The Romanian hacker whose real name is Marcel Lehel Lazar, breached the AOL account of long time Clinton confidant Sidney Blumenthal in 2013, and posted online the Clinton email.com address thereby exposing Hillary Clinton’s use of personal email for government business was sentenced by a federal judge Thursday to 52 months in prison.And in a surprising development, Romanian authorities now want the 44-year-old “Guccifer,” who continues to cooperate with U.S. investigators, sent home “right away.”
Lazar, looking alert and with neatly trimmed hair, appeared in the Alexandria, Va., courtroom for the 35-minute hearing before U.S. District Judge James C. Cacheris. Prosecutors said the hacker took responsibility for his actions but showed no remorse for accessing the private online accounts of at least 100 Americans, and causing the public release of their information.
His high-profile victims include Dorothy Bush Koch, the sister of former President George W. Bush; former Secretary of State Colin Powell; and Blumenthal, among others. After breaching Powell’s account, Lazar said he identified Blumenthal in the contact list and successfully targeted him. Court documents filed Monday by the government say by “the defendant’s own estimate, his quote ‘success rate’ at gaining entry into private accounts was only 8-10 percent of his attempts.”
Lazar said he used a color-coded system to show which accounts were successfully breached. “From what I remember I was using red for accounts I hacked, orange for the ones I could hack, and green for the ones I tried to hack and was not able to,” he said, according to a heavily redacted FBI interview released by the court on Monday.
His public defender, Shannon Quill, asked for a more lenient sentence of 36 months, arguing he did not profit from the crimes. Quill said the separation from his family, including a young daughter, has been hard.
Further, she indicated the Romanians now want him back to finish his seven-year sentence there, which he’d been serving in his home country before his extradition to the U.S. That sentence is connected to the same series of hacks.
His attorney indicated he could be sent back in the coming weeks, though a timeframe was not clear. Together with the sentence in the U.S., Quill said this would amount to “a total global sentence of 10 years.”
Cacheris, though, pressed both sides on how a transfer to Romania might work. The judge and lawyers for both sides all noted that Lazar continues to cooperate with U.S. investigators, though court filings did not provide detail beyond the hacker’s efforts to recover the personal information of his victims and close security loopholes connected to their accounts.
Lazar was extradited to the U.S. in late March after considerable time, effort and expense by the U.S. government.
