WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A top employee of billionaire Elon Musk who is now working in the U.S. Justice Department previously bragged about hacking and distributing pirated software, according to archived copies of his former websites reviewed by Reuters.

Christopher Stanley, a 33-year-old engineer who has worked at both Musk's social media company X and space-launch company SpaceX, is a senior advisor in the Deputy Attorney General's office, according to a former Justice Department official and a staff directory listing reviewed by Reuters. 

Stanley was assigned there while working for Musk's Department of Government Efficiency that President Donald Trump set up to slash the federal bureaucracy. Musk has said no "organization has been more transparent" than DOGE, but there's been little public information on the responsibilities and background of its staff. 

Stanley ran a series of websites and forums starting as far back as 2006, when he was 15, registration data preserved by the internet intelligence firm DomainTools shows. Several of those sites distributed pirated ebooks, bootleg software and video game cheats, according to copies maintained by the Internet Archive, a nonprofit whose 'Wayback Machine' preserves old websites.

Stanley boasted about hacking into websites on at least two of the forums, according to archived posts, one of which dates to when he was 19. At the time, he said he had put his hacking days behind him. But a YouTube video he posted in 2014 shows his involvement in the breach of customer data from a rival hacking group, when he was 23.

In response to questions for this story, the Justice Department did not directly address Stanley's current role or his past but said he had an active security clearance that predated his employment at DOGE. In a statement to Reuters, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi said she had "full trust and confidence in Chris's ability to help the federal government." Stanley, the White House, SpaceX and X did not respond to requests for comment.

In the hours after Reuters contacted Stanley, several of his old websites vanished from the Internet Archive. Mark Graham, director of the Wayback Machine, declined to answer specific questions about the disappearance of Stanley's websites but said people who own the rights to sites can request to have their URLs excluded from the archive.

National security professionals were largely split on how seriously to take Stanley's past. Six former Justice officials told Reuters his background raised red flags, noting that the department handles sensitive information, including details of federal investigations and other information protected by grand jury secrecy rules.

"I would have very serious concerns about hiring him in and giving him access to these kinds of records," said Jonathan Rusch, who spent more than 25 years as a Justice Department prosecutor before going into academia. Rusch said Stanley's background was worrisome, particularly for a Justice Department employee, because he had disclosed data which he had "acquired apparently illegally."

Dan Guido, whose digital security firm Trail of Bits has worked with the Justice and Defense departments, was more forgiving. Stanley's history of hacking shouldn't disqualify him from working at the DOJ, he said, citing Stanley's youthfulness and the way he targeted other hackers as mitigating factors.

"That is a way I've seen a lot of people learn."

Reuters could not determine Stanley's specific Justice Department responsibilities. The Deputy Attorney General's office, run by Trump's former private attorney, Todd Blanche, oversees all the U.S. Attorney's offices, and manages criminal investigations into a range of offenses, including hacking and other malicious cyber activity. 

Reuters also could not establish whether Stanley remains employed by X and SpaceX. On LinkedIn, he still identifies himself as working for them and makes no reference to his Justice Department work. A profile photo on X shows him standing before the emblem for the Office of Justice Programs, an office in the department that awards grant funds. Like Musk, Stanley is classified as a "special government employee" and is not drawing a government salary, the DOJ said.

PIRACY, VIDEO GAME CHEATS AND HACKING

Other members of Musk's DOGE team have faced scrutiny over their backgrounds. 

When Reuters reported last week that DOGE staffer Edward Coristine had previously provided network infrastructure to a gang of cybercriminals, Democrats in the Republican-led House of Representatives Oversight Committee said in a post on X that it was another reason "we need a full investigation into WHO is working for DOGE." Coristine has not responded to requests for comment.

Starting about 10 years before joining SpaceX, Stanley ran several online forums that covered software piracy, video game cheats and hacking. He used various pseudonyms on those sites, including eNkrypt and Reneg4d3, both of which he still uses on some social media accounts.

Reuters was able to link the now-defunct forum websites and the usernames to Stanley by cross-referencing the sites' registration data against his old email address and by matching Reneg4d3's biographical data to Stanley's.

On some of Stanley's earliest sites, he claimed credit for hacking. The website, fkn-pwnd.com, launched in 2006 while he was in high school, boasted of "Fucking Up Servers!" and featured a crude sketch of a penis, according to a copy of the site preserved by the Internet Archive. 

On reneg4d3.com, which he registered the following year, the archives show Stanley described how he hijacked a competing message board. "Got admin access," he said in a 2008 post, just before he turned 17, describing the site's operators as "stupid noobs." "Easy exploit," he wrote.

Around that time, a rival video game-cheating website, rev0lution-cheats.com, was hijacked and defaced with the message: "This site has been hacked by RENEG4D3.com." Reneg4d3.com was suspended by its internet service provider a few months later, according to a screenshot of the site preserved by DomainTools. 

Reuters could not corroborate certain aspects of the hacking activity, including the identity of the site Stanley claimed credit for hijacking or the circumstances of rev0lution-cheats' defacement. 

Stanley went on to start other websites where he and other participants discussed hacking, video-game cheating or piracy, including error33.net and electonic.net (sic), the Internet Archive's records show. 

'I NO LONGER HACK'

At age 19, Stanley distanced himself from malicious cyber activity in an archived 2010 post on electonic.net, writing: "I no longer hack into Paypals, gain root access into other peoples computer (sic), or exploit online websites like StickAM" - an apparent reference to a video streaming service that shut down in 2013.

In that same post, he said he'd been threatened with a lawsuit by the South Korean gaming company Nexon Co for "infiltrating their game software and altering certain aspects of the game."

"They did not take kindly to this," he said.

Reuters could not independently corroborate the claims of theft, computer hijacking and software tampering, or the threatened lawsuit. A Nexon spokesperson said the company had been unable to locate any information regarding the matter. PayPal did not respond to a request for comment.

Discussions on the electonic.net forum show that Stanley had not entirely left the hacking world behind. The website - like others Stanley had created - offered contraband ebooks and "warez" - internet slang for pirated software.

In December 2014, when he was 23, Stanley posted footage of himself carrying out a hack of the customer database connected to Lizard Squad, a hacking group that took credit for several high-profile outages that included attacks against Sony Corp's PlayStation Network. Reuters was unable to reach former members of Lizard Squad for comment.

Stanley had published the video to his YouTube page, where he went by the Reneg4d3 nickname and used a photo of himself with Elon Musk as his profile picture. Shortly after this story was published, the video was set to private and the page became unavailable.

(Editing by Jason Szep)