During his testimony before the House Intelligence Committee Wednesday, former Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson revealed that his agency offered help to the Democratic National Committee during its WikiLeaks scandal. Unfortunately, he said, they did not cooperate. In the midst of the 2016 presidential election, emails authored by DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and other DNC staffers, Hillary Clinton, and Clinton Campaign Chairman John Podesta, were hacked by Russians. Yet, for some reason, instead of taking steps to prevent more breaches, the committee resisted any help from the DOJ.
As Johnson explained, without a search warrant, he and his employees had no power to enter the DNC headquarters.
“It was a nonpartisan interest,” Johnson told the intelligence panel Wednesday. “I was not pleased that we were not in there helping them patch this vulnerability.”
In January, reports surfaced that the DNC also reportedly rebuffed an FBI request to examine their computer services.
How did the RNC manage to avoid such damaging leaks their counterpart endured? They simply had better security measures.
RNC officials, concerned they too might have been compromised, called a private computer security firm, which in turn called the FBI and obtained information about what kinds of malicious emails to look for, the person said. Upon inspection, the RNC found that its electronic filters had blocked emails sent to a former employee matching the description they’d been warned about.
While Johnson reiterated that Russia did try to interfere in the election, they did not manage to swing any votes.
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