Donna Brazile says hacks of DNC "did not stop" until the end of the election
Interim Democratic National Committee (DNC) chair Donna Brazile is pushing back against President Obama’s claim last week that Russian hacking into DNC systems stopped after he spoke with Russian leader Vladimir Putin about the cyber attacks.
Brazile said Sunday in an interview with ABC’s “This Week” that the hacks went on “repeatedly.”
“President Obama also said Friday that the cyber attacks stopped after he warned Putin at an international conference in September. You’ve been briefed on the party’s computer system. Is that right, they stopped?” ABC’s Martha Raddatz asked.
“No, they did not stop,” Brazile responded. “They -- they came after us absolutely every day until the end of the election. They tried to hack into our system repeatedly. We put up the very best cyber security -- what I call infrastructure -- to stop them, but they constantly -- they came after us.”
The president, in a Friday press conference, gave this timeline of how he had personally responded to the Kremlin-directed attacks: “In early September when I saw President Putin in China, I felt that the most effective way to ensure that that did not happen was to talk to him directly and tell him to cut it out. There were going to be some serious consequences if he did not.”
“And in fact,” Mr. Obama continued, “we did not see further tampering of the election process. But the leaks through Wikileaks had already occurred.”
But Brazile, in her Sunday interview, said Russian hackers “came after us daily, hourly.”
“And there were times when we thought they would penetrate us and we would have another breach,” she said.
“We were under constant attack,” said Brazile, who came under fire earlier this year after a hacked email from Clinton campaign chair John Podesta’s personal account showed she had given the campaign information about a debate question. “We never felt comfortable. We didn’t know what was coming next. And, you know, this is not just about computers. This is harassment of individuals, it’s harassment of our candidates, harassment of our donors. We had stolen information, personal information. People were personally harassed.”