GOP operative was warned about Russia before bizarre suicide

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Raw Story‏ @RawStory 5m5 minutes ago
HOLY SH*T https://www.rawstory.com/2017/10/gop-operative-was-warned-about-russia-before-bizarre-suicide-you-dont-want-to-play-this-game/ (Newsweek)

GOP operative was warned about Russia before bizarre suicide: ‘You don’t want to play this game’

____At the time Smith was seeking to verify the alleged stolen Clinton emails, intelligence agencies had determined Russia was behind the hack of thousands of emails from the Democrat National Committee servers, which were subsequently released to WikiLeaks.

A sheaf of documents, including a statement police called a suicide note, in which Smith declared he was ill and his insurance policy was expiring, lay next to his body. Medical records list his cause of death as asphyxiation.

Investigators will be seeking to clarify whether Smith was acting as unofficial Trump campaign operative, or was a fantasist. For (Matthew) Tait (British security analyst who was recruited by Smith in his search for the Hillary Clinton emails), though, there was no doubt that Smith's search for the emails led him to reckless behavior.

"In my conversations with Smith and his colleague, I tried to stress this point: if this dark web contact is a front for the Russian government, you really don’t want to play this game. But they were not discouraged," he wrote.

"They appeared to be convinced of the need to obtain Clinton’s private emails and make them public, and they had a reckless lack of interest in whether the emails came from a Russian cut-out. Indeed, they made it quite clear to me that it made no difference to them who hacked the emails or why they did so, only that the emails be found and made public before the election."


read: https://www.rawstory.com/2017/10/gop-operative-was-warned-about-russia-before-bizarre-suicide-you-dont-want-to-play-this-game/