Mother Jones has a new article with its own explanation of events.
Or, maybe he changed it after he found out Wikileaks had hacked the site? I'm just throwing that out there. I have no basis whatsoever to make that claim.On the evening of September 20, 2016, WikiLeaks sent a direct message on Twitter to Trump Jr.: “A PAC run anti-Trump site putintrump.org is about to launch. The PAC is a recycled pro-Iraq war PAC. We have guessed the password. It is ‘putintrump.’ See ‘About’ for who is behind it. Any comments?”
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The password did not allow anyone access to the back end of the site; it was intended simply to let the press preview the site as it would look the following day, when it went live.
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WikiLeaks [...] was wrong about the PAC funding our project. Created by technology entrepreneur Rob Glaser, the PAC was initially titled “Progress for America.” There was no connection to a much older pro-Iraq War PAC of the same name, as WikiLeaks perhaps believed. That older group had not been registered with the Federal Election Commission; after realizing the overlap, Glaser immediately changed the PAC’s name to “Progress for USA,” on the day PutinTrump.org was launched.
Mother Jones
A bonus for them.Trump Jr. soon emailed top officials in the Trump campaign about the exchange, according to The Atlantic, including Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, digital director Brad Parscale, and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner; Kushner forwarded the email to campaign communications staffer Hope Hicks.
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WikiLeaks messaged Trump Jr. about the launch of PutinTrump.org just eight minutes before it posted the password for its millions of followers.
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Our site was soon hit with a surge of traffic and spam while it was still password-protected and meant to be out of public view—and that was just the beginning. Within hours, people involved with launching the site were doxxed and personally targeted on Twitter, an attack that quickly spread to Reddit and to alt-right and pro-Trump news sites. Mother Jones is withholding some details about the attack at the request of the people who were targeted due to their concerns about further harassment: Their cell phone numbers, home addresses, and other information about them and their family members were publicized, alongside calls to go after them. Their email accounts were hit with a spambot attack, signing them up for thousands of unwanted subscriptions—many in a foreign language—which rendered the accounts unusable. In a panic, one of them sent me a message: “We are getting 100,000 spam messages to our inbox and all of our personal info is on twitter.” They also received menacing emails and crank phone calls.
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We found no evidence that our site was hacked. The password shared without authorization by WikiLeaks had been created for an embargoed press release sent on Sept. 19 to journalists at roughly a dozen major news organizations who agreed to keep the information about the project private until after the following morning’s launch. It is unclear how WikiLeaks learned about the existence of our site prior to the launch—we had not yet publicized it to anyone other than the group of journalists.
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It is unclear who was behind the Twitter account that appeared to lead the targeting of PutinTrump.org on Sept. 20. [...] The account was created in February 2016 and went dark about three weeks after the attack began, just before the presidential election. The account offered to reward “whoever can find dirt” on the people working with PutinTrump.org; in another tweet it declared, “We will uncover them ALL!”
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“We launched PutinTrump.org because I and others inferred that there were a set of unseemly and perhaps illegal links between then candidate Trump and Russia’s efforts to hack our democracy. It’s clear that our inferences were well founded,” Glaser says. “Even so, we had no idea that our website would actually stimulate new links connecting the Trump campaign, Russian hackers, and their publisher, WikiLeaks.”
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
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