Famous Romanian hacker Guccifer becomes pawn in the US presidential campaign

Romanian hacker Marcel Lehel Lazar, who became famous under the alias Guccifer, may turn into a pawn in this year’s presidential campaign in the United States. Guccifer claims that he hacked into former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s personal email server, in 2013, according to American TV channel Fox News. This is the same email server that Clinton used to carry out her official communication, which also included classified and top secret information. Guccifer’s allegations, if proven true, may weigh in the US presidential campaign, where Hillary Clinton is fighting Senator Bernie Sanders (who also mentioned Romania during his campaign) to land the Democratic Party’s nomination and then face billionaire Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican Party nominee for President. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has started an investigation regarding how classified information was handled on the Clinton server, after allegations that classified and top secret information had been improperly handled. If it turned out that such information had indeed been hacked, then Clinton or her aides may be held responsible for jeopardizing state secrets. Marcel Lehel Lazar, who has been convicted in Romania for breaking into the email accounts of several local officials, was extradited to the US earlier this year on federal charges relating to other alleged cyber-crimes. He allegedly hacked the email accounts of several American officials, including former Secretary of State Colin Powell, and members of the Bush family. Guccifer also hacked the email account of Sidney Blumenthal, a former aide to President Bill Clinton, and confidant to Hillary Clinton, which is how he claims he got access to Clinton’s personal email server. He carried out his illegal activities from Romania, using proxy servers from Russia. “For me, it was easy ... easy for me, for everybody,” the Romanian said in an exclusive interview with Fox News, in which he described how he got into the former Secretary of State’s email server. In response to Lazar’s claims, Clinton’s campaign team issued a statement saying that there was “absolutely no basis to believe the claims made by this criminal from his prison cell.” Fox News interviewed Lazar in a prison in Virginia, where the American authorities have been holding him since early April. He will be tried in September for his alleged cybercrimes against American citizens. In 2013, Guccifer distributed several emails that Blumenthal had sent to Clinton, which he got by illegally accessing his email account. These hacked emails were the first to show that the then Secretary of State used her personal email server to communicate on official matters, rather than using the official State Department email accounts maintained on federal servers. However, the scandal officially started in March 2015, when the New York Times reported that Clinton had exclusively used her own private email server rather than a government-issued one throughout her time as Secretary of State.