When there is a political scandal one should always ask the question "Cui bono": who benefited? In the case of the Macron email leaks it most likely was Macron. The newspaper reports about the leaks basically said that nothing harmful could be found - and that Macron thus was clean. And it helped the Macron campaign to paint Le Pen as an agent of Putin. Of course there is always a possibility that the Russians "got sloppy" as the pro-Macron press wants us to believe, but there are a lot of red flags that point the other way:
- The (pro-)Russian press had been negative about Macron for months. So why were the leaks published at the last moment? Information needs time to sink in. Journalists and Le Pen supporters would need time to study the mails for interesting/harmful information. And if they found something Macron would need time to react: with leaks it is often the inadequate or lacking reaction that converts believers.
- The last emails in the leak are from 24 April. The leak was published on 5 May. So it seems like the data thief wasted eleven days. Even worse: the mails were published just before a no-election news period in the French media. As a consequence their influence on the election was very low. And French journalists had very little incentive to investigate the emails.
- Organisations like Wikileaks publish the information in trenches. This has two advantages: it keeps the leaks in the news and it offers the opportunity to stress different aspects at a different time. The Macron failed to do this.
- By now leaking has become a science and organizations like Wikileaks have shown us what works and what doesn't. Dumping a big amount of mails or other documents does not work: it causes a short stir and after that it is old news. Journalists don't have the time to find the real hot items and when they find something a week later it may be old news that someone else revealed before. So typically the trove is revealed in tranches and each tranche is accompanied by a press release that tells what emails to look for and what they tell. In contrast there was no press release accompanying the Macron leaks.
- We saw almost immediately news articles that there was nothing interesting to see and that there were fake mails between the real ones. One has to admire those superhuman journalists who managed to study 7 gigabytes of emails within a day and who even found time in the process to conclude that some of those mails were fake.
- Later on we saw news articles that the CIA had been monitoring the attack and that the French had prepared themselves by adding fake mails - what seems to be a common tactic in businesses. If the American secret services were so close to the fire they might as well have been a bit closer than they admit.
- Even after the mails were released I haven't seen one good article discussing their content. The claim that nothing harmful can be found sounds shallow to me. When a team of journalists digs through the emails they will find something interesting. It doesn't have to be harmful to Macron's campaign. But there might be information on how Macron saw his adversaries and what kind of tactics he used against them. Or how he intends to operate in the coming elections for the parliament. Either this information isn't there - what would suggest that the mails have been filtered - or the press has been rather sloppy.
- we hear the usual talk about shady Russian hacker organizations who did it and traces of Russian editing software - that point to modifications - in the leaks. But by now we know from Wikileaks that creating false traces is an accepted tactic within the US security services.
Dividing the mails in tranches and publishing each trench with a press release takes a lot of work. It may have been that the hacker didn't have those resources. There have already been suggestions that American neo-nazis were involved.
It seems to me that either the hackers were extremely incompetent or this was a false flag. Of course a combination is also possible.
