Were the Russians behind the hacking of email accounts belonging to staffers at the Democrat National Committee and that of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta?

The Obama administration says they were.

But a key piece of evidence just emerged and it calls the whole story into question.

After Democrats claimed their servers were hacked by the Russians, the DNC refused to let the FBI examine their servers.

Instead, investigators were forced to rely on the work of CrowdStrike, a private cyber security firm, which was hired by the DNC to investigate the breach.

CrowdStrike came back with findings that the Russians were behind the hack.

This was a key piece of evidence that led many to believe the Russians had conducted the operation to help Donald Trump win the election.

But the evidence is now collapsing.

CrowdStrike was forced to walk-back one of their key findings that supposedly backed up their claims.

Voice of America reports:

U.S. cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike has revised and retracted statements it used to buttress claims of Russian hacking during last year’s American presidential election campaign. The shift followed a VOA report that the company misrepresented data published by an influential British think tank. In December, CrowdStrike said it found evidence that Russians hacked into a Ukrainian artillery app, contributing to heavy losses of howitzers in Ukraine’s war with pro-Russian separatists. VOA reported Tuesday that the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), which publishes an annual reference estimating the strength of world armed forces, disavowed the CrowdStrike report and said it had never been contacted by the company. Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense also has stated that the combat losses and hacking never happened. CrowdStrike was first to link hacks of Democratic Party computers to Russian actors last year, but some cybersecurity experts have questioned its evidence. The company has come under fire from some Republicans who say charges of Kremlin meddling in the election are overblown.

As previously reported, the FBI did agree with CrowdStrike’s findings.

But they never examined the DNC’s servers to corroborate the claim.

The FBI may have relied upon CrowdStrike’s faulty work to come to their conclusion.

This only adds fire to the criticism that no evidence has been presented to prove the Russians were behind the email hacks.

Toward the end of the Obama administration, the intelligence community published a report stating their assessment the Russians were behind the email hacks.

But the report contained no proof or evidence, either.

This bombshell that CrowdStrike is having to walk-back part of their report only raises more questions as to whether the Obama administration was putting politics ahead of the truth.