Yes, The Democratic National Committee Flat Out Lied In Claiming No Donor Financial Info Leaked

from the it-leaked-like-a-seive dept

Fri, Jul 22nd 2016 7:39pm — Mike Masnick

You may recall, from last month, that a hacker (who many have accused of working for the Russian government) got into the Democratic National Committee's computers and copied a ton of stuff. All of the emails that were obtained (a little over 19,000, from seven top DNC officials) are now searchable on Wikileaks, so there are tons of stories popping up covering what's been found. The Intercept, for example, appears to be having a field day exposing sketchy behavior by the DNC.

But one point that hasn't received as much attention: the DNC appears to have flat out lied right after the hack happened. In its statement on the hack, the DNC had insisted that no personal donor info got out:

The hackers had access to the information for approximately one year, but that access was wiped clean last weekend, The Washington Post reported, noting that the DNC said that no personal, financial or donor information had been accessed or taken.

Except, well, no. There had been reports, driven by the hacker, that the files absolutely did include personal donor info, and now you can see some of that for yourself. For example, it took me all of about 5 minutes to find a list of donors and their email addresses, which I won't be sharing here, but I'm sure others can find as well. And, then, of course, you can find things like this discussion about a potential donor, Niranjan Shah, with "ties" to disgraced and convicted former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, noting that there were "pay to play" accusations associated with him. The DNC noted that they "could be ok" with Shah donating to the DNC, but that the administration might not want him to show up at their events. And, of course, there are emails detailing specific donations by specific people.

There are claims that some emails contain credit card data, though I haven't seen that myself. Either way, it certainly appears that in the rush to "nothing to see here" the leak of the info, the DNC simply lied about what was leaked.

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Filed Under: computers, dnc, donors, hacked, personal info, private info

39 Comments

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That Anonymous Coward (profile), 22 Jul 2016 @ 7:54pm

If only there were laws about disclosure... that applied to anyone but the peons of the world.
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Steve Zissou (profile), 22 Jul 2016 @ 7:58pm

the political class!? lying??? surely not!!!
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Anonymous Coward, 22 Jul 2016 @ 8:42pm

*gasp*
The DNC not being honest about something?
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Indy, 22 Jul 2016 @ 10:22pm

Cursory review
I've been reading these for past few hours and honestly, this is a fairly dull leak. The most amazing thing to me is the topics and candor of discussion for top communications positions at one of the most powerful political parties on the planet. It amazes me they get anything done of significance.

And yet the donor information is there, but why not all of it? This is just a very, very small slice of what is probably still out there.
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Anonymous Coward, 22 Jul 2016 @ 10:36pm

Re: Cursory review
Also the staffer Pablo Manriquez sure seemed to be a thorn in everyone's side. Pretty funny to read threads with/about him.
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Anonymous Coward, 22 Jul 2016 @ 11:35pm

Re: Cursory review
> It amazes me they get anything done of significance.

Well, they had help leaking all their most confidential files, so there's that done, at least.
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That One Guy (profile), 23 Jul 2016 @ 2:10am

Tisk tisk
Clearly this only happened because they weren't using encryption/security with a built in unicorn gate, as everyone knows that with those in place the only people who can access something are 'good guys', of which the hackers almost certainly wouldn't have counted.

Had they been using unicorn gate encryption this would never have happened, making for yet another perfect example of the kinds of dangers trying to use secure encryption can cause, and one that I can only hope the tech companies take note of for their own future good.
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Anonymous Coward, 23 Jul 2016 @ 3:41am

Of course they lied
Take a look at this message from this stunningly ignorant and incompetent chimp who works there:

https://wikileaks.org/dnc-emails/emailid/4075

The combination of cluelessness and arrogance is amazing. Hopefully this moron will be blacklisted for life: he certainly should never be hired by ANYONE who actually cares about competence.
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afn29129 (profile), 23 Jul 2016 @ 6:33am

Public record
Political contributions are a matter of public record.
Ditto for voter registrations. And here in Florida, if you gave your phone number when registering, it's public too. A complete listing of all registered voters in FL, on a CD, will cost you just $5.00 from Tallahassee. As for how well, or poorly, Gawker redacted in their news article.. The Zip-plus 4 column, which they didn't blackout, will get you CLOSE.
http://gawker.com/contrary-to-dnc-claim-hacked-data-contains-a-ton-of-pe-1782132678
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Oblate (profile), 23 Jul 2016 @ 7:15am

Politicians not lying would be real news...
One of my fears about the current political situation is that the DNC will realize that they can get away with just about anything, as long as they're still not as bad as the Republicans, using the unassailable logic of "what are you going to do, vote for Trump?"
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John Fenderson (profile), 23 Jul 2016 @ 7:49am

Re: Politicians not lying would be real news...
You're a bit late. Your fear was realized quite a few election cycles ago.
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Avior, 23 Jul 2016 @ 12:09pm

The party of Clinton lied?
I'm shocked, I tell you. Shocked!
(That they didn't do a better job of it.)
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Anonymous Coward, 23 Jul 2016 @ 12:31pm

Re: Cursory review
Dull? On another site I read that they were working for/wanted Clinton even while she was running against Sanders.
In my opinion that is something that should not happen because it undermines fair competition and gives one candidate an advantage.

