Congressional investigators released a report indicating, “Democrat IT aides made unauthorized access to congressional servers in 2016, allegedly accessing the data of members for whom they did not work, logging in as members of Congress themselves, and covering their tracks, according to a presentation summarizing the findings of a four-month internal probe,” reported the Daily Caller Tuesday.
The report continued, alleging Democrats misrepresented the entire scandal:
Their behavior mirrored a “classic method for insiders to exfiltrate data from an organization,” and they continued even after orders to stop, the briefing materials allege. There are indications that numerous members’ data may have been secretly residing not on their designated servers, but instead aggregated onto one server, according to the briefing and other sources. Authorities said that the entire server was then physically stolen.When acting on the findings, Democratic leadership appear to have misrepresented the issue to their own members as solely a matter of theft, a comparison of the investigators’ findings with Democrats’ recollections and a committee’s public statement shows, leading 44 Democrats to not conduct protective measures typically taken after a breach — including informing constituents whose personal information may have been exposed.
House investigators don’t believe multiple unauthorized logins were “innocuous”, saying, “This pattern of login activity suggests steps are being taken to conceal their activity.”
A second presentation shows that shortly before the election, their alleged behavior got even worse. “During September 2016, shared employee continued to use Democratic Caucus computers in anomalous ways:
- Logged onto laptop as system administrator
- Changed identity and logged onto Democratic Caucus server using 17 other user account credentials
- Some credentials belonged to Members
- The shared employee did not work for 9 of the 17 offices to which these user accounts belonged.”
The investigation found “possible storage of sensitive House information outside the House … Dropbox is installed on two Caucus computers used by the shared employees. Two user accounts had thousands of files in their Dropbox folder on each computer.” Using Dropbox is against House rules because it uploads files offsite.
The Daily Caller’s report is detailed, lengthy, and well worth the time to read.
One of the aides, Imran Awan, worked for former DNC Chair, Debbie Wasserman Schultz. Professor Jacobson discussed Shultz’s connection to Imran last year, and we’ve covered the story over the last few months.
CLICK HERE FOR FULL VERSION OF THIS STORY