One year ago, the news broke that the Democratic National Committee had been hacked. Tongues began wagging and fingers began pointing that Russia was behind it. However, Democrats might want to get the Kremlin on the phone and offer an apology because a new report suggests the DNC hack may not have been a "hack" at all.

It could have been an inside job.

According to a new report at The Nation, forensic experts and former national security advisers have quietly gathered over the last several months to examine the breach and they have determined the DNC email hack heard ‘round the world was conducted from within the DNC.

The report says that "forensic investigators, intelligence analysts, system designers, program architects, and computer scientists of long experience and strongly credentialed are now producing evidence disproving the official version of key events last year. Their work is intricate and continues at a kinetic pace as we speak."

The group found that "there was no hack of the Democratic National Committee's system on July 5 last year—not by the Russians, not by anyone else."

The report continues, "Hard science now demonstrates it was a leak—a download executed locally with a memory key or a similarly portable data-storage device. In short, it was an inside job by someone with access to the DNC's system."

So, who leaked the emails?

Was it someone at the DNC who, after a bruising primary season, didn't like Hillary Clinton? It's possible.

Could it have been the infamous Awan brothers who acted not only as IT aides to Congress, but as IT consultants to the DNC? It's not only possible, but feasible given what we know now.

Or could it have been the DNC itself, leaking emails disguised as a hack to illicit sympathy and to create confusion in the election?

No one knows just yet, but investigators are getting closer to pinpointing the source.

Until they do, it looks like the DNC owes a big apology to Russia and to President Trump.

For a year the DNC allowed Russia to take the fall for a hack that never happened. They also suggested that then-candidate Trump would condone such criminal activity, when it's been demonstrated that Democrats are the ones who clearly have a problem keeping information technology safe.

First, it was Hillary Clinton storing emails on her own personal server, bleaching 33,000 emails and destroying BlackBerry SIM cards.

Next, it was Huma Abedin storing official State Department emails on her laptop at home which she shared with her husband Anthony Weiner – known in the sexting world as "Carlos Danger" – clearly someone who has little self-control over his own devices, both electronic and otherwise. Law enforcement believed the laptop had been hacked, according to the official FBI search warrant.

Next came the revelation that former DNC chairwoman and Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., knowingly allowed an IT aide to remain on staff after law enforcement discovered he had breached the House Intelligence Committee and House Foreign Affairs Committee mainframes. In fact, she helped him circumvent the House ban on his employ by turning him into an "adviser" who continued to have access to dozens of top Congress members' documents and emails. She provided Imran Awan the password to her iPad containing DNC emails around the time the "hack" took place.

Of course, people probably won't hear much about this on the evening news. The mainstream media is great at pushing fake Russian narratives that even The New York Times calls " sensational, unverified." However, the media is not as good at admitting when the trail has gone cold.

Yet another Russian collusion fairytale turns to dust for the Democrats as it is discovered that the only "hacks" at the DNC are the ones who sit in the press office.

Jennifer Kerns (@JenKernsUSA) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner's Beltway Confidential blog. A GOP communications strategist, she served as spokeswoman for the California Republican Party, recalls in Colorado, and California's Prop. 8. Previously, she served as a writer for the 2016 U.S. presidential debates for FOX News.

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