It was a startling twist in a tense storyline that’s emerged between the DNC and the FBI, who top Democrats say torpedoed Hillary Clinton’s presidential prospects by mishandling its wholly separate investigation into the Democratic presidential nominee’s use of a private email server while she was Secretary of State. On Thursday, in a stunning counterpunch, the FBI said it had not only asked, but had consistently and repeatedly been denied access by DNC officials, who the bureau said had “inhibited” the investigation. The DNC said Wednesday that the FBI had never asked for access to the servers. The FBI did not respond to a request for comment.
“What is going on?”Ī spokesman for the DNC did not respond when asked what had led to the communications breakdown between their organization and the FBI by Friday night. “How and why are they so sure about hacking if they never even requested an examination of the computer servers?” President-elect Donald Trump tweeted on Thursday about the scandal. Instead, federal investigators had relied on computer forensics from a third-party DNC contractor, Crowdstrike. The FBI’s investigation of the hack, launched in July, came under sharp scrutiny Wednesday after BuzzFeed News revealed that the FBI had never had direct access to the committee’s hacked servers, and that no US Government entity had yet run an independent forensic analysis on the system. That intrusion, and subsequent release of stolen DNC emails, was part of a broader Kremlin-directed effort to undermine the US election, smearing Democrats and bolstering Donald Trump, according to an intelligence assessment released Friday. The FBI announced in July it was investigating a sweeping cyberattack against the DNC, later attributed to Russia-backed hackers. “I don’t know how this has happened, I don’t know where this is coming from.” “There’s no fight between the Bureau and the DNC,” a high-level DNC official told BuzzFeed News, requesting anonymity to discuss the investigation.
WASHINGTON - The Democratic National Committee downplayed its public spat with the FBI on Friday over why federal investigators did not independently examine their servers breached by Russian cyberspies, saying it was a misunderstanding that didn’t have anything to do with lingering political tensions between the two.