Bloomberg falsely reports about Russian hackers and GOP
July 7, 2021
Bloomberg reporters anxious once again to report a GOP story with a Russian angle said today that hackers with ties to “Russia’s foreign intelligence service” that had previously been accused of the 2016 hack of the Democrat National Committee successfully hacked the computers of the Republican National Committee.
The problem with the story, the reporters didn’t contact the RNC before publication and the RNC is denying the hack accessed their systems.
“We immediately blocked all access from Synnex accounts to our cloud environment,” said the RNC through a statement released by Chief of Staff Richard Walters. “Our team worked with Microsoft to conduct a review of our systems and after a thorough investigation, no RNC data was accessed. We will continue to work with Microsoft, as well as federal law enforcement officials, on this matter.”
The statement was later added to the Bloomberg story, at first without attributing it to being a post-publication edit.
RNC Director of Communications, Danielle Alvarez, said flatly that the Bloomberg article was false.
“This is not true. Formal statement coming,” tweeted prior to the statement by the RNC.
She also took Bloomberg to task for not getting comments from the RNC or returning calls from the RNC.
“Would be nice if you reached out for comment for this story in the first place or returned our calls since the story published,” said Alvarez on Twitter a few minutes later.
Calls and emails to reporter William Turton of Bloomberg from Accuracy in Media were not returned, nor were the emails sent to Turton’s co-reporter Jennifer Jacob.
Jacob’s Twitter page says that she’s the Senior White House Reporter for Bloomberg, “Reporting what I know, not what I think.”
Given the hypertext Turton posted pre-publication about a “scoop” about Russian hackers, AIM.org thinks the Bloomberg reporters wrote what they think, not what they know.
https://twitter.com/WilliamTurton/status/1412508734325145606