Rinat Akhmetshin has stated that he lacks the expertise to obtain hacked emails from the internet, but according to this NYTs Piece from yesterday, they keep finding their way into his hands.
”While not, he insisted, an expert in the technical aspects of hacking nor, a spy, Mr. Akhmetshin talked openly about how he had worked with a counterintelligence unit while serving with the Red Army after its 1979 invasion of Afghanistan and how easy it was to find tech-savvy professionals ready and able to plunder just about any email account….
... at a meeting with a New York Times reporter at the Ararat Park Hyatt hotel in Moscow, Mr. Akhmetshin, by then an American citizen, informed the journalist he had recently been reading one of his emails: a note sent by the reporter to a Russian-American defense lawyer who had once worked for Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the anti-Kremlin oligarch…..
...An investigator for I.M.R. (International Mineral Resources) reported personally witnessing and overhearing a conversation at a London coffee shop during which Mr. Akhmetshin handed someone an external hard drive that Mr. Akhmetshin described as containing files obtained from I.M.R. computers, according to the lawsuit.”
I’ve reached the limit of my quotes from the article, but you should read the entire piece. It tell the story of a man who has come to the U.S. after serving in Russian Military Intelligence, and who has made a very good living trafficking in stolen Industrial email documents along with his more mundane work of trying to reverse sanctions placed on alleged murderers and tortures in Moscow.
We don’t know and cannot accuse right now that Akhmetshin had anything to do with the Russian Military Intelligence groups, Cozy and Fancy Bear, that hacked into the DNC emails, but he has had some experience in their area of expertise and most certainly might have been sought out and brought into the cabal that met in Trump Tower last year for that very reason.