The thousands of hacked emails sent by senior aides to the House Republican campaign arm weren't used against GOP candidates before the 2018 midterm elections because they were Republican, a Democratic senator said Wednesday.

"Well, it feels a little bit like a replay except, because it was Republicans and not Democrats, perhaps, there was no weaponization of it," Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., told MSNBC after being asked about the similarities between the 2016 and 2018 online intrusions into political organizations. "So we need to figure out more what happened and was it used for any purpose."

On Tuesday, it was revealed that the email accounts of four staffers from the National Republican Congressional Committee were compromised for months before the breaches were detected in April by MSSP, a security services firm contracted to monitor the network. Party officials told Politico, which first reported the story, that none of the details discussed in the accessed emails have been made public and no extortion attempts were made. The FBI was notified about the security threat.

"Clearly the hack on the DNC was weaponized against Democrats and against Hillary Clinton to help Trump, so you can draw a bunch of conclusions about how the hacked emails were used," said the Senate Judiciary Democrat. "Because we don't know how these were used yet, you don't have that first level of conclusions to draw."

[Related: Video of Trump saying DNC should be 'ashamed' for getting hacked resurfaces after NRCC hack revealed]



"Because it was Republicans and not Democrats, perhaps, there was no weaponization" of GOP hacked emails - @SenWhitehouse pic.twitter.com/3Gi0BWex0E — TheBeat w/Ari Melber (@TheBeatWithAri) December 5, 2018



The electronic incursion comes after attacks in 2016 on the Democratic National Committee and John Podesta, who was then chairman of Hillary Clinton's campaign. The emails, suspected to be stolen by a group linked to Russian intelligence, were then published by WikLeaks ahead of the election. The release of Podesta's emails, which at one point coincided with the leak of the "Access Hollywood" tape capturing Trump allegedly bragging about sexual assault, is now part of special counsel Robert Muller's federal Russia investigation.