Trump Says This Is The First He's Hearing About Russian Hacking But Nope

The DNC and a cybersecurity firm said that Russian government hackers had breached the computer networks of the DNC and that they targeted Hillary Clinton and Trump, the Washington Post first reported in June.

CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity firm the DNC called on to respond to the breach, said they identified "two separate Russian intelligence-affiliated adversaries" present in the DNC network in May.

"Both adversaries engage in extensive political and economic espionage for the benefit of the government of the Russian Federation and are believed to be closely linked to the Russian government’s powerful and highly capable intelligence services," CrowdStrike said.

"Experts are telling us that Russian state actors broke into the DNC, stole these emails, and other experts are now saying that the Russians are releasing these emails for the purpose of actually helping Donald Trump,” Robby Mook told CNN.

“I don’t think it’s coincidental that these e-mails were released on the eve of our convention here, and that’s disturbing, and I think we need to be concerned about that.”

“If the Russians in fact had these emails," he said, "I don’t think it’s very coincidental that they are being released at this time to create maximum damage on Hillary Clinton and to help Donald Trump.”

Citing federal officials, the New York Times reported that American intelligence agencies had told the White House they had "high confidence" that Russia was behind the theft of emails from the DNC.

"We know that Russian intelligence services, which are part of the Russian government, which is under the firm control of Vladimir Putin, hacked into the DNC,” Clinton said in a Fox News interview. “And we know that they arranged for a lot of those emails to be released.”

"We’ve never had a foreign adversarial power be already involved in our electoral process with the DNC hacks,” she said, citing intelligence reports linking Russia to the hacked emails. "We’ve never had the nominee of one of our major parties urging the Russians to hack more. So I am grateful that this is being taken seriously and I want everyone—Democrat, Republican, independent—to understand the real threat that this represents."

In a joint statement, the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence on Election Security said that they were cofident that the "Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations."

The agencies said that the hacked emails on WikiLeaks and other sites were "consistent with the methods and motivations of Russia-directed efforts."

"These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the US election process."

During the debate, Clinton directly confronted Trump about his position on Russian's alleged interference in the elections.

Referring to the WikiLeaks emails, Clinton said the "Russian government has engaged in espionage against Americans."

"This has come from the highest levels of the Russian government, clearly, from Putin himself, in an effort, as 17 of our intelligence agencies have confirmed, to influence our election," Clinton said.

"So I actually think the most important question of this evening, Chris, is, finally, will Donald Trump admit and condemn that the Russians are doing this and make it clear that he will not have the help of Putin in in this election, that he rejects Russian espionage against Americans, which he actually encouraged in the past?" Clinton told the debate moderator, Chris Wallace. "Those are the questions we need answered. We've never had anything like this happen in any of our elections before."