The Democratic Senate staffer who tried to ruin the lives of several GOP senators because they backed the confirmation of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh will spend four years in prison.
Jackson Cosko (shown), 27, who worked for Senator Maggie Hassan, a Democrat from New Hampshire, will also spend three years on supervised release and pay a $500 fine. He was also an intern for Representative Sheila Jackson Lee, the Democrat from Texas.
A federal judge sentenced the miscreant leftist on Wednesday for stealing information from Hassan’s office and using it to dox the Republicans.
Doxxing is a new, potent weapon in the arsenal of the radical left. The doxxer discloses personal or identifying information about a target in the hope that other leftist miscreants — presumably crazier that the doxxer — will harass, harm, or even murder the target.
“Deliberate Malice”
Cosko’s crimes are detailed in his sentencing memorandum:
The defendant has pleaded guilty to carrying out 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.
Cosko’s five felonies — two counts of making public restricted personal information, one count of computer fraud, one count of witness tampering, and one count of obstruction of justice — “reflected a deliberate malice and self-righteous entitlement that distinguishes his offense conduct from purely impulsive, one-time mistakes, and from offenses driven solely by intoxication or addiction.”
Indeed, after “mulling over the response (and the harm) caused by his doxxing Senators Lindsay Graham, Orrin Hatch, Mike Lee, the defendant essentially decided that his targets deserved it, that he should target Senators Paul and McConnell, and that he should commit additional doxxing offenses, even writing an (undated) note to himself, suggesting a ‘contest of who to dox next.’”
But Cosko’s doxxing didn’t just threaten the senators. It caused “retaliatory abuse and racial harassment at another staffer in the House of Representatives — someone who was entirely innocent.”
Cosko’s crimes were the largest such electronic theft ever in the Senate.
Helper Charged
Cosko confessed to inserting the home addresses and phone numbers of his GOP targets onto their Wikipedia pages, then tweeting the information. And he was proud, the memo says, of the cyber-terror campaign:
The evidence shows that the defendant knew that his conduct caused harm to others, and that he derived satisfaction from media and other reports that his doxxing offense had caused emotional distress. For example, it was publicly reported that the doxxing led to telephone calls and harassment that caused emotional distress by the spouse of one of the defendant’s targets. The defendant saw these reports and … happily reported them to a friend … writing “Haha it ruined [a Senator’s] wifes [sic] birthday.”
Cosko targeted Hassan for the cybertheft because she fired him for “performance-related” reasons. He broke into her Senate office four times using keys from a fellow employee with whom he had a “prior close relationship” that continued after he was fired.
That employee, Samantha Deforest-Davis, Politico reported on Wednesday, is charged with misdemeanor computer fraud and misdemeanor evidence tampering, and will likely plead guilty:
Prosecutors say Deforest-Davis didn’t give Cosko permission to use her keys the first time he surreptitiously entered Hassan’s office, but the colleague later agreed to loan Cosko her office key and agreed to “wipe down” computers in the office to erase traces of Cosko’s fingerprints. Deforest-Davis and Cosko had a “close relationship” and she also owed borrowed money from Cosko to pay her rent, court papers say.
Deforest-Davis is SUBJECT A in Cosko’s sentencing memo.
Prosecutors asked for a tough sentence because “the defendant’s burglary, doxxing, and computer fraud crimes were all committed deliberately, intentionally, and over an extended period of time” and “a clear malicious intent toward other people.”
Cosko, prosecutors averred, “wanted to punish people who disagreed with his politics.”
Image: screenshot from YouTube video
