Hillary Clinton’s campaign has suggested that the Russian hackers wanted to benefit Donald Trump by weakening the Democratic Party.
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Trump dismissed that idea as laughable, tweeting: “The new joke in town is that Russian Federation leaked the disastrous DNC e-mails”.
On Friday, the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks published almost 20,000 emails from the DNC.
The FBI on Monday said it has opened an investigation into the DNC hack “to determine the nature and scope of the matter”.
Trump’s campaign chairman Paul Manafort has called the accusations that Trump colluded with Russian Federation in the DNC email hack “absurd”.
A former CIA and National Security Agency director Michael Hayden said, “Certainly Russia has become a master at manipulating information for their strategic goals: Witness the information bubble they have created for their threatening behavior in the Crimea, the Ukraine and elsewhere”.
Clinton, who received the Democratic nomination on Tuesday at the party’s convention in Philadelphia, will face Republican Donald Trump in the election.
Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., denied that his father’s campaign had anything to do with encouraging Russians to hack the DNC.
The 49-year-old Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Chairwoman of Democratic National Committee in a statement announced her resignation after the emails leaked by Wikileaks showed that she tended to support Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders in the party’s presidential primaries.
It responded after cyber security experts and USA officials said there was evidence Russian Federation had engineered the release of sensitive Democratic Party emails in order to influence the November 8 US presidential election.
“What the motives were in terms of the leaks, all that – I can’t say directly”, Obama told NBC News.
The leak of the DNC emails last week was a bombshell, providing clear evidence that officials in the committee were actively working against the campaign of Sen.
Also Tuesday, Senate Judiciary Committee leaders pressed the FBI and Justice Department for details on the investigation, including how and when federal investigators learned of the breach and what action is being taken in response.
The FBI and other US agencies involved haven’t yet officially attributed the DNC attack to Russian government hackers. “It’s one thing to say that they were typing stuff in Russian or they were coming from a Russian IP (internet protocol) address or their systems were configured in Russian”, Tait said.
Kerry told reporters Tuesday he brought the matter up with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov at a meeting in Laos and explained that the FBI was investigating. “While Hillary Clinton unequivocally positions herself as an adversary of Russian Federation and [president] Vladimir Putin, [Donald Trump] has repeatedly stated in speeches and interviews that resolving issues with Russian Federation and its president is not just possible but necessary”.
CrowdStrike have said they believe two hackers, Fancy Bear, which obtained access to the Democratic servers in April, and Cozy Bear, which first stole information in the summer of 2015, are controlled by GRU and FSB respectively.
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Clinton on Monday spoke at the same gathering and offered a scathing critique of Trump’s foreign policy, casting him as too reckless to serve as the country’s commander in chief.
