Romania has conditionally released Marcel Lazar Lehel, a hacker known by the nickname Guccifer, and who in 2016 claimed to have hacked former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's email account. However, his release only served as a means to extradite the hacker to the US, where he is set to face another sentence lasting 52 months, a court in Alba Iulia reported, citing Interpol. The extradition took place several days ago.
The hacker was sentenced in 2014 by a Bucharest court on multiple charges of hacking the internet accounts of politicians and celebrities. In 2016 he was temporarily transferred to the US for another trial on nine charges: wire fraud, gaining unauthorized access to protected computers, aggravated identity theft, cyberstalking, and obstruction of justice. He was sentenced to 52 months, but was returned to Romania so he could finish his original sentence.
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During his stay in the US, Lehel claimed that he had hacked Hillary Clinton's email account on multiple occasions, but failed to present any evidence to prove it. Several months later, a persona claiming to be Marcel Lehel announced that he had successfully hacked the servers of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and stolen some of its data, which was later published by WikiLeaks. The persona was then called Guccifer 2.0. US authorities claimed that the persona was controlled by Russian hackers, but Guccifer 2.0 denied the allegations.