According to Millers affidavit, the FBI evidence is based on witness

interviews including confidential sources, ISP records, court-authorised

electronic interceptions, and other sources. Some of the electronic
intercepts were emails from the Gmail account of Alexei Belan, a hacker on
the FBI wanted list for allegedly conspiring with Russian FSB agents to
perpetrate a huge hack on Yahoo in 2014. Belan is on the FBIs cyber top 10
most wanted list. None of the raw evidence was provided to the court.

The affidavit relates solely to the hacking of LinkedIn, Dropbox and

Formspring in 2012, and does not mention any election hacking.

However, Nikulin wrote in a letter from prison that Miller had interrogated
him in Prague on 7 February and raised the election hacking. Excerpts of
the letter were provided to the Guardian by Nikulins lawyers, but there is
no way of substantiating the claims he made.

Nikulin claimed Miller demanded he admit to hacking the DNC servers as

part of what the FBI is said to have claimed was a nefarious plot ultimately
ordered by Trump, and promised him good treatment in the US if he
cooperated. Nikulin wrote that he rejected the offer.

A document among the court papers detailing the interrogation on 7

February confirms Miller and assistant US attorney Michelle J Kane were
present in person along with four Czech intelligence officials identified only
by their initials.

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The document states that Nikulin was read his rights, insisted he was not
guilty of the charges, and that the interrogation was concluded after just 29
minutes.

Nikulins lawyer suggested the record of the interrogation was incomplete

and that his client had fallen victim to an FBI plot. Do you really imagine
that a high-ranking FBI agent is going to travel all the way from San
Francisco just to read this guy his rights?

Others close to the case dismissed the idea of an overarching conspiracy,

but conceded there were many unusual elements to the case.

One theory is that the FBI is rounding up Russian hackers in the hope they
may know others who were involved in the election hacking. A Russian
computer programmer was arrested in Barcelona in April.

My guess in both of these cases is that US intelligence has only now started
gathering intelligence about Russian hackers and how they work with the
security services, and they want to use these guys to extract info out of
them, said Andrei Soldatov, a specialist on the Russian security services.

Mark Galeotti, senior researcher at the Institute of International Relations

Prague, said the presence of Miller in Prague at least suggested that the
case was no ordinary one. An FBI agent travell