There are plenty of people in politics who will stoop to any low to get what they want. But this is beyond the pale.
And now a sudden attack on Lindsey Graham shut down Capitol Hill.
Sen. Lindsey Graham said Wednesday that the FBI seized his phone after someone tried to deceive the South Carolina Republican into thinking he was conversing with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer.
Mr. Graham exposed the potential breach during remarks at the Hill & Valley Forum on Capitol Hill, a gathering of senior tech and government executives in Washington to tackle AI security.
When asked about spies targeting Silicon Valley and how AI laboratories should prepare, Mr. Graham expressed worry and recounted his own encounter with suspected hackers.
“My phone is in the hands of the FBI now,” Mr. Graham stated at the discussion.
“So I get a message, I think, from Schumer, it ain’t from Schumer, and next thing you know, my phone’s, I don’t know what. Anything you can create apparently can be hacked.”
Mr. Graham did not say who he felt was responsible. Mr. Graham’s spokesperson, Taylor Reidy, confirmed that the Senate’s Sergeant at Arms was conducting an investigation.
There is no confirmation if any information was compromised that Americans should be worried about.
On top of that, it’s unclear if the FBI knows who hacked the Senator’s phone. It’s possible it could be a foreign actor.
And this isn’t the first time something like that has happened.
Republican U.S. Representative Don Bacon said that the FBI had alerted him that his emails had been hacked by Chinese hackers in August of 2023, with both personal and campaign correspondence exposed.
Bacon told X, the social media network formerly known as Twitter, that the Chinese Communist Party had access to his accounts for about a month, which ended on June 16.
The Washington Post was first to report the news.
The hack was the result of a “vulnerability in Microsoft software,” Bacon said, referring to the hacking campaign disclosed by Microsoft (MSFT.O) last month, which reportedly resulted in the theft of hundreds of thousands of emails from senior U.S. officials, including U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and U.S. Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns.
CNN earlier reported that email accounts in the United States House of Representatives had been targeted as part of the same campaign.
“There were other victims in this cyber operation,” Bacon revealed on X. “The Communist government in China are not our friends and are very active in conducting cyber espionage.”
A Chinese Embassy official branded the development a “smear” and part of a “groundless narrative,” saying that the U.S. government had undermined China’s sovereignty with recent military shipments to Taiwan, a self-governing island that China claims.
The FBI and Microsoft declined to comment.
According to a spokeswoman for Bacon, the FBI informed him that Chinese hackers had penetrated his email and stolen information on personal banking, political strategy, and campaign financing.
Stay tuned to the Conservative Column.
