by Margot Cleveland at The Federalist
The U.S. Department of Defense tasked the same Georgia Tech researcher embroiled in the Alfa Bank hoax with investigating the “origins” of the Democratic National Committee hacker, according to an email first obtained by The Federalist on Wednesday. That email also indicates the special counsel’s office is investigating the investigation into the DNC hack and that prosecutors harbor concerns about the DOD’s decision to involve the Georgia Tech researcher in its probe.
The special counsel branded this person “Researcher-1” in court filings. His identity has since been confirmed by his attorney as Georgia Tech’s Manos Antonakakis.
Antonakakis first garnered public attention when Special Counsel John Durham indicted former Hillary Clinton campaign attorney Michael Sussmann. That one-count indictment charged the former Perkins Coie attorney with lying to FBI General Counsel James Baker when Sussmann provided Baker data and white papers purporting to show a secret communication network between the Russian-based Alfa Bank and the Trump Organization.
In charging Sussmann, the speaking indictment explained that tech executive Rodney Joffe first alerted Sussmann to data allegedly compiled by April Lorenzen that supposedly revealed a backdoor communication network between Alfa Bank and the Trump Organization. Joffe later allegedly asked two Georgia Tech researchers, Antonakakis and David Dagon—the latter identified in the indictment as Researcher-2—to mine internet data for evidence establishing a Trump-Russia connection.
According to the indictment, in mid-August, Antonakakis “queried internet data” maintained by Joffe’s tech company for the mail1.trump-email.com domain. The results from that search, however, showed no apparent connections between the Trump email and Russia, causing Antonakakis to tell Joffe that the results do “not make sense with the storyline you have.” Nonetheless, Joffe provided Antonakakis, Dagon, and Lorenzen a draft “white paper,” which presented a tale of an Alfa Bank-Trump secret communication channel, which the three then reviewed for Joffe.
Sussmann would later provide the Alfa Bank data and white papers to Baker, telling Baker that he was not acting on behalf of a client. The indictment alleged, however, that in reality Sussmann was acting on behalf of both the Clinton campaign and Joffe when he fed the FBI’s general counsel that Alfa Bank story.
While it has been known since Sussmann’s indictment dropped in September 2021 that the Georgia Tech researchers had allegedly reviewed the Alfa Bank data and one of the white papers Sussmann provided to the FBI, there was previously no known connection to the government’s investigation into the DNC hack. However, one email contained in a cache of documents obtained on March 9 from Georgia Tech pursuant to a Right-To-Know request reveals Antonakakis’ involvement in the investigation into the hack of the DNC.
A little more than a week after Antonakakis’s scheduled testimony before a Washington D.C. grand jury, the Georgia Tech researcher wrote to the university’s general counsel and other members of upper management to highlight areas of concern to discuss “after the dust settles.” In that email, Antonakakis launched a soliloquy that perfectly described the Russia-collusion hoax and the plot by anti-Trump politicians and the deep state intelligence and law enforcement communities to take down the president of the United States.
But to Antonakakis…
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