[meatbags]

"It is clear that at a bare minimum he was used as a tool by Putin to sway politics"

Can you provide evidence or sources for this claim? It's not clear to me, although the majority of Western news-media seems to be pushing this speculation.

[slg]

I just pulled up the Wikipedia page for Guccifer 2.0 [1]. You can click through from there to find plenty of sources. That page opens with the following:

>"Guccifer 2.0" is a persona which claimed to be the hacker(s) that hacked into the Democratic National Committee (DNC) computer network and then leaked its documents to the media, the website WikiLeaks, and a conference event. According to indictments in February 2018, the persona is operated by Russian military intelligence (GRU)

The available evidence suggests the Russians hacked the DNC and then used Wikileaks as the primary method of distributing that hacked data. I don't know whether Wikileaks was aware of their role, but either way Wikileaks clearly was used as a distribution tool by Putin and the Russians.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guccifer_2.0