A former British government intelligence official has said he was approached last summer by a veteran Republican operative to help verify hacked Hillary Clinton emails offered by a mysterious and most likely Russian source.



The incident, recounted by Matt Tait, who was an information security specialist for GCHQ and now runs a private internet security consultancy in the UK, may cast new light on one of the pathways the Russians used to influence the 2016 presidential election in Donald Trump’s favour.

Tait’s account, published on the Lawfare national security blog, demonstrates a willingness to collude with the Russians on the part of the Republican operative, Peter Smith, who had a long history of hunting down damaging material about the Clinton family on behalf of the GOP leadership. It also points towards possible collusion by Trump aides.

According to Tait, Smith claimed to be working with Trump’s then foreign policy adviser, Michael Flynn, and showed documentation suggesting he was also associated with close Trump aides including Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway.

They have denied having had contact with Smith, who died in May at the age of 81, about 10 days after talking to the Wall Street Journal about his pursuit of the emails. Smith told the paper he had operated independently of the Trump campaign.

In his account, Tait writes that he thought Smith had approached him because of his analysis of Democratic National Commitee (DNC) emails stolen by suspected Russian hackers and then published online.

Smith first contacted Tait “out of the blue” in late July, he wrote, around the time 20,000 hacked DNC emails were published by WikiLeaks and Trump publicly called for Russia to look for emails from the private server used by Clinton when she was secretary of state.

“Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” the Republican candidate said at a press conference in Florida on 27 July 2016.

“Smith implied that he was a well-connected Republican political operative,” Tait writes. “Yet Smith had not contacted me about the DNC hack, but rather about his conviction that Clinton’s private email server had been hacked – in his view almost certainly both by the Russian government and likely by multiple other hackers too – and his desire to ensure that the fruits of those hacks were exposed prior to the election.

“Over the course of a long phone call, he mentioned that he had been contacted by someone on the ‘Dark Web’ who claimed to have a copy of emails from Secretary Clinton’s private server, and this was why he had contacted me; he wanted me to help validate whether or not the emails were genuine.”

Tait writes that he warned Smith about serious implications if the emails were being offered by Russian intelligence as part of a wider campaign to disrupt the election.

“Smith, however, didn’t seem to care,” he writes. “From his perspective it didn’t matter who had taken the emails, or their motives for doing so.”

Smith claimed to be closely connected to Flynn and his son, Tait writes, and seemed to be well versed in inner goings on and rivalries within the Trump campaign.

Tait also writes that it is “certainly possible that [Smith] was a big name-dropper and never really represented anyone other than himself”, but adds: “If that’s the case, Smith talked a very good game.”

In September, Tait writes, Smith sent him a cover page for opposition research on Clinton that named Flynn, Bannon, Conway under the title: “Trump Campaign (in coordination to the extent permitted as an independent expenditure).”

Tait ended his contact with Smith the same month, he writes, when Smith asked him to sign a non-disclosure agreement. Tait remains unsure if the material Smith received was genuine and from Russian intelligence or whether Smith was being scammed.

However, the Wall Street Journal quoted US officials as saying that investigators looking into Trump links with Moscow had “examined reports from intelligence agencies that describe Russian hackers discussing how to obtain emails from Mrs Clinton’s server and then transmit them to Mr Flynn via an intermediary”.

Flynn resigned as Trump’s national security adviser in February, after it emerged he had not disclosed the extent of his conversations with the Russian ambassador to Washington, Sergey Kislyak. His role in Trump camp links with the Kremlin is part of a much broader investigation being run by special counsel Robert Mueller.

His lawyer said in March: “General Flynn certainly has a story to tell, and he very much wants to tell it.”