Of all of Mueller’s new prosecutors, Dickey—who joined the special counsel’s team last November—may have the experience that hits closest to home: He worked on the prosecution of Romanian hacker Marcel Lazar Lehel, known as Guccifer. Lehel hacked Sidney Blumenthal, a longtime confidante and ally of Hillary Clinton, and released emails showing she had used a private email address as secretary of state. His victims also included former secretary of state Colin Powell, Daily Beast founder Tina Brown, and actor Jeffrey Tambor. After Guccifer’s incarceration—a judge sentenced him to 52 months in prison—another hacker took up his mantle, going by the moniker Guccifer 2.0 and targeting the Democratic National Committee in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election. The Daily Beast reported exclusively in March that Guccifer 2.0, who communicated with Trump ally Roger Stone and took credit for giving the hacked DNC emails to Wikileaks, is actually a Russian intelligence officer…
Timothy Belevetz, who worked alongside Dickey as an assistant U.S. attorney for a time, said he has “a fairly relaxed and personable style.”
“They’ve got their core group of prosecutors who are working for the SC, then they brought Ryan on, I suspect, because of his background with computer crimes issues, cyber issues,” Belevetz said. “I don’t know all the evidence the government has or all the facts of the case, but my guess is that there is some significant component of computer use that relates to the alleged offenses that they believe he would have some special background and some special skills regarding.”
