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On Wednesday night, just hours after the Dept. of Justice appointed a Special Prosecutor to handle the Trump/Russia probe, a series of screenshots began spreading around the Dark Web, a colloquial term for the portion of the Internet that is unlisted in search engines and requires special encrypted software to access. The Dark Web is known as the “Internet home” to those who wish to communicate anonymously and hacker groups like Anonymous.
An unidentified user going by “FreshCamel” posted on several Dark Web message boards Wednesday evening asking other users to help him make sense of communications he had intercepted on a messaging platform called Gliph, a secure messaging service that uses end-to-end encryption to prevent communications from being tracked back to those who sent them. This individual did not provide much context regarding the source of these communications, but American users quickly put the pieces together.
On initial inspection, the screenshots, which are printed in their entirety below, appear to be taken from a short, highly-coded conversation held between approximately 5 individuals in the United States intelligence community on Wednesday, May 17th from 2:31 pm to 3:15 pm.
Third Estate Newsgroup’s Contributing Editor Micah Bull worked to make contact with “FreshCamel” late Wednesday night via an encrypted email service, and this individual confirmed that he had accessed the personal computer of an employee at the FBI sometime around April 24th. This access had been obtained through a falsified “phishing” email that installed spyware on this employee’s computer when opened. “FreshCamel” declined to identify this individual for the time being, but confirmed that he or she is a higher-level employee in the Bureau.
According to “FreshCamel,” this individual’s computer is used to join a secured chat channel on Gliph approximately four times per week for exactly 45 minutes each session. Activity has increased in recent days, “FreshCamel” confirmed. For weeks, “FreshCamel” casually monitored these chats without realizing what they were, but when a topic of discussion in Wednesday’s chat became a major news story in the United States just hours after the chat was closed, he decided to seek help.
These screenshots (shown below) show a 45 minute chat on the afternoon of Wednesday, May 17. From 2:31 pm to 3:15 pm, 5 separate users sent a total of 20 messages. “FreshCamel” confirmed that there were a total of 13 users “present” in the chat room, but the users known as “Severus,” “Roger,” “Huck,” “Juules,” and “Dooku” are those who consistently speak the most in these daily chats.
The chat begins with mention of “RR” and Mueller, hours before Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein announced that former FBI Director Robert Mueller would be named as the Special Prosecutor handling the probe into the Trump campaign’s communications with Russia. The users admit that the news will “blindside” the White House.
Then, the topic of conversation turns to an individual referred to as “MF” and whether or not these users should work to “put [him] back in the news.” They eventually agree that an individual known as “S” will work to draft a “memo” somehow connecting “MF” to Turkey and the user known as “Huck” will use a secured connection with their “friends in New York.”
On Thursday, a major story broke that former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn had accepted money from the Turkish government and then intervened on their behalf in U.S. military operations. Flynn and Trump associates have denied these reports, but Flynn remains the subject of an ongoing FBI investigation.
See the Screenshots and the rest of the story in detail HERE