Democratic Party database hacked by Russian government, Trump opposition research accessed

Russian government hackers have broken into the Democratic National Committee’s computer network, accessing opposition research on Republican presumptive nominee Donald Trump as well as email and chat information, party officials confirmed to TIME.

The hackers did not access donor information and financial records, according to the DNC, but were able to steal troves of data including information on Trump, whose past the Democratic Party has been researching in preparation for a general election. The intrusion was first reported by the Washington Post.

The DNC will play a key role in helping organizing state campaigns in the November election between presumptive nominees Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, and much of the information on their systems is invaluable to waging a successful campaign.

“The security of our system is critical to our operation and to the confidence of the campaigns and state parties we work with,” said Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), the DNC chairwoman said in a statement. “When we discovered the intrusion, we treated this like the serious incident it is and reached out to CrowdStrike immediately. Our team moved as quickly as possible to kick out the intruders and secure our network.”

http://time.com/4368534/dnc-democratic-national-committee-hack-russia-donald-trump/

Russians deny knowledge, of course ...

Russian government, eh? Strange to see them as a HRC surrogate. Well, it'll be fun to watch.

Meh. Isn't this one of those "big stories" that always break out that you two waffled about so much on my Trump thread?
Is this somehow different.

Pah.

eddie wrote:Meh. Isn't this one of those "big stories" that always break out that you two waffled about so much on my Trump thread?
Is this somehow different.

Pah.

No...Republicans don't promote BIG STORIES unless it has to do with Benghazi or emails.

I'm still right

eddie wrote:Meh. Isn't this one of those "big stories" that always break out that you two waffled about so much on my Trump thread?
Is this somehow different.

Pah.

The Republicans are always hyping stories that never actually materialize -- there's no there there.

(Deep breath.) For example, Andrew Breitbart claimed he was going to unveil an "explosive" tape of Obama back in 2012 (which of course was a presidential election year), and it ended up being an unedited version of a video that was already available to the public, showing Obama as a college student praising a professor named Derrick Bell, who's hated by the right for his work in critical race theory but was actually pretty well loved by both his liberal and conservative students. The part that had been "covered up" was where Obama gave Bell a brief hug. Just to emphasize, the tape that had already been made public showed that Obama liked the guy quite a bit. It just didn't have the hugging part.

Then, of course, Breitbart died before the video was posted to his website (he still had a whole staff in place, of course, and they did post the entire thing in March of 2012). http://nation.foxnews.com/president-obama/2012/03/07/obama-harvard-tapes-exposed-hannity

Well, of course, Obama had Breitbart killed (he didn't) to prevent this explosive (it wasn't) video from being released (it was). Never mind the fact that he did have heart disease, never mind the fact that the only thing that turned up in the toxicology report was that Breitbart was a bit tipsy when he died -- oh no, the president is a murderer!

So you see how the American right makes "explosive news" out of nothing, then spins a murder conspiracy theory out of a guy dying of heart disease.

On the other hand, the incursion into the DNC database has been independently confirmed, according to the source, which quotes the CEO of the security firm the Democrats hired to investigate. So there actually is something there, to the tune of a foreign government hacking into the information system of the Democratic Party and retrieving information the DNC is planning to use in the upcoming election.

Despite all that, I'm still right.

If a story appears it still depends upon who says it, and who it's about.

According to Chris Matthews, MSNBC, it's another non-story. Trump has not been in politics before now, and foreign governments routinely do backgrounds on people who might be important in coming months.

Because little is known about Trump, the Russian government simply went to an open channel and data-mined some tidbits about him.

That is the follow-up by the Washington Post, who broke the story.

"Russian government hackers"  ?!?

I thought that the Russian "hackers" these days were supposedly largely independent contractors, selling their services to both government departments and criminal gangs over there..

The brave new world of Russian and Eastern European entrepreneurship.