The latest well-known name to appear in the database of clients for the Ashley Madison adultery website is Florida State Attorney Jeff Ashton, noted – not always with favor – from the Casey Anthony murder trial.
(A recent example of those not impressed with Ashton’s work was accused spree killer David Damus, who said to Ashton from the stand during his June trial, “When you lost the Casey Anthony case, that made you look bad.” For the record, Damus was subsequently convicted of his offenses.)
According to Jacob Engels at the East Orlando Post, the street address provided for Ashton in the Ashley Madison subscriber database leaked by hackers last week matches property records and voter registration data from Orange County.
Engels adds what he calls a “subtle yet shocking fact”: the adultery website was accessed from the computer system used by the Ninth Judicial Circuit.
The database revealed that both Jeff Ashton Ashley Madison accounts were accessed from IP address “66.193.236.254”. Research by our technical expert using publicly available Reverse DNS services has revealed that this IP address tracks back to “host-204.ocnjcc.org” and the Ninth Judicial Circuit internal network! In other words, it appears Jeff Ashton was using the cheating website on taxpayer’s time, on a state-owned machine and computer network at the Ninth Judicial Circuit State Attorney’s Office!
Breitbart News spoke with a third-party computer expert who confirmed this analysis is correct.
The hackers included a set of payment transactions to go with the subscriber database, which has been seen in many cases to include incorrect email and surface addresses, fake subscriber names, and so forth. The payment data has been useful for verifying the identity of subscribers. In the case of Ashton, there were actually two paid subscriber accounts under his name. One of them was active during July of 2013, after which the user paid an extra fee to have it completely deleted.
(Obviously, it wasn’t erased. This was one of the principal charges leveled by the Impact Team hackers against Ashley Madison’s owners – they said the paid service for deleting user data permanently, to ensure the anonymity of departing clients, was a scam.)
The other account under Ashton’s name was paid from August 2013 to February 2015, incurring a substantial total of charges, as subscriptions to the adultery website could cost hundreds of dollars per year. This would seem to argue against the notion that the account created under Ashton’s name was a phony account created by an enemy with the intention of embarrassing him – it cost a great deal of money to maintain over the course of several years, a previous account paid with the same credit card was ostensibly destroyed with the “paid delete” feature, and the individual who launched the second account in August 2013 couldn’t have known that hackers would steal and expose the subscriber list two years later.
A few embarrassing passages from the user profile associated with Ashton’s name are included in the East Orlando Post article, such as: “I am looking for someone who has fantasies we can act out. Who know what she wants and isn’t afraid to ask for it. You must be discrete, not looking to change my situation just want to get excited again.” He was also interested in connecting with a woman who had a “big toy collection.”
Engels angrily notes that Jeff Ashton is a “married man with six children,” who leveraged his fame from the Casey Anthony trial into a book deal, a successful run for State Attorney for Orange and Osceola Counties, and a great deal of moralizing. He notes that if the Ashley Madison story checks out, it would be more than just an embarrassing scandal, given the use of government computers to access the adultery website, and asks if Florida Governor Rick Scott will appoint a special prosecutor to investigate.
Some of the powerful men exposed by the Ashley Madison hack have claimed they were framed by miscreants who created false accounts in their name. It can be difficult to prove conclusively, although the electronic evidence described in Engels’ article is damning – if Ashton was framed, this particular miscreant put a great deal of money and effort into getting all the little details right, over a span of two years, to no obvious end.
At the time of this writing, Ashton had not offered a public response to the East Orlando Post article.