Wikileaks' Julian Assange must have looked at the material which Guccifer 2.0 provided and realised that he was being played. Everyone in the security business knows that Guccifer 2.0 is actually a group tied to Tsar Putin’s disinformation unit, but that did not mean that the material he had was not the real deal.

Assange was initially telling the world that the data would finish off Clinton's campaign for good, a fact which was echoed by the US republican candidate, and friend of Putin, Donald Trump.

But it is fairly clear that Assange, and the Trump campaign expected the material to be far better than it was. When Assange did not play ball, Guccifer 2.0 posted what he claimed were files from the Clinton Foundation's servers and it turned out to be rubbish. Guccifer 2.0 wrote:

"Many of you have been waiting for this, some even asked me to do it. So, this is the moment. I hacked the Clinton Foundation server and downloaded hundreds of thousands of docs and donors' databases. Hillary Clinton and her staff don't even bother about the information security. It was just a matter of time to gain access to the Clinton Foundation server."

But the files did not come from the Clinton Foundation. Some of the individual files contain real data, much of it came from other breaches Guccifer 2.0 has claimed credit for at the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Other data could have been aggregated from public information, while some clearly appears to be fabricated as propaganda.

Some files have been scrubbed of the "custom properties" fields that tell things like the version of Office applications that were used to create them so it appears that Putin’s disinformation team were hoping that Assange would do what he normally did and publish them without looking.

Aside from some DNC payroll data, and lease documents for some Democratic Party field offices, most of the documents in the dump were originally authored either at the DCCC or by people working for the DCCC on their personal computers. The file timestamps correspond to the timeframe of the DNC and DCCC data breaches, with nothing more recent than July of this year.

The Clinton Foundation's president, former Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala, denied that the foundation had been hacked in a Twitter post:

“Guccifer's post includes a screen grab of what appears to directory folders, including one labeled "Pay to Play," that appears to be fabricated from DCCC and DNC files and other material of questionable provenance. But some of the material appears to be actual data from the DCCC.”