‘Guccifer’ hacker who exposed Clinton emails wishes to serve sentence in native Romania: Report

Marcel Lehel Lazar, the computer hacker known as “Guccifer” who first exposed Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while secretary of state, said he’ll fight against being extradited from his native Romania to the United States next year to serve the remainder of a 52-month prison sentence for hacking a handful of high-profile American politicos.

The hacker told Fox News he will ask judiciary authorities at a hearing in Timisoara this month to let him serve his U.S. and Romanian sentences concurrently in his home country instead of returning to the U.S. in 2018 to serve time for committing cybercrimes against victims including former Secretary of State Colin Powell and longtime Clinton confidant Sidney Blumenthal, the network reported Friday.

Notably the hacker obtained and ultimately leaked correspondence in 2013 between Mr. Blumenthal and Mrs. Clinton in which the latter used a previously undisclosed, non-government email address to exchange messages discussing issues related to of national security, among other matters, triggering a federal probe widely attributed with sidelining her unsuccessful 2016 U.S. presidential campaign.

Lazar, 45, was already serving a seven-year sentence in Romania when he was criminally indicted by the Justice Department in 2014 and extradited stateside to face federal charges connected to the Blumenthal breach and other intrusions. He entered a guilty plea in April 2016 to two related counts and was ordered to spend nearly 4½ months in federal prison, but was told to finish serving his original sentence first and was extradited back to Romania in October.

The hacker has a wife and kids that live in Romania and would rather serve time there than back abroad, Fox reported.

Neither Romanian nor U.S. authorities associated with the cases against Lazar agreed to comment, Fox News reported.

While the identities of Lazar’s victims were redacted in public court filings, previous reporting and the hacker’s own admissions have linked him to breaches endured by Mr. Powell as well as Dorothy Bush Koch, former President George W. Bush’s younger sister.

Lazar later boasted of having breached Mrs. Clinton’s infamous private email server, but the FBI subsequently said he had invented the claim.

An entity known as “Guccifer 2.0,” meanwhile, took credit last year for successfully hacking several targets affiliated with Mrs. Clinton’s 2016 campaign. The U.S. intelligence community and private security researchers have since linked that persona to a cyber campaign authorities by the Russian government.