A federal judge just dropped the hammer on a major Dem leaker. Jackson Cosko leaked personal information on Lindsey Graham and other GOP Senators after they defended Brett Kavanaugh from a political hit job.
He got caught as the smear job imploded and now he will spend the next four years in prison so he can think about what he has done. From The Daily Caller:
A former aide to Sen. Maggie Hassan and Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee is headed to prison Wednesday for what prosecutors said was the largest known data theft in Senate history.
The former aide, Jackson Cosko, pleaded guilty in April to crimes related to an unparalleled effort to ransack a Senate office, extorting a Democratic senator, illegally harming Republicans for their political views, and blackmailing a witness.
Prosecutors asked for nearly five years in prison for Cosko, a onetime congressional IT aide to Hassan. Cosko admitted he stole the New Hampshire Democrat’s data out of revenge for being fired, then used it to doxx Republicans during the Brett Kavanaugh hearings.
“The government believes that a significant sentence would help to make clear that difference of political opinion do not entitle people to engage in politically motivated, criminal attacks threatening elected officials with whom he disagrees, and would thereby encourage respect for the law, and deter future criminal conduct,” prosecutors wrote.
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.”
He wanted to use stolen data “to punish people who disagreed with his politics” by publishing the personal information of Republican Sens. Lindsey Graham, Orrin Hatch, Mike Lee, Rand Paul, and Mitch McConnell, the memo says, which noted that Cosko laughed about his actions.
Prosecutors said his case must be a deterrent to what they said are rising politically-motivated attacks.
“The defendant operated under the belief that he was entitled to inflict emotional distress upon United States Senators and their families, simply because they disagreed with the defendant and had different political views,” prosecutors wrote. “The government believes that there appears to have been an increase in similar criminal harassment, particularly through social media channels, by people across the political spectrum.”
In a sentencing memo, prosecutors described “a months-long series of burglaries and sophisticated data theft offenses directed at the office of United States Senator Maggie Hassan; to a separate set of ‘doxxing’ offenses through which he maliciously released personal information of Senators Lindsay Graham, Orrin Hatch, Mike Lee, Rand Paul, and Mitch McConnell; and to obstruction of justice, because he attempted to silence a witness by threatening to release the private health information of a Senator’s children, because he corrupted another person and persuaded her to attempt to ‘wipe down’ the scene of his burglaries, and because he attempted to destroy evidence in his own apartment.”
