‘Not Reassuring’
The House Intelligence Committee has posted the written remarks of Obama-era Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson ahead of his testimony Wednesday on Russia’s interference in the U.S. election, and in them, he diplomatically lands blame at the feet of the DNC.
Johnson, a highly-respected Obama administration official and a former federal prosecutor, at the very beginning of his remarks makes one fact crystal clear: “In 2016 the Russian government, at the direction of Vladimir Putin himself, orchestrated cyberattacks on our Nation for the purpose of influencing our election – plain and simple.”
President Donald Trump’s press secretary earlier Tuesday stated he does not know the Commander in Chief views on the issue as they have never discussed it. All 17 U.S. intelligence agencies, former FBI Director Jim Comey, and now former Secretary Johnson are in complete unanimous agreement: Russia interfered in the election.
Later in his testimony Secretary Johnson politely but disappointedly directs blame to the Democratic National Committee (DNC) for its response to Russia’s hacking of its servers, calling their response “not reassuring.”
“Sometime in 2016 I became aware of a hack into systems of the Democratic National Committee,” Johnson says in his written testimony. “Fresh from the experience with the Office of Personnel Management, I pressed my staff to know whether DHS was sufficiently proactive, and on the scene helping the DNC identify the intruders and patch vulnerabilities. The answer, to the best of my recollection, was not reassuring: the FBI and the DNC had been in contact with each other months before about the intrusion, and the DNC did not feel it needed DHS’s assistance at that time.”
Nearly 20,000 emails were hacked from the DNC’s servers from January 2015 to May of 2016.Â
Reports after the election made clear the DNC’s utter incompetence. According to the New York Times the FBI contacted the DNC in September of 2015, when it detected Russian hacking but could not reach anyone in person. According to the report the DNC hired a third party contractor and when he received multiple calls from the FBI he did not respond for weeks because he did not believe the calls were from the Bureau. He thought they were prank calls.
“Yared Tamene, the tech-support contractor at the D.N.C. who fielded the call, was no expert in cyberattacks. His first moves were to check Google for ‘the Dukes,'” The New York Times explained, referring to the name of the Russian hacking group, “and conduct a cursory search of the D.N.C. computer system logs to look for hints of such a cyberintrusion.”
“By his own account, he did not look too hard even after Special Agent Hawkins called back repeatedly over the next several weeks — in part because he wasn’t certain the caller was a real F.B.I. agent and not an impostor.”
Secretary Johnson testifies before the House Intelligence Committee Wednesday at 10 AM EDT.
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Image: Official DHS photo by Barry Bahler via FlickrÂ
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