Amna Nawaz:
So, Andrew, the White House responded to our request with a statement about this.
And they said — quote — “It’s months-old news that President Trump signed an executive order to hire DOGE employees at agencies and coordinate data sharing. Their highly qualified team has been extremely public and transparent in its efforts to eliminate waste, fraud and abuse across the executive branch, including the NLRB.”
So, Andrew, they’re arguing this is all part of their work that they’re doing to cut waste, fraud and abuse.
Andrew Bakaj, Attorney for Daniel Berulis: If the administration is taking the position that having data exfiltrated out of the United States government and potentially into other nation-states, if that’s about efficiency and effectiveness for the nation, it doesn’t make any sense.
Within 15 minutes of DOGE engineers creating accounts, years, names and passwords within internal systems within DOGE, within 15 minutes of the creation of those accounts, somebody or something from Russia tried to log in with all of our credentials, meaning they had the right usernames and right passwords.
And the question is, how do they get that and why? The second question that I have is that why is it that from what Dan has seen, as well as others, because we have spoken to other individuals who are able to corroborate this, which is that some of the data is also using Starlink as a backdoor.
And that’s another way to get data out of internal databases within agencies. And Starlink has now direct access where information is likely, we believe is funneled directly into Russia.
