The acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security says they offered to test the Democrats’ app for bugs before the Iowa Caucus but the Democrats said naw, we’re good.
As you know by now, they weren’t good. Not good at all. The caucus data operation was a complete disaster.
Acting head of DHS Chad Wolf told “Fox and Friends” that the Democrats’ Iowa caucus app was not hacked but likely failed due to the stress put on the system in a concentrated period of time. He said it was a “concerning event” because we need to maintain confidence in our elections. He added “that we’re more secure than we’ve ever been; election ‘war rooms’ have already been set up by DHS.”
Election security is of paramount concern now for obvious reasons. In 2016, Democratic National Committee emails were hacked when Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair John Podesta fell for a phishing scam. Former DNC chief Donna Brazile described the problem in her book called Hacks:
With Hillary’s campaign chair, John Podesta, it was an email that looked as though it was sent by Google demanding that he change his password. When he did change it through the link the hacker provided, they go into the system on his credentials. They also robbed identities by setting up a website that looked just like on for our IT firm but had one letter transposed in the url, something most people would not notice.
Brazile says they had been warned by the FBI for nearly a year that their system had been hacked and compromised but they didn’t do anything about it.
At the time, Brazile states, the Department of Homeland Security announced that the hack was probably from Russia, since that’s where so many hackers set up shop. The FBI did not confirm the hack. Neither government agency was able to look at the Democrats’ servers.
Instead of taking up the FBI on its offer of help to get rid of the malware planted by the hackers believed to be from Russia, the DNC said no thanks and hired a company called “CrowdStrike” to fix it.
The FBI never got a look at the DNC servers or system.
John Eddy, a representative for CrowdStrike, emailed PJ Media after this article was published and insisted that the company “provided all forensic evidence and analysis that the FBI requested.”
The company conducted the investigation using a standard process called imaging,” he said, citing CrowdStrike’s official statement on the topic.
Former FBI Director Jim Comey testified in 2017 about the problems of not getting a look at the system:
Why the Democrats didn’t want DHS to double-check their app for malware is astonishing considering what happened in the last election cycle.
Democrats continually claimed in 2016 that Trump and Russia “colluded” to “hack the election.” The election was never hacked; no votes were ever changed, we’re told, but the confusion over the hacking allowed Democrats to create a question about it since neither the DHS nor the FBI had been able to look at the system.
Though the Mueller investigation and IG Report showed no collusion, Democrats haven’t let the “TrumpRussia!!” canard go, even bringing it up again at President Trump’s impeachment hearing.
You can’t blame Republicans if they’re holding their breath now to see just how they and Trump will be blamed for this latest cyber disaster. A special prosecutor can’t be far behind, right?
This article has been updated to include a statement from legal counsel for CrowdStrike.
