According to Bloomberg sources in the Russian and American security and intelligence agencies, Klyushin is a Kremlin insider and even a year and a half ago received a state award from Putin, the Order of Honor.
They added that Klyushin has access to documents that relate to the Russian campaign to hack the servers of the Democratic Party during the US elections in 2016. According to them, these documents confirm that the hacking was carried out by a group of hackers from the GRU, which is known under the names Fancy Bear and APT28. In addition, some sources expressed the opinion that Klyushin has access to secret records of other high-ranking GRU operations abroad. All this can make Klyushin a useful source of information for the US authorities, especially if he asks the court for leniency.
Another argument that Klyushin has this valuable information for the U.S. is that his subordinate at M13 was former ex-GRU operative Ivan Yermakov. In 2018, he was one of the defendants accused of hacking into the computer systems of the Democratic Party.
Recall that on December 19, Switzerland extradited Klyushin to the United States. He is suspected of illegal trading in securities worth tens of millions of dollars. Klyushin is the head of the M13 company, which has developed the Katyusha media monitoring system for the Ministry of Defense and the Presidential Administration.
In 2017, The Insider managed to prove that the Fancy Bear group consists of employees of the military unit 26165 GRU. A year later, this data was confirmed by the US Department of Justice, officially bringing charges against a group of hackers. The most famous operation APT28 was the hacking of the servers of the Democratic Party in 2016, designed to help Donald Trump defeat Hillary Clinton in the presidential election.
