Freedom of information campaign group Wikileaks has released over 21,000 emails from the presidential campaign of French President Emmanuel Macron, stating the source of the leaks came from someone inside the campaign.
Wikileaks announced the publication of the 21,075 emails on Monday presenting them in the form of a searchable database. In a statement on the group’s website, they said that the number of total emails amounts to over 75,000 but they were only able to verify the authenticity of 21,075 using the Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM) system.
The total archive, according to Wikileaks amounts to 71,848 emails, 26,506 attachments from 4,493 different individual email addresses. So far the group has not released any specific email conversations but has encouraged other to sift through the emails by providing a searchable database.
Wikileaks cites an interview earlier this year with the head of French government cyber security agency ANSSI Guillaume Poupard to claim that the origin of the leaks did not come from a government source like Russia, but rather an individual actor.
The Macron campaign during the election frequently accused Russia of trying to hack the campaign and even banned two state-funded Russian media outlets from covering the campaign by denying them access.
The French government later acknowledged that there was little to no evidence that the Russian government had hacked the Macron campaign.
The leaks mark the second time Macron’s campaign has been hacked, the first coming only days before the second round vote for the French presidency in May. The initial hack totalled around nine gigabytes of material including donor lists, campaign strategies and more.
The leaks, which were initially released on the website 4chan, were analysed by Wikileaks at the time and the group determined that they were genuine.
“We have not yet discovered fakes in #MacronLeaks & we are very sceptical that the Macron campaign is faster than us,” the group wrote at the time.
Despite winning the presidential election in May and the legislative election in June, President Macron has been inundated with problems including various scandals relating to his ministers and accusations from the media that he is clamping down on press freedoms.
Macron has also come under criticism from many of his own supporters after various statements he has made since the legislative elections including that he would like to govern France “like a Roman god.”
The most controversial statement Macron has made came earlier in July when he said that African women should have fewer children and that European aid programmes will not resolve the “civilizational issues” of the continent.
Follow Chris Tomlinson on Twitter at @TomlinsonCJ or email at ctomlinson(at)breitbart.com