The chair of the House homeland security committee said he “misspoke” Wednesday evening when he intimated during an interview on CNN that the Republican National Committee’s computer network had been hacked.
“I misspoke by asserting that the RNC was hacked,” Texas Republican Mike McCaul said in a statement. “What I had intended to say was that in addition to the DNC hack, Republican political operatives have also been hacked.”
In the earlier interview with CNN, McCaul had told host Wolf Blitzer that the RNC had fallen victim to a hacking perpetrated by Russian state actors at the behest of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“It’s important to note, Wolf, that they have hacked not only hacked into the DNC but also into the RNC,” McCaul told Blitzer at the time. “So they are not discriminating one party against the others. The Russians have basically hacked into both parties at the national level and that gives us all concern about what their motivations are.
“The FBI director would tell you they’re just trying to undermine the integrity of the process,” McCaul continued, after Blitzer noted that if Russia had hacked the RNC, it was news to him. “They are not discriminating one party against the other.
“They have hacked into the RNC, so this is, again, they’re not picking sides here, I don’t think,” McCaul said. “They’re hacking into both political parties. What they intend to do with that information, I don’t know.”
Earlier this summer, hackers believed by the US government to be agents of the Russian government successfully infiltrated the data networks of the Democratic National Committee. That hack led to tens of thousands of internal DNC emails being released on the internet days before the Democratic national convention in Philadelphia, infuriating supporters of onetime Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, who cited emails deriding the candidate as evidence that the party’s establishment had been hostile to Sanders’ candidacy.
The resulting turmoil eventually led to the resignation of DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz – as well as speculation that the Russian government was actively involved in the hack in a bid to interfere with the US presidential election.
Putin has recently been praised by Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, who has also appeared to incite Russia to hack into and publish his opponent Hillary Clinton’s private emails.
