If you recall, only a week or so ago the FBI and DHS issued their report on the hacking of the DNC server and the successful spearphishing of John Podesta. In it they fingered the Kremlin as the party behind the hacks. The report, however, started to cause more questions to be asked than were answered. Perhaps for the first time in history an investigative product came with an actual disclaimer that essentially says “Caveat Emptor.”

Then questions were raised about the superficiality of the report. Many cybersecurity experts started saying that even though they believed the conclusions of the report to be true, the FBI had a lot of stuff wrong and presented no real evidence of Russian involvement.

Then the ever helpful DNC piled on.

“The DNC had several meetings with representatives of the FBI’s Cyber Division and its Washington (DC) Field Office, the Department of Justice’s National Security Division, and U.S. Attorney’s Offices, and it responded to a variety of requests for cooperation, but the FBI never requested access to the DNC’s computer servers.

Beginning at the time the intrusion was discovered by the DNC, the DNC cooperated fully with the FBI and its investigation, providing access to all of the information uncovered by CrowdStrike – without any limits.”

I don’t know why the DNC would do that unless they were trying to make the FBI look incompetent, to bolster their narrative of Hillary Clinton’s innocence, and assumed that the FBI would just have to take the abuse. Now the FBI has struck back.

LATEST: FBI says they asked DNC for servers, and DNC refused, "inhibited" the investigation. pic.twitter.com/AfkAPlJsYZ

— Ali Watkins (@AliWatkins) January 5, 2017

Via The Daily Caller:

“The FBI repeatedly stressed to DNC officials the necessity of obtaining direct access to servers and data, only to be rebuffed until well after the initial compromise had been mitigated,” an FBI official said Thursday, according to BuzzFeed News.

“This left the FBI no choice but to rely upon a third party for information. These actions caused significant delays and inhibited the FBI from addressing the intrusion earlier.”

That third party was a Democrat hired security firm called Crowdstrike. It was their analysis that became the FBI/DHS analysis. In fact, in my original story I commented on the fact that there was nothing in the report that had not already appeared on the internet.

So I’m really unsure how all of this works. Has the FBI decided that cyber-crime is no longer a real crime? Or are we now in an era where you can tell the FBI to pound sand if they ask you for access to evidence of a crime? Or was Comey’s FBI so incredibly influenced by politics that its agents were not even allowed to pursue evidence of a crime if the right people refused to cooperate (shades of the Clinton Foundation investigation)? Why, we can ask, did the DNC obstruct the investigation? Were they afraid the FBI would incidentally find evidence of criminal misconduct?

What we do no for certain about the DNC hack right now are two things. First, it happened. Second, it is impossible to ever know for certain who did it or how it happened because the DNC assisted in destroying the evidence.