The top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee was prepared on Monday to blame Donald Trump at least in part for a server breach at the Democratic National Committee, though he could not confirm who specifically was behind the attack.
In a statement that followed a briefing about the hack with intelligence officials, Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., said Trump’s “admiration for Putin and his belittling of NATO” could have motivated Russia to attack the DNC, though he did not confirm the attack had in fact been traced to Moscow.
“[It] would not be the first time cyberintrusions linked to the Kremlin and its supporters have sought to influence the political process in other countries,” Schiff said in the statement. “Given Donald Trump’s well known admiration for Putin and his belittling of NATO, the Russians have both the means and the motive to engage in a hack of the DNC and the dump of its emails prior to the Democratic convention.”
“The reported hack into the Democratic National Committee is the latest example of the vulnerability of all institutions to malicious cyberintrusions,” Schiff added.
A breach of the DNC’s servers announced in June led last week to the exposure of approximately 20,000 private email that were sent or received by Democratic officials. The incident has inspired a sharp rise in acrimony at the party’s national convention this week, as supporters of Bernie Sanders say the emails show that the DNC favored Hillary Clinton.