But I guess if you don't want fair pre elections then yes, it's a dull leak.
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Anonymous Coward, 23 Jul 2016 @ 12:36pm

Re:
Most disappointing part of it:

If she becomes president she won't tell us the truth about aliens!
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Anonymous Coward, 23 Jul 2016 @ 1:27pm

None of this will matter
Millions and millions of loyal sheeple will vote for her regardless of what she does. The fact that she is the best the Dems have speaks very poorly of their morals and expectations.
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TJ, 23 Jul 2016 @ 1:36pm

WUT?
"The fact that she is the best the Dems have speaks very poorly of their morals and expectations."

...and the repub nom doesn't speak very poorly of their morals and expectations?
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Anonymous Coward, 23 Jul 2016 @ 1:38pm

Re: WUT?
The difference is that Trump brought in a lot of new voters as an anti-establishment candidate which allowed him to beat the better candidates. Hillary was running against a socialist, though Hillary is one as well. The fact that the Dems couldn't find any better candidates than those two is sad.
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Anonymous Coward, 23 Jul 2016 @ 4:05pm

Re: Re: Cursory review
It's a party. The entire purpose of a Political Party is to usurp the will of the people and undermine any form of fair competition.

If you want fair vote for an independent, not because they are any better, but because that will help to destroy that which you complain about.
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Anonymous Coward, 23 Jul 2016 @ 4:08pm

Re: Re: Politicians not lying would be real news...
Agree, the poster you responded to is an example of how common place corruption has become that many no longer properly recognize it.
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Anonymous Coward, 23 Jul 2016 @ 4:16pm

Re: Re: WUT?
better candidates

Better Candidates? Had they been better they would have gotten he votes not Trump.

Trump is more of an example of how bad things have gotten that he could make it in politics.

Trump is really the ONLY one that has chosen to address the Illegal Immigration problem. That carries so much weight than many other problems are secondary for most. If the nation is destroyed by this shit the way Europe is, then there will effectively be NO America to speak of in less than 50 years. We are going to see Europe fall in 20~40 years unless they cull a lot of immigrants and get rid of the socialism.

Brexit "MIGHT" save Britain, but we have to see, because as it turns out, only a bunch of non-nonsensical turds were at the helm of Brexit. And if a bunch of fools got that much election, then imagine how big the problem really is in the mind of the people.
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Whatever (profile), 24 Jul 2016 @ 12:28am

Remind me again how Wikileaks isn't playing politics? Timing the release like this is just plain nasty, gotta wonder if the Republicans have inside connections.

Between that and all the hateful anti-Hillary GIFs appearing online, you gotta know some modern day Karl Rove is pushing a social media agenda like mad - and sucking at it.
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Anonymous Coward, 24 Jul 2016 @ 5:15am

Re: Re: WUT?
Hillary was running against a socialist, though Hillary is one as well.
Bernie is an FDR/LBJ-style social-democrat -- which used to be the norm for Democrats, as much as Party leadership would like everyone to forget that -- and Hillary is a crony-capitalism economic neoliberal and a military neoconservative hawk. Also, recent polls still show that Bernie would mop the floor with Trump in the general while Hillary struggles to maintain a tenuous lead. It really says something about Democratic Party leadership that they would rather risk losing to Trump than win with Bernie.

Thanks for making me chuckle, though. Your comment made me nostalgic for the days when folks of your ilk applied that slur to Obama -- who continued bailing out Wall Street and left underwater homeowners floundering, who flipped on national single-payer health insurance and instead championed a for-profit protection racket conceived by the Heritage Foundation, and under whom income and wealth inequality has grown steadily worse. (I could go one.) Good one.
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Anonymous Coward, 24 Jul 2016 @ 5:16am

Re: Re: Re: WUT?
Edit: (I could go on.)
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Anonymous Coward, 24 Jul 2016 @ 6:31am

Say what? Politicians lied? Oh, please say it is not true.
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TRX (profile), 24 Jul 2016 @ 8:21am

> 19,000

Did those people actually *do* anything other than burning up their keyboards and keypads?
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Anonymous Coward, 24 Jul 2016 @ 8:52am

Re: Re: Re: WUT?
yea, no need to go on... you don't get it either.

