Almost a year ago, we witnessed the weeks-long drama of hearings to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court. While progressive outrage theater transpired on the streets of DC and Democrats in the chamber made fools out of themselves, a very serious crime unfolded behind the scenes.
A Democrat aide named Jackson Cosko, who was angry about Kavanaugh, stole private information about Republican senators and made it public. Now he is going to jail.
Cosko is from a family of means, and his parents did what they could for him, offering to pay for his stay at a mental health facility, but the prosecutors in the case were intent on sending a message.
Josh Gerstein reports at Politico:
Ex-Hassan aide sentenced to 4 years for doxing senatorsA former aide to Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.) was sentenced to four years in prison Wednesday for hacking Senate computers and releasing personal information online about five Republican senators out of anger spurred by their roles in the confirmation hearings for Justice Brett Kavanaugh.U.S. District Court Judge Thomas Hogan said the sentence for Jackson Cosko, 27, was needed to send a signal that criminal harassment driven by political motives would be punished severely in an era marked by extreme political polarization…In April, Cosko pleaded guilty to five felonies, admitting that after being fired last year from his work as a systems administrator on Hassan’s staff, he repeatedly used a colleague’s key to enter the office, install keylogging equipment that stole work and personal email passwords, and downloaded a massive trove of data from Senate systems.Cosko also acknowledged that after growing angry about the GOP’s handling of the Supreme Court nomination, he released home addresses and phone numbers of Sens. Lindsry Graham, Orrin Hatch, and Mike Lee on Wikipedia. After initial press coverage of that doxing, Cosko released information about Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Sen. Rand Paul.
This short video from One America News Network in March will give you more background on the case:
Luke Rosiak of the Daily Caller has written a very detailed report on Cosko and how this all unfolded. It reads in many ways like a modern Watergate:
New details emerged in their sentencing memo that made the case of Cosko — the Bernie Sanders-supporting son of a millionaire San Francisco developer with ties to California Sen. Dianne Feinstein and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi — even more shocking.A second Hassan staffer who was friends with Cosko served as his accomplice in exchange for rent money helped him physically break into the office at night and pilfer internal emails even after he was fired, prosecutors’ sentencing memo shows…Even after Cosko was arrested and a computer was quarantined, Capitol Police and Senate employees did not realize that keylogger devices were plugged in to many of the office’s computers, according to prosecutors. The devices continued to beam every keystroke — including passwords to personal and business accounts — over a WiFi signal that could be accessed from the public hallway.Prosecutors said Cosko had “self-righteous entitlement” and a “belief that he could violate the sanctity of the United States Senate at will and threaten individual Senators as he pleased.”
There’s much more than I can quote here. Read the whole thing.
It’s amazing how many times in recent years we’ve seen people embedded in government jobs and culture, think they were justified in using their knowledge to break the law in order to sabotage Trump and Republicans.
Cosko is also very lucky to have received such a light sentence. According to a report from the Washington Examiner last fall, he was initially facing a sentence of up to 50 years.
Featured image via YouTube.
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