Senator Chuck Grassley
The FBI is investigating allegations Russians hacked Democratic National Committee computers and leaked thousands of emails — and Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley is asking the FBI to reveal what it’s learned.
Republican Grassley and Senator Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat, are sending a letter to Attorney General Loretta Lynch, asking if the Russians are responsible. “I believe they have the capability and the history of doing it, but do I know they’re specifically involved in this hacking? I don’t know,” Grassley says. “That’s the purpose of the Grassley-Leahy effort. We ought to know.”
Some 20,000 emails and documents from DNC computers were hacked and made public on the WikiLeaks website. The emails showed national party staff favored Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders and it led the chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee to resign on Sunday, on the eve of the party’s national convention.
Grassley says, “If it’s affecting our political process and they’re trying to interfere in our election process and particularly, if it’s to help one candidate over another, I think the public needs to know about it.” Grassley says we cannot stand for this type of espionage and wants to know about the government’s response to the cyberattacks which target American political organizations. He calls the attack “substantially troubling.”
“We ought to expose it and maybe by exposing it, we will discourage Russia from doing it,” according to Grassley. He is the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee and Leahy is the panel’s ranking Democrat. The senators are raising concern about the potential influence such computer breaches by foreign nations could have on American elections.
The letter says: “The integrity of the democratic process is essential to the social contract on which our republic is formed. If foreign intelligence agencies are attempting to undermine that process, the U.S. government should treat such efforts even more seriously than standard espionage.”