DNC chair contradicts Obama on duration of Democratic hacks: 'They came after us daily, hourly'

published 18 December 2016

President Obama said at a press conference Friday that when he met one-on-one with Russian President Vladimir Putin earlier this year, he told Putin to put a stop to hacking attacks on the Democratic National Committee. After that, Obama said, he "did not see further tampering of the election process."

But speaking on ABC's This Week on Sunday, interim DNC Chair Donna Brazile offered a different timeline while speaking with Martha Raddatz:

Raddatz: 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?Brazile: No, they did not stop. 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. [...] They came after us daily, hourly. And there were times when we thought they would penetrate us and we would have another breach. [ABC News]

Brazile demurred to say why Obama would claim the attacks stopped if they didn't — or whether she believes he was misinformed about the situation. "We never felt comfortable," she emphasized. "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." Watch her comments in context below. Bonnie Kristian

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.