A Republican operative who says that her own email account was hacked after she spoke out publicly against Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign said on Tuesday that she believes Trump and his associates were directly involved in the email hacks of the Democratic National Committee servers that ultimately threw the Democratic 2016 convention into disarray, according to an account by the news site Raw Story .
United States intelligence agencies concluded in a 2017 Director of National Intelligence assessment that the hacks were carried out by Russian intelligence agencies. In July of 2018, Russia investigation Special Counsel Robert Mueller indicted 12 Russian intelligence officers, charging them with carrying out the hacking of the DNC servers, and a similar cyber attack on Hillary Clinton Campaign Chair John Podesta, as The Inquisitr reported.
But Jacobus said in a column published on the Republican site A House United , that Trump likely knew about the Russian hacks in advance, and may have even taken part in planning the cyber attacks, which resulted in the stolen emails being released online by the site WikiLeaks.
“Not only did Trump know WikiLeaks had the hacked emails of his political ‘enemies,’ but that it’s likely Trump and his associates arranged in advance to have the emails hacked,” Jacobus wrote in her Tuesday column.
Jacobus says that her own emails were hacked in 2016 and that she suspects that Trump was also behind the attack against her. According to a Politico report, the FBI was initially investigating the hack of Jacobus’ email account, but in October of 2018 turned the investigation over to Mueller. Why the FBI referred the case to Mueller, as well as what Mueller’s investigation has learned about the Jacobus hack, remains unclear.
But Jacobus is not the first to allege that Trump at least knew in advance about the hacking or release of the emails that were stolen by Russian spies. In congressional testimony last month, Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen said that he was present when Trump took a call from longtime associate Roger Stone. In that call, Cohen testified, Stone informed Trump that WikiLeaks would soon release hacked Democratic emails, as The Inquisitr reported.
A Trump campaign aide was told in April of 2016 about the Russian-hacked emails, and according to court papers filed by Mueller, told others about the emails, including an Australian diplomat and the Greek foreign minister. Mueller’s filings also describe Papadopolous as highly eager to impress Trump and his top campaign officials, as The Inquisitr reported.
“Hard to square this with the idea that he would keep this explosive information secret, while telling people outside of the campaign about it,” wrote journalist Judd Legum, on his Twitter account.