The U.S. presidential campaign just gets weirder and more unpredictable. This week's revelations suggest that the narrative has moved from "reality show camp" to geopolitical thriller. As attention shifted from Cleveland, the site of the Republican National Convention, to Philadelphia, where the Democrats are holding their own convention, news broke of machinations within the Democratic National Committee (DNC) to favor Hillary Clinton. It soon appeared as though the proof — leaked emails on the Wikileaks website — may be an attempt by Russia to influence the U.S. presidential campaign and portend more aggressive efforts to upend Western democracies.
The story began in April when the DNC learned that its computer networks had been compromised. Two computer security firms were called in to investigate and identified two hacker groups — which had also broken into U.S. government networks — that were working independently of each other to obtain information. The evidence linking the groups to Russia is strong. The techniques — fake web pages and spearphishing — closely resemble those used in other occasions tied to Russians, the code that has been inserted is identical, as is the signature of the hacker groups. Parts of that code, including the metadata, are in the Russian language, the time stamps of hacker activity track with that of the Russian workday, Russian IP addresses are in the malware and the skills of the hackers are among the best the security experts have seen.
The leak of the emails is intended to cause maximum disruption of U.S. politics. Messages that show the DNC was trying to undercut the Bernie Sanders campaign would enrage his supporters on the eve of an event that is supposed to show party unity. DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz was forced to step down before the convention began, but the damage appears to have been contained.