Sometimes in life our first impressions of a story might be slightly wrong, and it’s important when we that happens to acknowledge it. On September 28th, 2020, like many other people, I reacted with some amusement to the then-alleged hacking of Luke Ming Flanagan’s twitter account, which appeared to show the MEP accidentally searching for nude photographs of his one-time political rival, Saoirse McHugh. Like a lot of people at the time, I was privately deeply sceptical about his claims to have been “hacked”.
Skepticism is an important disposition in journalism: Those of us who write or report for a living about or on the activities of politicians should assume as a matter of course that politicians act primarily out of self-interest, and take their claims with a pinch of salt.
In the case of claims of having their social media hacked in response to something embarrassing appearing on that social media, such skepticism has traditionally been very well founded: “I was hacked” has for years now been the standard excuse for politicians who’ve ended up with compromising material appearing on their social media accounts. In almost every case, there’s a bit of embarrassment for a few weeks, the claim of being hacked never goes anywhere, and everyone agrees to forget about the story and move on.
But in this case, he really was hacked:
A former assistant to MEP Luke Ming Flanagan is to go on trial in Brussels accused of posting a tweet about photographs of green activist Saoirse McHugh skinny dipping.
Diarmuid Hayes, a Brussels-based film-maker from Ireland who worked as a parliamentary assistant for Mr Flanagan between 2018 and 2019, appeared before judge Isabelle Jacquemin at a criminal court in Belgium’s Palace of Justice on Monday.
Mr Hayes is accused of having illegally accessed Mr Flanagan’s account on Twitter, now known as X, and of having entered false data – broadly-defined crimes in Belgian law that can carry a potential prison sentence or community service.
The accused person here is, obviously, innocent until proven guilty, and we can (and do) make no assumptions about whether the charges against him are fair. But what we can say with some certainty is that the Belgian Police and authorities are clearly satisfied that Luke Ming did not send the tweet in question on September 28th, 2020.
The thing about this particular crime – regardless of who committed it – is that the nastiness of it comes directly from the person’s knowledge that Luke Ming wouldn’t be believed. Something I noted at the time:
Not only was his account hacked, it was hacked (to quote a British minister) in a highly limited and specific way.
Somebody accessed it at 2.50AM in order to post a compromising line of text which might make it look like the MEP was searching for a naughty photograph of Ms. McHugh.
They then deleted the tweet, almost immediately. Rather than do things that a hacker might do – like search his account for politically embarrassing private messages, say – they then immediately left the account and handed it back over to Ming this morning, in time for him to change his password.
Of course, if a hacker wanted to make it look like Ming was fibbing, this is exactly what they would do, so it can’t be ruled out.
Somebody who wanted to hack an account for traditional purposes might have behaved differently – trying to dig out embarrassing private communications, for example, or maintaining control over the account for a period of time to use it to promote their own agenda. When Gript Media’s Youtube account was hacked earlier this year, for example, the hackers used it to try and sell a bitcoin scam to our audience.
In this case, though, the purpose of the hack was apparently to force Flanagan into a claim – that he had been hacked – that many people might find hard to believe. It was particularly insidious, and particularly nasty.
That it came – allegedly – from one of his own former assistants will point, if the allegations are proved, to a nasty falling out inside his own office, and to questionable judgment about the people he appoints to work with him. Indeed, the fact that one of his former assistants is on trial accused for this points, even if the accused is acquitted, to a certain toxicity between them.
But all of that is somewhat besides the point. Many of us, including me, were sceptical of Flanagan’s story here, and his story appears to have been entirely true. He’s been completely vindicated, and that should be put on the record. Even if it’s a vindication that he’s not accepting, entirely, with class or good grace:
See you in court. https://t.co/2VAJleAAVh pic.twitter.com/JtoIOdJsos
— Luke 'Ming' Flanagan (@lukeming) September 4, 2023
(For the record, even had I defamed Flanagan – which I assuredly did not – any such case would fall well outside the one-year statute of limitations for defamation. So he will not, in fact, be seeing me – or even anyone else who “libelled” him, at the time, in court).