U.S. Rep. Ben Ray Luján, D-N.M., was among those targeted by Russian hackers aiming to influence the November election, The New York Times is reporting.
Courtesy photo
Ben Ray Luján
A website that posted documents stolen from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), the campaign arm of Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives, which Luján chairs, “posted a cache of confidential documents focusing on Representative Ben Ray Luján, Democrat of New Mexico, the chairman of the D.C.C.C., who faced no serious challenger this year,” the newspaper reported late Tuesday.
“Mr. Luján said it was a clear effort to send a message to the party leadership — that the hackers wanted to try to hurt Democrats at all levels of the party, from lesser known races in Florida to the leadership,” The New York Times reported.
The attack on Luján was part of a larger hacking of DCCC documents before the election, The New York Times reported. The information released about nearly a dozen House candidates nationwide “was largely lost in the focus on the hacking attacks against the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign,” the newspaper reported. “But this untold story underscores the effect the Russian operation had on the American electoral system.”
After the theft of DCCC documents, Luján wrote to the campaign committee for House Republicans, the National Republican Congressional Campaign Committee, urging it to “not use this stolen material in the 2016 campaign.”
“The N.R.C.C.’s use of documents stolen by the Russians plays right into the hands of one of the United States’ most dangerous adversaries,”Luján’s Aug. 29 letter stated, according to The New York Times. “Put simply, if this action continues, the N.R.C.C. will be complicit in aiding the Russian government in its effort to influence American elections.”
The article on Russia targeting House Democrats was the second on the hacking The New York Times published Tuesday. In the first, the newspaper detailed Russia’s hacking of Democratic National Committee computers in an attempt to harm Clinton’s presidential campaign.