The Daily Beast's scoop that Guccifer 2.0 was "in fact an officer of Russia’s military intelligence directorate (GRU)" means that if the reporting is accurate, House Speaker Paul Ryan's Super PAC and the House GOP’s campaign committee used information supplied by a Russian intelligence officer to defeat Democrats in the 2016 campaign cycle.
The fact that Ryan's Super PAC, the Congressional Leadership Fund, and the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) made use of materials hacked by Russian operatives as part of Russia's influence operation isn't new. And the links between Guccifer 2.0 and Republican operatives has been well established.
But now we know that influence campaign likely has a direct link back to Russia's main intelligence agency and Vladimir Putin himself. That adds another layer to the fact that Ryan and the GOP campaign committee always knew they were using Russian harvested materials and they did so shamelessly. As the New York Times reported in December 2016:
After the first political advertisement appeared using the hacked material, [Democratic Rep. Ben Ray] Luján wrote a letter to his Republican counterpart at the National Republican Congressional Committee urging him to not use this stolen material in the 2016 campaign.
“The N.R.C.C.’s use of documents stolen by the Russians plays right into the hands of one of the United States’ most dangerous adversaries,” Mr. Luján’s Aug. 29 letter said. “Put simply, if this action continues, the N.R.C.C. will be complicit in aiding the Russian government in its effort to influence American elections.”
Ms. Pelosi sent a similar letter in early September to Mr. Ryan. Neither received a response. By October, the Congressional Leadership Fund, a “super PAC” tied to Mr. Ryan, had used the stolen material in another advertisement, attacking Mr. Garcia during the general election in Florida.
AshLee Strong, a spokeswoman for Mr. Ryan, said he did not control how the material was used in the ad, although she did not dispute that the material had been stolen as part of an act of Russian espionage. “Speaker Ryan has said for months that foreign intervention in our elections is unacceptable,” she said in a written statement.
Ryan didn’t control “how the material was used”—sorry, but how does that even clear him of wrongdoing? It’s not how the material was used, it’s that the material was used at all. You can’t use the hacked information and then make an ex post facto declaration that “foreign intervention in our elections is unacceptable.” It should have been entirely off limits in the first place and indeed some individual campaigns declined to use the Russia-provided information.
This is the type of action—as Rep. Luján put it, “aiding the Russian government in its effort to influence American elections”—that seems ripe for an inquiry into what Republicans knew, when they knew it, and their decision to ultimately use the materials supplied by a foreign adversary.
But that’s never going to happen in a GOP-led Congress that’s still obsessing over Hillary Clinton to kill time between now and the midterms. With any luck, Robert Mueller’s investigation will turn up more information about GOP use of Russian intelligence in 2016. The Daily Beast reports that Mueller’s team has taken over the inquiry into Guccifer 2.0 specifically.