Former FBI official: Hacker likely extradited for Clinton probe
By Rudy Takala (@RudyTakala) • 4/8/16 2:57 PM
A former assistant director for the FBI said Friday that authorities would not have gone to the trouble of extraditing a notorious Romanian hacker unless he was key to their investigation of Hillary Clinton.
Marcel Lehel Lazar, known online as "Guccifer," was extradited from a Romanian prison at the end of March and relocated to a facility in Alexandria, Va. He is scheduled to remain in the country for 18 months while he faces a nine-count federal indictment on hacking charges.
Before his 2014 conviction in Romania, Guccifer hacked a range of public figures around the world. That included, most notably, former Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal, who exchanged private messages with Clinton during her tenure as secretary of state.
Through that action, Guccifer obtained emails Clinton had sent using her secret
[email protected] account. He subsequently distributed at least some of that stolen information online.
Ron Hosko, a former assistant director of the FBI's Criminal Investigative Division, told Fox News that it was unlikely U.S. authorities would have taken Guccifer out of a foreign prison unless they had a use for him. "Because of the proximity to Sidney Blumenthal and the activity involving Hillary's emails, [the timing] seems to be something beyond curious," Hosko said.
A 2015 interview that Matei Rosca conducted with Guccifer corroborates Hosko's assessment. Guccifer lacks any real programming skills, Rosca said, but may still hold information on Clinton to which no other person on the globe has access.
"Guccifer has no programming skills and guessed passwords of prominent public figures after reading their biographies," Rosca said. Calling him "a simple and delusional man" with "a conspiratorial streak," Rosca said he also claimed to have "unpublished hacked material in the cloud, some of it relating to the Middle East ... He said he was expecting to collaborate with U.S. security services when the time is right. Presumably that would be now."
The FBI is expected to conclude its investigation into Clinton's surreptitious server with interviews of Clinton and more than a dozen of her associates. However, observers have increasingly groused about the length of time being taken to reach that closing stage of the investigation. If authorities are in fact obtaining new information from Guccifer, that might explain the delay.
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