Surprise! The hacker who delivered all those stolen Democratic National Committee emails to Wikileaks turns out to be a Russian intel officer.

The Daily Beast has the story:

Guccifer 2.0, the “lone hacker” who took credit for providing WikiLeaks with stolen emails from the Democratic National Committee, was in fact an officer of Russia’s military intelligence directorate (GRU), The Daily Beast has learned. It’s an attribution that resulted from a fleeting but critical slip-up in GRU tradecraft.

That forensic determination has substantial implications for the criminal probe into potential collusion between President Donald Trump and Russia. The Daily Beast has learned that the special counsel in that investigation, Robert Mueller, has taken over the probe into Guccifer and brought the FBI agents who worked to track the persona onto his team.

While it’s unclear what Mueller plans to do with Guccifer, his last round of indictments charged 13 Russians tied to the Internet Research Agency troll farm with a conspiracy “for the purpose of interfering with the U.S. political and electoral processes, including the presidential election of 2016.” It was Mueller’s first move establishing Russian interference in the election within a criminal context, but it stopped short of directly implicating the Putin regime.

Mueller’s office declined to comment for this story. But the attribution of Guccifer 2.0 as an officer of Russia’s largest foreign intelligence agency would cross the Kremlin threshold—and move the investigation closer to Trump himself.

The DNC continues to struggle to raise cash, holding only $6.3M in the bank on Dec 1, compared to the RNC's $40M. But the numbers are deceiving, because 50% of the country want the Democrats to control Congress in 2018 (compared with 39% who want the GOP to retain power) and individual Democrat candidates are having banner years fundraising, especially the progressive, "Sanders Democrats" who break with the party's coziness with the finance industry and big business. Read the rest

The 2018 "superdelegates" to the Democratic National Convention will include lobbyists for Rupert Murdoch's Newscorp, CITGO petroleum, Citigroup, and other large corporations. Read the rest

While the world was agog at the news that President Trump had leaked sensitive, classified information to a Russian diplomat, the rightosphere was going bonkers over an old, dumb conspiracy theory that Seth Rich, a young DNC staffer who was murdered in DC, had been assassinated in retaliation for leaking DNC emails to Wikileaks. Read the rest

Late yesterday, the @wikileaks account tweeted "Julian Assange's internet link has been intentionally severed by a state party. We have activated the appropriate contingency plans." Read the rest

John Scalzi makes a very good case that the DNC's major message is that "this year is not about Democrat versus Republican, or conservative versus liberal, it’s about normal versus highly fucking abnormal" -- but Corey Robin persuasively argues that abnormality has been normal for a long time in the GOP: "the rational, prudential conservatives [Democrats] think they know [in the GOP] are in fact ultra-revanchist songstresses of domination and violence." Read the rest

Yet another U.S. Democratic Party group has been hacked, the FBI said today. This latest cyberattack against the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (or DCCC) could be related to an earlier hack against the Democratic National Committee, Reuters reported, citing unnamed sources on the FBI investigation. Read the rest

After penning the best article on the RNC, Laurie Penny has taken her Red Pen of Justice to the DNC, where she reports on the state of American progressivism in the balance, where the best we can hope for is "a future slightly less terrifying than Trump nation." Read the rest

It was a busy night at the 2016 Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, as the party's leading lights made their case for Hillary Clinton. In this post: Video of the speeches given at the DNC Wednesday night by U.S. President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, Clinton’s running mate Senator Tim Kaine, and former New York mayor and one-time presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg. Read the rest

In Philadelphia today at the 2016 Democratic National Convention, an emotionally overwhelming moment for Bernie Sanders as Democrats Abroad cast their votes for the party's 2016 presidential nominee. Read the rest

A sustained and rousing standing ovation for Bernie Sanders at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, tonight. Read the rest

Earlier this week Crowdstrike, a security company hired by the Democratic National Committee, announced that the party's servers had been deeply penetrated by hackers working for the Russian government, who had made off with many sensitive files, including the DNC's Trump oppo research spreadsheet. Read the rest