Peter Smith, an investment banker and Republican Party operative who said he attempted to acquire Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s emails from Russian hackers, committed suicide days after speaking with the Wall Street Journal.
Smith, an 81-year-old GOP donor from Chicago, was found dead in a Rochester, Minnesota, hotel room in May 2017.
Smith told the Journal he created a team to find the emails from Clinton’s tenure as U.S. secretary of state that he believed had been stolen by hackers. The Journal reported that Smith was interested in the 30,000 emails Clinton claimed she deleted because she said they were of a personal nature.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/gop-operative-who-sought-clintons-emails-committed-suicide
The Journal reported that Smith, who had long worked on oppositional research for the GOP, “mounted an independent campaign to obtain emails he believed were stolen by Hillary Clinton’s private server, likely by Russian hackers” and implied he was working with Gen. Michael Flynn, who was then working as a senior adviser to then-candidate Donald Trump.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/gop-operative-who-sought-clintons-emails-committed-suicide
Flynn briefly served as President Trump’s national security adviser before resigning after it was determined he had not disclosed his contacts with Russia with the Trump administration.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/politics/ct-peter-smith-death-met-0713-20170713-story.html
Smith told The Journal he worked independently and was not part of the Trump campaign.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/politics/ct-peter-smith-death-met-0713-20170713-story.html
The Journal initially reported that Smith had died of natural causes.
The Chicago Tribune, however, received a state death record that listed Smith’s cause of death as suicide.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/politics/ct-peter-smith-death-met-0713-20170713-story.html
Smith, in a note, said he took his life because of bad health.
The Tribune reported that Smith wrote two blog posts before his death. One challenged the U.S. intelligence community’s conclusions that Russia interfered in the 2016 election and another that predicted that “the Russian interference story will die of its own weight.”
https://www.chicagotribune.com/politics/ct-peter-smith-death-met-0713-20170713-story.html
