The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has pushed back the estimated completion date of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for documents pertaining to its communications with the security firm that examined the Democratic National Committee’s hacked servers to October.

The Washington Free Beacon submitted the FOIA request in July 2017 with the FBI seeking all communication between the bureau and CrowdStrike, Inc., the California-based cyber security firm that examined the DNC’s servers following the infiltration that led to the release of John Podesta’s emails. The FBI said in December the documents should be available by March.

The FBI, which was never granted access to the DNC’s servers for inspection, instead relied on the third-party firm that was brought in by the DNC for information regarding the compromised network who concluded that Russia was behind the hack.

The FBI previously awarded an unrelated $150,000 contract to CrowdStrike in July 2015. Details and communications between the firm and the bureau regarding that past contract were requested as part of the FOIA.

The request additionally sought all communications spanning from April 1, 2016—one month before the firm was brought in by the DNC to analyze the servers—and July 7, 2017, the day the FOIA request was submitted to the FBI. – READ MORE