Guccifer 2.0 Cleaned Up His “Collusion” Three Months after the Fact

I discovered something curious when I was working on a timeline recently.

Most posts on the Guccifer 2.0 site appear to have been modified only in the immediate timeframe after publishing (though, significantly, the first post was modified after the some of the first documents were recorded as being tweaked). But one post was modified, very slightly, months after it was posted.

That’s the Guccifer FAQ post. When it was first published on June 30, 2016 and as late as September 27 of that year, a paragraph on Hillary in the post read this way:

As for me, I see great differences between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Hillary seems so much false to me, she got all her money from political activities and lobbying, she is a slave of moguls, she is bought and sold. She never had to work hard and never risked everything she had. Her words don’t meet her actions. And her collision with the DNC turned the primaries into farce. [my emphasis]

On October 2, 2016, that paragraph was corrected to read like this:

As for me, I see great differences between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Hillary seems so much false to me, she got all her money from political activities and lobbying, she is a slave of moguls, she is bought and sold. She never had to work hard and never risked everything she had. Her words don’t meet her actions. And her collusion with the DNC turned the primaries into farce. [my emphasis]

That is, over three months after the post was originally posted, someone went back in and changed “collision” into the word that has taken on such loaded meaning since, “collusion.” Probably, “collusion” was the word intended from the start; perhaps either a keyboard fat-finger (on an English language keyboard, with the “u” and the “i” adjacent) or an autocorrect produced “collision” instead. While the paragraph and the post are rife with the linguistic inaccuracies — such as the use of “mogul” in the same paragraph — seen in other Guccifer 2.0 posts, in context “collusion” is the word that makes sense.

To be clear: I’m not making a big deal about any likely explanations for the incorrect word in the first place, nor am I making a big deal that that word — “collusion” — is the one thing that someone cared enough about to correct months later. “Collusion” is not a word Guccifer 2.0 used elsewhere, not even in posts where it might have been easy to do so. I’m not ascribing any grand significance to this change. I just find it curious.

As I disclosed in July, I provided information to the FBI on issues related to the Mueller investigation, so I’m going to include disclosure statements on Mueller investigation posts from here on out. I will include the disclosure whether or not the stuff I shared with the FBI pertains to the subject of the post.