A year before Democrats were hacked by Russia, a self-styled “investigator” in Florida attempted to hack the Clinton Foundation, searching for evidence that the Clintons were secretly funding jihad. When authorities seized his computers, they found pictures of the hacker sexually abusing a baby.
Timothy Sedlak, 44, was sentenced on Monday to 18 months in prison for the hacking attack, to which he pleaded guilty. He will serve the year-and-a-half sentence concurrently with a 42-year sentence for production and possession of child pornography. The child pornography case, in which Sedlak was found guilty in May 2016, may have never been discovered had Sedlak not attempted to confirm nebulous right-wing rumors that the Clinton Foundation funded terrorism.
In June and July 2015, months after Hillary Clinton announced her presidential campaign, staffers at the Clinton Foundation began experiencing trouble logging into their work email, according to a criminal complaint in Sedlak’s case. Employees found themselves locked out of their accounts, or unexpectedly redirected after logging in. Stymied, the foundation asked employees to change their passwords.
Investigators soon discovered that two IP addresses had attempted to log into Clinton Foundation accounts nearly 400,000 times over those two months. Both IP addresses traced back to Sedlak’s home in Ocoee, Florida.
The attacks prompted the Secret Service to raid the home, where they found a den of 30 computers and notes on the Clintons, including on the servers Sedlak hoped to hack. Sedlak was attempting to enter email servers, using email combinations that included the word “jihad,” the complaint said.
After his arrest, Sedlak told investigators he attempted the hacks while “conducting ‘research’ of charitable organizations to try to determine if such organizations are unintentionally financing jihadist groups by sending, to charitable organizations in the Middle East, funds which are then seized by jihadist groups,” according to the criminal complaint.
Sedlak’s claims mirror those made against the Clinton family by the far right for years. Conservative critics have repeatedly attempted to tie the Clinton Foundation to terrorism, with limited success and increasing degrees of panic as the allegations trickled from more mainstream websites like the Free Beacon, which published “Clinton Foundation, Hamas Share Major Donor” (the donor was the nation of Qatar), to further-right publications like Front Page Magazine, which ran the headline “WILL HILLARY RETURN MONEY FROM LOBBYIST FOR RAPE JIHAD REGIME?”
On his resume, Sedlak presented himself as a private investigator. His LinkedIn page lists him as an “investigator” at “Surveillance Associates, LLC.” Florida business records show Sedlak registered the company in 2005, although he is the only person associated with the company in any of its filings. But Sedlak’s investigator credential was fabricated, prosecutors say.
“In order to work as a private investigator, one must be licensed,” a criminal complaint against Sedlak reads. “The defendant currently does not have a license to work as a private investigator in the state of Florida.”
His attempted hacking tactics were also illegal. When investigators seized approximately 30 computers from his home, they found a brute force password cracking tool in some of the computers. The tool is used to launch “a relentless barrage of passwords at a log in to guess the password utilizing a password list compiled by the hacker,” the criminal complaint reads.
But investigators soon discovered far worse than a hacking tool. During a search on Sedlak’s home on Sept. 11, 2015, investigators noticed a number of children’s toys, unusual for a man who lived alone with no children. Then, while conducting a forensic investigation on one of the 30 computers seized from Sedlak’s home, researchers discovered a trove of child pornography.
Nearly 400 images appeared to have been downloaded from the internet, or obtained through a third party, researchers concluded. But some images appeared to show Sedlak sexually abusing a 1-year-old and a 3-year-old child.
A jury found Sedlak guilty of producing and possessing child pornography in May 2016. During the trial, the jury learned that Sedlak had also attempted to hack a Manhattan-based charity, but the jurors did not learn that the charity was the Clinton Foundation.
In a statement during his sentencing Monday, Sedlak apologized to some of his victims: the Clinton Foundation staffers he had attempted to hack.
“I’ve hurt many people in different ways with what I’ve done, including everyone who uses electronic mail by making them feel insecure,” Sedlak said in a prepared statement, according to Courthouse News. “I know I caused them to be afraid for their privacy and to feel violated.”
