About

DC Leaks is a website which serves as a repository for leaked emails taken from the accounts of top-ranking officials from around the world. In August 2016, the site was widely publicized for releasing emails hacked from organizations run by business magnate George Soros', including the grantmaking network Open Society Foundations.

History

In April 2016, the website DC Leaks^[1] was launched, where several hacked emails from the Gmail account of retired United States General Philip Breedlove were published. In a series of emails to former Secretary of State Colin Powell in September 2014, Breedlove asked for help in convincing United States President Barack Obama to take more aggressive action toward Russia (shown below).

Russian-backed Speculation

On August 12th, 2016, the internet security company ThreatConnect^[3] published a blog post speculating that DC Leaks was a "Russian-backed" influence outlet and connecting the website to the mysterious hacker Guccifer 2.0.

Soros Leaks

On August 11th, 2016, Wikileaks^[5] released a January 2011 email in which George Soros advises then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to intervene in political unrest in Albania.^[5] On August 13th, DC Leaks^[4] released 2,576 internal documents from various organizations run by Soros, the vast majority taken from the Open Society Foundations (OSF) international grantmaking network. The files, which were created from 2008 to 2016, documented various plans orchestrated by Soros, including the manipulation of European elections and policies surrounding immigration throughout the continent.

On August 15th, Wikileaks tweeted a link to the DC Leaks website, garnering upwards of 3,300 likes and retweets in the first 48 hours.^[2]

The same day, Redditor Rietendak submitted a post titled "What is sorosleaks?" to t/r/OutOfTheLoop,^[6] gaining over 1,800 votes (90% upvoted) and 270 comments in the next 72 hours.

Additional Powell Emails

On September 14th, 2016, additional emails hacked from Colin Powell's account were released, which included conversations regarding Hillary Clinton's health, her feelings toward Barack Obama and various scandals that arose during her tenure as Secretary of State.^[7] When discussing a scandal involving Clinton's private email server, Powell stated that "everything HRC touches she kind of screws up with hubris." In an email to journalist Emily Miller, Powell referred to 2016 Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump as a "national disgrace" and "international pariah." In an email exchange with private equity investor Jeffrey Leeds, Leeds told Powell that Clinton "hates" President Barack Obama for defeating her in the 2008 Democratic presidential primary election.

In emails from March 2015, Leeds and Powell discussed Clinton's health, saying "she is working herself to death" and that "she could barely climb the podium steps" at an event. That day, several posts about the hacked emails reached the front page of various subreddits, including /r/politics,^[8] /r/The_Donald^[9] and /r/EnoughTrumpSpam.^[10] Meanwhile, several news sites published articles about the leaked messages, including The Intercept,^[11] The Daily Mail,^[12] BuzzFeed,^[13] The New York Times^[14] and CNN.^[15]

Search Interest

External References