CrowdStrike Had No Evidence Of Russians Stealing Emails From DNC, Declassified Transcript Shows

The cybersecurity firm that investigated and remediated the alleged hack of the Democratic National Committee’s servers in 2016 found no direct evidence that hackers stole any data or emails, according to a newly declassified interview transcript.

Shawn Henry, the president of CrowdStrike Services, told the House Intelligence Committee in late 2017 that his firm had no evidence that the alleged Russian hackers stole any data from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) servers.

“There’s not evidence that they were actually exfiltrated,” Henry said.

“There’s circumstantial evidence, but no evidence that they were actually exfiltrated.”

The publication by WikiLeaks of more than 44,000 emails from senior DNC officials became one of the biggest stories of the turbulent 2016 presidential race and served as the predicate for the FBI’s investigation of the Trump campaign. Special counsel Robert Mueller, who took over the probe in May 2017, eventually charged a group of Russians with hacking the DNC. The indictment alleges that the Russians hacked into the DNC and stole thousands of emails.

Prior to Mueller’s indictment, the public knowledge of the alleged DNC hack consisted of CrowdStrike’s brief report on the matter released on June 14, 2016, days after the firm claims to have ousted the hackers from the committee’s systems. The report makes no mention of stolen data, although Henry told The Washington Post in an article published the same day that the Russians allegedly “stole two files.”

More