A video of President Trump saying the Democratic National Committee should be “ashamed of themselves for allowing themselves to be hacked” ahead of the 2016 election resurfaced Tuesday after it was reported that the campaign body for House Republicans was hacked.
National security lawyer Bradley Moss retweeted a video from July that showed Trump boasting about how the Republicans were far better protected from cyber intrusions.
“Clearly the @NRCC should be ashamed of themselves. That is the President’s view on cybersecurity,” the vocal Trump critic teased.
Clearly the @NRCC should be ashamed of themselves. That is the President’s view on cybersecurity. https://t.co/WLvMZdszFG
— Bradley P. Moss (@BradMossEsq) December 4, 2018
“The DNC should be ashamed of themselves for allowing themselves to be hacked. They had bad defenses, and they were able to be hacked,” Trump said in the “Face the Nation” interview for CBS News in July. “I heard they were trying to hack the Republicans, too. But, and this may be wrong, but they had much stronger defenses.”
“I heard that they were trying, or people were trying, to hack into the Republican National Committee, too. The Republican National Committee,” he said. “But we had much better defenses. I’ve been told that by a number of people. We had much better defenses, so they couldn’t.”
Politico broke the news Tuesday that email accounts of four senior NRCC aides were compromised for months before the breaches were detected in April by a security services contractor that monitors its network. While the party’s leadership team in the House and its rank-and-file members were not informed of the intrusion, NRCC launched an investigation, and the FBI was alerted.
Party officials did not pinpoint when the attack took place, or its origin, though they did say they thought a foreign agent was behind the effort.
The report comes after NRCC leaders backed out of a deal with the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee to refrain from using hacked or stolen material on the campaign trail, the New York Times reported in September.
Trump’s disparaging of the DNC in July came shortly after special counsel Robert Mueller indicted a dozen Russian military officials for breaking into two Democratic Party computer systems in an effort to disrupt the 2016 election.
