“Just weeks after she started preparing opposition research files on Donald Trump’s campaign chairman Paul Manafort last spring, Democratic National Committee consultant Alexandra Chalupa got an alarming message when she logged into her personal Yahoo email account,” Michael Isikoff reports for Yahoo News. “‘Important action required,’ read a pop-up box from a Yahoo security team that is informally known as ‘the Paranoids.’ ‘We strongly suspect that your account has been the target of state-sponsored actors.'”
“Chalupa’s message is among nearly 20,000 hacked internal DNC emails that were posted over the weekend by WikiLeaks as the Democratic Party gathered for its national convention in Philadelphia,” Isikoff reports. “Those emails have already provoked a convulsion in Democratic Party ranks, leading to the resignation of DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz in the wake of posted messages in which she and other top DNC officials privately derided Bernie Sanders and plotted to undercut his insurgent campaign against Hillary Clinton.”
“But Chalupa’s message, which had not been previously reported, stands out: It is the first indication that the reach of the hackers who penetrated the DNC has extended beyond the official email accounts of committee officials to include their private email and potentially the content on their smartphones,” Isikoff reports. “Two sources familiar with the breach said that the hackers’ reach was far more widespread than initially thought and includes personal data about big party contributors and internal “vetting” evaluations that include embarrassing comments about their business dealings (as well as gossipy internal emails about the private affairs of DNC staffers). One newly posted email discusses a prospective DNC donor’s offering to host a fundraiser with President Obama, noting that he had previously been convicted in a case involving allegations that he killed 50 horses, as part of an insurance fraud scheme. Party officials are bracing for more damaging document dumps after Labor Day.”
Read more in the full article here.
“As I write this, the Democratic Convention is about to begin. The chair of the Democratic National Committee, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz just stepped down as the head of the DNC over the leaked e-mails showing that the DNC had apparently conspired against the Bernie Sanders campaign to hand the nomination over to Hillary Clinton,” Rosch writes. “Almost immediately after her resignation, Wasserman-Schultz was given a position within the Clinton campaign as an honorary chair. With cronyism, loyalty is rewarded even after a scandal.”
“The whole campaign will be about Clinton’s e-mail scandal, the DNC’s e-mail scandal, cronyism, and big money corruption in politics,” Rosch writes. “This was a tough primary battle and there is no doubt that Secretary Clinton won more pledge delegates but as these recent DNC e-mails have shown, the deck had been stacked against Sanders from the beginning and even with that, no SuperPAC, and little name recognition, he has prevented Clinton from getting enough pledge delegates to clinch the nomination. He would almost certainly have won the nomination if the DNC had played fair and the media had given him equal time.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Sordid.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews readers too numerous to mention individually for the heads up.]
