A story went up at Politico just after 5 EST this morning titled Manafort faced blackmail attempt, hacks suggest. Written by Ken Vogel, David Stern and Josh Meyer, the story is subtitled “Stolen texts appear to show threats to expose relations between Russia-friendly forces, Trump and his former campaign chairman.”
The story begins like this:
A purported cyber hack of the daughter of political consultant Paul Manafort suggests that he was the victim of a blackmail attempt while he was serving as Donald Trump’s presidential campaign chairman last summer.
The undated communications, which are allegedly from the iPhone of Manafort’s daughter, include a text that appears to come from a Ukrainian parliamentarian named Serhiy Leshchenko, seeking to reach her father, in which he claims to have politically damaging information about both Manafort and Trump.
The source of the story is texts hacked from the phone of Manafort’s daughter.
Leshchenko has denied sending the texts, which came from two different addresses. They were urging the daughter to have Manafort get in touch with the sender with threats of going to the FBI or the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine if he did not. The email address to which Manafort was supposed to respond is known to journalists as a means of reaching Leshchenko.
Manafort did confirm the authenticity of the texts hacked from his daughter’s phone. And he added that, before the texts were sent to his daughter, he had received similar texts to his own phone number from the same address appearing to be affiliated with Leshchenko.
The story seems somewhat thin and more than a bit speculative. But it is Politico, which means it will get eyeballs.
A couple of more snips.
The hacked correspondence from his daughter’s phone, much of which is unrelated to Paul Manafort’s work, appears to have first surfaced a couple weeks ago in an anonymous post on a so-called darknet website run by a hacktivist collective.
While the post hints in its introductory text that the hacker or hackers have additional information on Manafort, it includes only a handful of screenshots of texts from Manafort’s daughter’s cellphone and some apparently supporting data files.
The images began circulating this week in political circles in Kiev and Washington.
The released material does not include dates on which the texts were supposedly sent.
… Manafort said that the first of the texts arrived shortly before The New York Times published an August expose revealing that the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine had obtained documents — which have since come under scrutiny — that appeared to show $12.7 million in cash payments earmarked for Manafort.
There is more information, including that Manafort is not a subject of the anti-corruption bureau because he is not a Ukrainian citizen, that the Ukrainians were during our election anti-Trump
and helped Clinton’s allies research damaging information on Trump and his advisers, according to a POLITICO investigation published last month.
Passing this on because Politico is featuring it, which will very much inject it into the larger discussions of Russian influence in our election.