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New Donald Trump Russia Hacker Scandal: Putin Agents Hit Private Email Of Trump’s Political Enemies, Report Says

By Jonathan Vankin
Published on: 12:48 PST, Jul 25, 2016

The connections between Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, the Vladimir Putin government of Russia, and the hacker attack on the Democratic National Committee grew more suspicious on Monday, with the revelation that a DNC staffer’s own personal, private email account was targeted by Russian hackers.

Previously, the presumed Russian agents were believed to have struck only at the main DNC servers used by employees for work emails. Thousands of emails were stolen by the hackers, who released them to the information-dumping site WikiLeaks — which in turn published them on the WikiLeaks site where they became accessible to anyone.

The release of the emails has caused an uproar at the Democratic National Convention that opened on Monday, because some of them show DNC staffers discussing ways to discredit Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders, showing apparent favoritism to frontrunner Hillary Clinton.

The disruption at the convention would likely benefit Donald Trump. The Inquisitr reported earlier on the connections between Donald Trump and the Vladimir Putin government in Russia and why Putin may be motivated to interfere in the United States election in favor of Trump. Read that full Inquisitr report by clicking on this link.

Trump has frequently spoken of his affinity for Putin, often comparing him favorably to United States Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush. Some examples of Trump’s praise of Putin at the expense of the United States can be seen in the following video.

On Monday, the Federal Bureau of Investigation announced that it was investigating the source of the hack, and according to The Daily Beast online magazine, the FBI is now convinced that Russia was indeed behind the Democratic National Committee email hack, as are top U.S. intelligence experts.

“The release of emails just as the Democratic National Convention is getting underway this week has the hallmarks of a Russian active measures campaign,” David Shedd, former head of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, told The Daily Beast.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who has been confined to the Ecuador embassy in London as he avoids a charge of rape against him in Sweden, told NBC News on Monday that “there is no proof whatsoever” that the hacked emails were given to WikiLeaks by Russia. But he would not say where his group got the cache of stolen emails.

The shocking revelation that Russia may have also accessed private email accounts, in addition to the DNC work servers, came from Yahoo! News chief investigative reporter Michael Isikoff, who reported Monday that one staffer who had been conducting research into the background of Donald Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, had her personal Yahoo! email account hacked by “state-sponsored actors.”

Read the full Michael Isikoff report on the possible Russian hack into personal email accounts of Donald Trump’s political enemies by clicking on this link.

Manafort previously worked as a political adviser to the now-deposed, pro-Russia president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, a close political ally of Vladimir Putin who now lives in exile under Putin’s protection in Russia.

DNC researcher Alexandra Chalupa had conducted extensive research into Manafort’s Ukraine dealings, including interviews with sources in that country who provided background information on Manafort and his relationship to Yanukovych, when she began receiving an ominous warning on her Yahoo! email account, reading, “Important action required. We strongly suspect that your account has been the target of state-sponsored actors.”

A Yahoo! spokesperson told Isikoff that the messages were sent by Yahoo!

“Rest assured we only send these notifications of suspected attacks by state-sponsored actors when we have a high degree of confidence,” Bob Lord, Yahoo!‘s Chief Information Security Officer, wrote in a blog post.

MORE ELECTION COVERAGE FROM THE INQUISITR:

According to Isikoff’s reporting, “there are also signs that the hackers have penetrated the personal email of some Clinton campaign staffers.”

Donald Trump, speaking a campaign rally in Virginia on Monday, appeared to himself confirm that the DNC email hack came from what he called “our friends” in Russia or, he added. China.

[Photos by Evan Vucci/Jussi Nukari/AP Images]

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