Responding to a tweet from President Donald Trump, WikiLeaks pointed out that the Obama administration ordered the CIA to hack Marine Le Pen and other candidates during the French election in 2012.
On Wednesday morning, President Trump tweeted that “SPYGATE could be one of the biggest political scandals in history!”
In response, WikiLeaks noted that his presidential campaign wasn’t the first one to be targeted, as “Obama already did it to the French.”
The tweet linked to a WikiLeaks release that revealed all major French political parties were targeted for infiltration by the CIA’s human and electronic spies. The CIA espionage operation was active for roughly 10 months, from November 2011 to September 2012.
“The revelations are contained within three CIA tasking orders published today by WikiLeaks as context for its forth coming CIA Vault 7 series. Named specifically as targets are the French Socialist Party (PS), the National Front (FN) and Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) together with current President Francois Hollande, then President Nicolas Sarkozy, current round one presidential front runner Marine Le Pen, and former presidential candidates Martine Aubry and Dominique Strauss-Khan,” the WikiLeaks release explains.
The documents released by WikiLeaks are marked as “NoForn” which means that they are to be viewed by people within the US intelligence community only.
The spying order was justified by the agency because it was to “prepare key US policymakers for the post-election French political landscape.”