The mainstream French media carried the Macron campaign statement, but virtually nothing else. In addition to the normal proscription of campaign “propaganda” on election eve, the government issued a statement saying specifically that anyone disseminating the materials in this dump in France could be liable to prosecution, and calling on the media to shoulder their “responsibility” by steering clear of them.
Meanwhile, Wikileaks jumped on the document dump, but didn’t seem to be familiar with the material in it. Responding to the Macron statement that some of the items were bogus, Wikileaks tweeted, “We have not yet discovered fakes in #MacronLeaks & we are very skeptical that the Macron campaign is faster than us.”
Ah, but there’s the rub. As reported by The Daily Beast, part of the Macron campaign strategy against Fancy Bear (also known as Pawn Storm and Apt28) was to sign on to the phishing pages and plant bogus information.
“You can flood these [phishing] addresses with multiple passwords and log-ins, true ones, false ones, so the people behind them use up a lot of time trying to figure them out,” Mounir Mahjoubi, the head of Macron’s digital team, told The Daily Beast for its earlier article on this subject.
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Another tactic used by that diabolically clever Macron was to not be the subject of a massive criminal investigation regarding mishandling of classified material, to not engage in obfuscation and deflection and ‘splaining about how maybe something happened BUT IT WASN’T THAT BIG A DEAL, to not give the impression of a shifty operator who’d been caught out but figured they’d shuck and jive until we found another stinky thing to roll in.
It’s like, hacking someone’s personal documents and releasing them to the public generally confirms everyone’s opinion of you but that means different things for different people.Report