Days after speaking with The Wall Street Journal about his attempts to work with Russian hackers to obtain deleted e-mails from Hillary Clinton’s private server, Republican operative Peter W. Smith died of an apparent suicide in a Minnesota hotel room, the Chicago Tribune reports. “NO FOUL PLAY WHATSOEVER,” read a suicide note left behind at the scene. “RECENT BAD TURN IN HEALTH SINCE JANUARY, 2017 . . . TO LIFE INSURANCE OF $5 MILLION EXPIRING.”

Smith, 81, who had implied to those he approached that he was working for former Trump campaign adviser Michael Flynn, though he’d later tell the Journal that Flynn was not involved in his search for the e-mails, was said to be in poor health, former associates told the Tribune. Shane Harris, who wrote the explosive Journal story about Smith weeks ago, said that he “had no indication that [Smith] was ill or planning to take his own life” after the Tribune published its story Thursday. The hotel in Rochester, Minnesota where Smith was staying is known to be frequented by Mayo Clinic patients, but a spokeswoman did not confirm to the Tribune if Smith had been a patient there.

Smith was found with a bag over his head with a source of helium gas attached. According to the Tribune, asphyxiation with helium is a method promoted by the Final Exit Network, a non-profit that offers information to people who suffer from terminal illness and want to commit suicide. Police, who do not suspect foul play, also found a Walmart receipt for “Helium Jumbo,” among other items, although they said they had not reviewed security camera footage to see who made the purchase.

In Harris’s initial story, he wrote that U.S. intelligence officials, who have been investigating Russia’s involvement in the 2016 election, thought Russians had discussed how to send the 33,000 Clinton e-mails to Flynn using an intermediary. After the Journal published its story about Smith, cyber-security expert Matt Tait wrote an account of his interactions with Smith, who had tried to recruit Tait before the election to help him obtain Clinton’s e-mails. “Smith, however, didn’t seem to care,” Tait wrote. “From his perspective it didn’t matter who had taken the e-mails, or their motives for doing so. He never expressed to me any discomfort with the possibility that the e-mails he was seeking were potentially from a Russian front, a likelihood he was happy to acknowledge. If they were genuine, they would hurt Clinton’s chances, and therefore help Trump.”

A private-equity executive and a longtime opposition researcher for conservative groups, Smith told Harris last month that he had found several hacker groups—two of them Russian—that claimed to have access to Clinton’s e-mails, although he couldn’t confirm their authenticity. Flynn, who was fired in February just weeks after starting in his role as national security adviser to Trump and making misleading comments about his conversations with Russia’s U.S. ambassador, has not commented on Smith’s search for Clinton’s e-mails, or any involvement Flynn himself may have had with Smith in the process. Trump campaign officials have said that if Flynn was involved in Smith’s e-mail search at all, it wasn’t in his capacity as a Trump campaign adviser.