Following Peter Smith's money

BuzzFeed News reports now-deceased GOP donor and operative Peter W. Smith conducted some suspicious financial transactions around the same time he thought he was getting closer to obtaining Hillary Clinton’s deleted emails from Russian hackers. 

Just a day after he finished a report suggesting he was working with Trump campaign officials, for example, he transferred $9,500 from an account he had set up to fund the email project to his personal account, later taking out more than $4,900 in cash. According to a person with direct knowledge of Smith’s project, the Republican operative stated that he was prepared to pay hackers “many thousands of dollars” for Clinton’s emails — and ultimately did so.

A quick refresher from Lawfare:

Peter Smith, a longtime Republican donor and political operative, had actively opposed the Clintons since the 1990s, reportedly paying thousands of dollars to promote stories about Bill Clinton’s alleged extramarital affairs. According to the Wall Street Journal, Smith began an effort to obtain Hillary Clinton’s emails during the 2016 presidential campaign, including from people he believed to be hackers with possible connections to the Russian government. Smith appeared to be particularly interested in 33,000 personal emails that Hillary Clinton allegedly deleted from her private server while serving as secretary of state. Ten days after his interview with the Journal, Smith died in what authorities deemed a suicide.