Minister’s questions yesterday.

    Do we still have a prime minister? Has anyone seen him?

    Anyway, Nicola Sturgeon has said she’s prepared to close the border if England comes out of lockdown too early. I have absolutely no clue how that would be enforced given that there’s no existing infrastructure at the border to monitor who’s going in or out, but I’ll read any proposal with sceptical interest.

    Wishing you all the best as always.

    • Vicks says:

      I keep saying to be suspicious of anyone whose words or actions pump up the divide.
      The more outrageous the issue conservatives are forced to defend the more they are owned by who ever is pulling the strings,
      It’s a lot easier for me to imagine Trump pointing out targets to hate and just making shit up on a daily basis as a way to build loyalty than it is for me to believe that anyone is that stupid enough to say the things that come out of his mouth.

  7. jaango says:

    I have a couple of good friends that are aligned with Assange and Wikileaks, but then, they are invested in today’s Right’s politics. As such, they are looking to yesterday’s politics, and not to the future within the approximate next ten years.

    To wit, the political patch that becomes the Indigenous Free Trade Agreement. Today, both Trump and Arizona’s Governor want to keep the border wall ‘open’ given that as of on a daily basis, 2,500 trucks cross the Southern Border here in Arizona, and given the current season, Arizona is awash in Tomatoes and Grapes.

    And which brings me to the subject matter that is Brexit. Should Brexit occur, the IFTA will become married to the European economy. Of course, Great Britain will advocate for a Free Trade Agreement with the United States, or until the IFTRA rejects this economic arrangement with the USA. Therefore, the seasonality within the next ten years, means that Europe will be awash in tomatoes and grapes, among the other major food products not readily available to Great Britain. And out of this self-sacrifice, Great Britain will have to become an agrarian economy, which reduces its corporate capitalism.

    • Rayne says:

      “Great Britain will have to become an agrarian economy, which reduces its corporate capitalism.”

      LOL Have you read much about life in Britain before the industrial revolution? What exactly do you think the House of Lords are, let alone the Tories?

      • jaango says:

        Outside of the Middle East and NYC, Great Britain, or specific to London, Great Britain is a major banking center.

        [FYI, please note this was hung up in moderation because one of the Name/Email/URL fields was filled incorrectly. /~Rayne]

        • Rayne says:

          Britain will still be capitalist even if it cuts itself off from the EU. Its capitalism begat our capitalism. Its capitalism underpins its monarchy.

          Capitalism is “an economic and political system in which a country’s trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state.” As a semi-monarchical model, the royals as part of the state own/control some of the means of production. The rest is owned/controlled by private owners, most of whom are in the House of Lords, own members of the House of Commons through patronage, or as wealthy members of the Tory party.

          And once the Brexiteers have their way, Britain won’t be great banking power for the same reasons California isn’t. There’s enough trade to constitute the fifth largest economy, on par with California, but not enough on which to standardize banking.

          “Freedom” from EU membership through Brexit means Britain willfully becomes an also-ran.

        • Dopey-o says:

          Speaking of brexit, when will the report on Russian involvement in the british vote see the light of day? It may shed light on the 2016 American election.

  8. tvor_22 says:

    WRT Guccifer2:

    https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.204569/gov.uscourts.dcd.204569.29.11.pdf

    “During the course of its investigation, the FBI has also identified a series of searches that appear to relate to the personas Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks, which predate the public unveiling of those two personas. In particular, between May 17, 2016, and June 15, 2016 24 Case 1:19-mc-00029-CRC Document 29-11 Filed 04/28/20 Page 30 of 38
    (prior to the publication of the Guccifer 2.0 WordPress blog), records from Google show that searches were conducted for the terms “dcleaks,” “guccifer,” and ”guccifer june,” from IP addresses within one of two ranges: 172.56.26.0/24, 107.77.216.0/24.3 These IP ranges are assigned to T-Mobile USA, Inc., and AT&T Mobility LLC, respectively, and, according to Google, the searches were all conducted from Florida. On or about June 13, 2018, this Court issued a search warrant for information associated with these searches and, in particular, for the full search histories associated with the CookieIDs that conducted the search.4 As set forth in the affidavit submitted in support of that search warrant, IP logs obtained from Twitter showed that STONE used multiple IP addresses within the ranges 172.56.26.0/24 and 107.77.216.0/24 to log into his Twitter account @RogerJStoneJr. A Facebook account controlled by STONE also used an IP address within the range 172.56.26.0/24 on or about June 13, 2016, to purchase a Facebook advertisement.”

    • tvor_22 says:

      I wish the dates were more specific. I don’t trust the FBI with this come to think of it:

      ” FBI has also identified a series of searches that appear to relate to the personas Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks, which predate the public unveiling of those two personas. In particular, between May 17, 2016, and June 15, 2016″

      June 15 is the time G2 showed up, so the FBI might be kind of full of shit if stone only started googling Guccifer on that exact date. dcleaks had domain registered on April 19, it was not well known by anyone best we know and not publicized until early June, true but still…

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