Former Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta said the Trump administration's claim that the Russia investigation is a witch hunt came true Friday with the indictment of a dozen Russian intelligence officers.
Shortly after Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein announced the Department of Justice, via special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia probe, has charged 12 Russians with hacking into Democratic email accounts during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, Podesta expressed his relief.
"Donald Trump calls this a witch hunt? Well, we've just found some witches," Podesta told ABC News. "And they've been indicted."
Podesta had his email account hacked in 2016, which resulted in 20,000 pages of his emails being published by WikiLeaks. He was reportedly victimized by a spear phishing email, which he claimed his IT person mistakenly said was legitimate to open and click on a link.
The Democratic National Committee also had its computer network compromised, and it said the Russians were responsible — despite pushback on that claim by Republicans.
DNC chair Tom Perez reacted to Friday's indictments by saying, "This is not a witch hunt and it is certainly not a joke, as Donald Trump has desperately and incorrectly argued in the past. It's long past time for him and his allies in the Republican Party to stop ignoring this urgent threat to our national security."
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