On Friday, the Democratic National Committee filed a multi-million dollar lawsuit against the Russian government, Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and WikiLeaks, claiming that they were involved in a massive conspiracy against Hillary Clinton.
The lawsuit, filed in federal court in the Southern District of New York, claims that senior members of the Trump campaign conspired with the Russian government to damage Clinton and seeks financial damages for the alleged hacks of the DNC’s servers.
“During the 2016 presidential campaign, Russia launched an all-out assault on our democracy, and it found a willing and active partner in Donald Trump’s campaign,” DNC chairman Tom Perez said.
Discovery in the case will be interesting given that the FBI has not had access to the DNC’s servers. In November 2017, BuzzFeed News reported:
The party had hired CrowdStrike essentially in place of the FBI — to this day, the Bureau has not had access to the DNC’s servers. DNC officials said they made the eyebrow-raising choice to go with a private firm because they were worried they’d lose control of their operations right in the middle of the campaign. Not only that, but the FBI was investigating Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server. Better, the DNC figured, to handle things privately.
“This constituted an act of unprecedented treachery: the campaign of a nominee for president of the United States in league with a hostile foreign power to bolster its own chance to win the presidency,” Perez continued. “This is not partisan, it’s patriotic.”