zerohedge.com / by Tyler Durden / Jul 14, 2017 11:20 PM
A longtime Republican operative from Chicago’s North Shore who was at the center of a confusing Wall Street Journal story involving shadowy Russian hackers and Hillary Clinton’s 30,000 missing emails committed suicide, according to the Chicago Tribune. Peter W. Smith, 81, a former private equity executive and longtime political operative, killed himself in a Minnesota hotel room days after telling his story to a reporter from WSJ, according to the Chicago Tribune.
Smith left a carefully prepared file of documents, including a statement police described as a suicide note in which he said he was in ill health and that a life insurance policy was expiring.
Smith’s death, which occurred on May 14, 10 days before the story was published, was one of the most bizarre developments in a hard-to-follow WSJ story that tried (and in our estimation, failed) to implicate former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn in a sinister plot to enlist the help of some Russians to hack the 2016 election…thus ‘proving’ collusion.
In the story, Smith recounted to WSJ his mission to find Hillary Clinton’s missing 30,000 emails – the holy grail of opposition research – which he organized late in the summer of 2016. The project began over Labor Day weekend when Smith, who as WSJ notes had been “active in Republican politics,” assembled a group of technology experts, lawyers and a Russian-speaking investigator based in Europe to acquire emails the group theorized might have been stolen from the private server Mrs. Clinton used as secretary of state. Smith believed that, once found, at least some of the emails would prove to be relevant to her official duties at the State Department, handing the Trump campaign an enormous PR victory and possibly proving that she knowingly misled investigators
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