Guess I'm just special

=======/////========

Mr. Smith died in mid-May at age 81, about 10 days after he spoke to
the Journal. He said he operated independently of the Trump
campaign.
Officials identified in the document include Steve Bannon, now chief
strategist for President Donald Trump; Kellyanne Conway, former
campaign manager and now White House counselor; Sam Clovis, a
policy adviser to the Trump campaign and now a senior adviser at
the Agriculture Department; and retired Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn, who
was a campaign adviser and briefly was national security adviser in
the Trump administration.
Mr. Bannon said he never met with Mr. Smith or anyone affiliated
with a limited-liability company, KLS Research LLC, that the
document said had been established for its mission. “Never heard of
KLS Research or Peter Smith,” Mr. Bannon said.
Ms. Conway said she knew Mr. Smith from Republican politics but
hadn’t spoken to him in years. “I never met with him” during the campaign, Ms. Conway said. “There were no calls, no meetings, no
nothing.”
The White House didn’t immediately respond to a request for
comment. Neither did the Agriculture Department, Mr. Clovis’s
employer.
Mr. Flynn, his consulting firm Flynn Intel Group and his son Michael
G. Flynn, who was chief of staff at Flynn Intel, were cited more
extensively as Mr. Smith sought to recruit researchers, as well as in
documents related to the effort that have been described to the
Journal. Neither Mr. Flynn nor his son responded to requests for
comment.
The names of the other campaign officials haven’t surfaced in
connection with Mr. Smith’s work except in the document, which the
Journal reviewed on Friday.
The document section that lists campaign officials is followed by the
words, “in coordination to the extent permitted as an independent expenditure.”—a possible reference to campaign strictures imposed
by campaign finance and disclosure laws.
The document was included in a package of opposition research Mr.
Smith shared through an encrypted email with Matt Tait, a
cybersecurity expert who once worked for British intelligence. Mr.
Tait said he was approached last summer by Mr. Smith, who wanted
him to help verify whether emails offered to the group by hackers
came from Mrs. Clinton’s private server.
After discussing his project by phone and in emails Mr. Smith gave
him a document called the “KLS research packet,” which contained
articles Mr. Smith planned to use for opposition research, Mr. Tait
said. The packet cover sheet is the document that listed the Trump
campaign officials. Mr. Smith’s name and phone number are typed at
the bottom of it.
Mr. Smith asked Mr. Tait to sign a nondisclosure agreement. Mr. Tait
said he declined and ceased communications with Mr. Smith, never reviewing any purported Clinton emails.

The document Mr. Smith presented to Mr. Tait, which he kept, is
titled, “A Demonstrative Pedagogical Summary to be Developed and
Released Prior to November 8, 2016,” which was Election Day.
It cites as the “preferred vehicle” for the effort a limited-liability
company established in Delaware. Mr. Smith established KLS
Research as that vehicle on Sept. 2, according to incorporation
documents.
The House Intelligence Committee and its counterpart in the Senate
are investigating Russian election meddling and whether there was coordination with the Trump campaign. So is Special Counsel Robert
Mueller. President Trump has denied any collusion. The Russian
government has denied it tried to interfere.
U.S. investigators have examined reports from intelligence agencies
that tell of Russian hackers discussing how to get emails from Mrs.
Clinton’s server and transmit them to Mr. Flynn via an intermediary,
according to U.S. officials with knowledge of the intelligence. It isn’t
clear who the intermediary might have been or whether Mr. Smith’s
operation was the one allegedly under discussion by the Russian
hackers.
Mr. Smith said in the May interview he had assembled a group of
technology experts, lawyers and a Russian-speaking investigator
based in Europe to acquire emails his group theorized might have
been stolen from Mrs. Clinton’s private server.
He said that after vetting batches of emails offered to him by hacker
groups last fall, he couldn’t be sure enough of their authenticity to
leak them himself and told the hackers to give them to WikiLeaks.
WikiLeaks has never published such emails or claimed to have them.
In a statement to the Journal, it said, “WikiLeaks has never revealed a source and never will"....

[continued]