Ever since the world first learned about the DNC hack last year, there has been mass confusion over one peculiar decision made by then DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz: why, if DNC leaders thought they were the victim of a massive cyber attack by a hostile foreign government seeking to undermine their political ambitions, would they shun FBI help and instead engage the private security firm CrowdStrike?

The response was so confounding, in fact, it has resulted in several conspiracy theories attempting to explain why DWS would make such a seemingly bizarre decision and what, if anything, she was attempted to hide.

Now, efforts to rationally explain the DNC's response to their server hack have grown even more difficult after Donna Brazile revealed for the first time that DWS and Hillary's campaign general counsel Marc Elias (yes, the very same Marc Elias who we now know laundered DNC and Hillary campaign cash through his law firm to pay for the Trump Dossier) apparently chose to hide their server issues, not only from the FBI, buy from DNC Officers as well. Per The Daily Caller:

Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the former head of the Democratic National Committee, did not tell the DNC’s own officers about a breach on its servers for more than a month after learning about it, according to then-DNC officer Donna Brazile. Wasserman Schultz alerted the officers of the breach only when The Washington Post was about to make the revelations public, Brazile writes in an excerpt of the book Politico ran Thursday. The DNC instead enlisted the law firm of Perkins Coie to make major decisions, including how to handle the breach of its servers that led to an embarrassing email dump. The timing suggests the DNC’s unusual and significant choice to have the private law firm CrowdStrike conduct the investigation into the breach, rather than turn the evidence over to law enforcement, was made without consulting DNC officers. “She told [officers] about the hacking only minutes before the Washington Post broke the news,” Brazile wrote.

Of course, this controversy erupted this past summer when even Obama's Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson blasted to the DNC's inexplicable decision to refuse FBI assistance.

Former President Barack Obama’s Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson testified in June 2017 before Congress that the DNC declined help from his agency after the email system was hacked. “The response I got was, the FBI had spoken to them. They don’t want our help. They have CrowdStrike, the cyber security firm,” Johnson said. “I recall very clearly that I was not pleased that we were not in there helping them patch this vulnerability.” Wasserman Schultz strongly disputed Johnson’s testimony. “He’s wrong in every respect,” she said. She claimed she had never been informed of the FBI’s offer and said the FBI was the one who did not loop in high-level officials, saying it did not “do anything other than lob a phone call into our tech support through our main switchboard.” “How is it that the FBI or DHS or any federal agency that was concerned about a foreign enemy state intruding on the networks of one of the two major political parties did not think it important enough to go higher than a tech support staffer?” she asked. “It is astounding and outrageous.”

The decision not to loop in the FBI was major, in part because there are potential chain-of-custody issues when law enforcement do not do the work directly. And CrowdStrike can’t work hand-in-hand with prosecutors the way the FBI can. Even CrowdStrike’s CEO said, as paraphrased by the Post, that it is “extremely difficult for a civilian organization to protect itself from a skilled and determined state such as Russia.”



Meanwhile, this isn't the only time that DWS has responded in a bizarre and inexplicable way to a scandal. As our readers are undoubtedly aware, DWS was the last Representative in Congress to fire the now-infamous IT staffer, Imran Awan, keeping him on her taxpayer funded payroll even after he had been banned from Congressional servers.

What is that saying about the truth and being set free?