Washington, DC -- Today, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), the Ranking Member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, released the following statement:
"In our election, and because of the decentralization of our voting system, my gravest fear was not that the Russians would hack the actual voting machines. Most were not online and many have paper trails. Nonetheless, I continue to think that any voter registrar that doesn't maintain a paper trail is guilty of negligence.
"Instead, I worried about the Russians dumping forged documents among the real, or worse still, adding fake paragraphs into real emails. Imagine the impact on an election if hackers inserted false information into a real email that suggested illegality by a candidate, and then published the document. If this was done close to an election, there would be no opportunity to disprove the forgery and who would believe the victim even if they could?
"In France with Macron's campaign, that nightmare scenario may be playing out, with hackers reportedly mixing fake documents in with the real and then dumping them. While we are still awaiting confirmation from French officials that there are indeed forgeries being dumped along with authentic stolen documents, this would represent yet another dangerous escalation of cyber interference in a Western nation's democracy."
