According to the CIA version of the Russian hacking story, both the DNC and RNC were hacked into but only the DNC’s info was used, making them believe that the Russians were trying to sway the election toward Donald Trump. On Friday the Wall Street Journal reported that the Russians (if it was the Russians) tried to invade the Republican’s system also, but the techniques that punched into the Democratic Party’s network didn’t work on the GOP. This is additional proof that the claims that the Russians hacked in to the DNC to make Trump POTUS are simply an effort to delegitimize the President-elect.
Until now, few details had been disclosed about the nature of the targeting of Republican organizations, especially the flagship Republican National Committee, where hackers sent so-called phishing emails last spring to an email address there. Those emails were quarantined by a filter meant to detect spam, as well as potentially malicious traffic that may carry viruses or trick recipients into divulging passwords, two officials said.
A third person familiar with the investigation said RNC staff members didn’t realize they had been the target of spies until June, after Democratic committee leaders revealed that hackers had successfully gained a foothold inside their networks. Once inside, they reportedly were able to access a trove of DNC opposition research on Mr. Trump, then a candidate.
We also know that it was a phishing operation that helped the Russians get into John Podesta’s email (and that password was the easily hackable “p@sswOrd”).
When the Republicans heard the DNC was hacked into they took action:
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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.
The apparently successful blocking of a Russian espionage operation offers one possible explanation why the GOP’s main political organization didn’t suffer the same fate as its Democratic counterpart—a deluge of leaked emails revealing private correspondence and internal strategy.
But the suspicion that Russians did try to break into the RNC, using the same techniques and tactics that worked so well on the Democrats, suggests that at least initially, they were trying to gather potentially incriminating or embarrassing information on both parties.
This seems to back up Reince Priebus, RNC Chair turned Trump Chief of Staff, correcting Chuck Todd on Sunday:
…The RNC was absolutely not hacked, number one. We had the FBI in the RNC. We’ve been working with the FBI….It’s really simple because when the DNC was hacked we called the FBI and they came in to help us and they came in to review what we were doing and went thru our systems and went thru every single thing we did. We went thru this for a month.
So if it was the Russians, all indications are that they weren’t trying to favor one candidate over the other, only that the Republican Party had better protection than the Democrats, which when you think about it makes a lot of sense. After all, the Democrats were being led by a person who used a private insecure server in her basement to send and received emails with some of our nation’s most sensitive information.
The Democratic Party/MSM’s claim that the Russians were trying to make Donald Trump president is nothing more than an attempt to damage the Trump presidency before it even happens.
Cross-posted at LidBlog