Socialism via bail out the rich Bush/Obama/Hillary IS socialism's out come. You require the intellect of a fool to not see that socialism is just a farce to centralize economic power inside the government instead of outside the government where it must remain.

Every time you vote for a socialist, you actually do not get socialism... you get corruption with added power and wealth for the ruling elite.

Socialism is a pipe dream for losers that never grokked reality.
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Anonymous Coward, 24 Jul 2016 @ 10:45am

Re: None of this will matter
You are right, she is the second least popular presidential candidate to ever be nominated. Luckily for her, she is running against Trump who happens to be #1.
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trollificus (profile), 24 Jul 2016 @ 2:53pm

However bad the President may be, the damage done would be less had Congress a approach to their jobs than:

Step 1: Get elected. (And re-elected)
Step 2:
Step 3: Profit!!

(Maintaining the perfect void of Step 2 inevitably requires all Congresscritters to delegate any actual legislating or decisionmaking to the executive branch and/or lobbyists retained by well-heeled industries. Then the only exceptions are hysterical legislative overreactions to media-driven moral panics and tit-for-tat patronage deals.)
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Anonymous Coward, 24 Jul 2016 @ 3:55pm

Re: Re: Re: Re: WUT?
You have no idea what socialism is. Get an education please.
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Anonymous Coward, 24 Jul 2016 @ 4:25pm

Re: Re: Re: WUT?
It really says something about Democratic Party leadership that they would rather risk losing to Trump than win with Bernie.

True that.
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Oblate (profile), 24 Jul 2016 @ 6:04pm

Re: Re: Re: Politicians not lying would be real news...
I was commenting about the scale of the corruption, not the existence of the corruption. I thought that was implied by the title.

Hope this clears up any confusion.
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GEMont (profile), 24 Jul 2016 @ 9:44pm

Home, home on deranged
"Yes, The Democratic National Committee Flat Out Lied In Claiming No Donor Financial Info Leaked"

Geez. On the "Holy Shit, No Kidding" scale, this fails to make even an attempt at a mark.

On the bright side, at least you have to admit that these politicians are diligently doing the jobs you're paying them to do.

Lying to the Public is, after all, one of the modern world's highest paid professions.... and one especially adept at procuring that universally sought after All-American Capitalist's Untaxable and Unrecorded Income that arrives in the dead of the night in brown paper bags.

I hear the pickings in America are getting so small - what with the federal/local government, police and Wall Street freely robbing the population "by law" - that there's a migration of both professional and amateur American evil-doers heading to Canada, where "you can still tell who wears the white hats".

Don't worry though. They'll be back right after they taste real winter. In winter in Canada, all hats are white most of the time. :)

===
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Anonymous Coward, 25 Jul 2016 @ 4:47am

Re: Re: WUT?
Brawndo has electrolytes, it's what plants crave.
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John Fenderson (profile), 25 Jul 2016 @ 7:24am

Re: Re: Re: Re: Politicians not lying would be real news...
Yes, I understood what you meant.
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Get off my cyber-lawn! (profile), 25 Jul 2016 @ 1:53pm

Tim Cushing - you created a new hashtag!
#NTSH

Nothing To See Here
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MMT (profile), 25 Jul 2016 @ 5:50pm

Can anyone explain the "specific donations" link - the name in the subject, Mayo Stuntz is of a former CIA man who has been dead for 3 years, but still donated to Hilary Clinton on May 24, 2016?
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Anonymous Coward, 26 Jul 2016 @ 12:47am

Re:
Sounds like someone's a Joe Biden fan.
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Wendy Cockcroft, 26 Jul 2016 @ 3:07am

Re: Re: Re: WUT?
All correct. Political discourse has shifted hard to the right and the "conservatives" won't admit to this because, if you want to establish Fascism as the norm, you have to cast anything that goes against it as basically commie pinko crap.
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The Wanderer (profile), 27 Jul 2016 @ 5:48am

Re: Re: Re: Cursory review
Uh, no.

A political party is what happens when people with compatible political views band together to help make the case to the public that the candidates who support their views are the ones who should be elected.

The only way this directly ends up at "usurp the will of the people and undermine any form of fair competition" is when you don't have enough different political parties, and so you have people with non-compatible views nevertheless having to band together under the same umbrella.

...and that, in turn, inevitably happens under a single-choice first-past-the-post voting system. If you want to change things, the first thing to do is to campaign - at the state and local level - for a switch to a ranked-preference / ranked-choice voting system which satisfies the Condorcet criteria.
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