Cyber Thieves Keep Stealing Republicans' Campaign Funds

Another Republican member of Congress has told the FEC that their campaign funds were hijacked by skillful hackers, making this the 5th Republican this year to suffer such an attack. Last week, Matt Gaetz reported having his campaign fund's credit card number stolen, and three other Republicans have suffered the same inconvenience this year. Why are cyber thieves targeting Republicans? Farron Cousins has a few ideas as to why this is happening.

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*This transcript was auto-generated. Please excuse any typos.

Yet another Republican member of Congress has had their campaign finances basically cleaned out by cyber criminals. We have now had five Republican lawmakers this year have their, uh, campaign finances targeted by hackers. Five that have been announced this year. I should say not all of it took place this year, but it was announced or revealed this year. The most recent is Republican representative Troy Neals of the state of Texas, who had $157,626 wiped out of his campaign funds because hackers got in there and they spent the money at a place called Misty J Productions. Uh, which according to reports doesn't even seem to exist. So Republican representative Neals is the most recent Republican to report that yes, I was hacked and had our campaign credit card number stolen. But the most high profile one of course, was last week when Republican representative Matt Gates filed with the F E C that they had had their campaign credit card, actually a political action committee, a credit card number stolen and a thief spent a couple hundred dollars and an Apple store.

We also had earlier this month, uh, this from raw story reports indicated that cyber thieves Madoff with hundreds of thousands of dollars from the campaign account of Senator Jerry Moran, Republican of Kansas FBI's investigating that, uh, Republican representative Neil Dunn of Florida lost $11,000 to an external check fraud situation. And Republican representative Russell Fry of South Carolina reported seven fraudulent withdrawals from his campaign account to the F E C. So, uh, Republicans, I don't know, maybe invest in a good vpn, maybe get one of those online security, uh, uh, companies to monitor your financials because y'all seem to be having a very real problem with people stealing your campaign account information and going on massive spending sprees. And so far, all of the reported cases, at least as of me sitting here right now talking to you, all 100% of the reported cases have been Republicans. So this does at the moment appear to be a uniquely Republican problem. The question is, why? Why are these cyber thieves, hackers, whatever you wanna call 'em, why are they targeting the Republican members of Congress? Could it be that perhaps they think the Republicans are sitting on more money? You know, the bigger the war chest, the bigger the target. Could it be that they think these Republicans are so irresponsible with their finances that they're never gonna notice anyway?

I mean, in the case of Matt Gates, again, it was only a couple hundred dollars. You know, some of these other folks had hundreds of thousands of dollars go missing. Matt Gaetz's campaign is just a few hundred. Maybe they thought they wouldn't notice, but whatever it is, it is Republicans that are being targeted. And yes, that is concerning, but I think a lot of it has to do with the way our campaign finance laws work. You have these accounts that are sitting out there, some of them literally just holding millions of dollars and you don't have a whole lot of oversight, right? A, as I talked about on a ring of fire last week, it's not like your personal bank account where if there's a bunch of weird charges, your bank is either gonna call you, text you, or you're gonna know it. Cuz you log into your bank every day to see how much money you got left till you get paid.

With these massive accounts that have hundreds of thousands, many of them, like I said, millions of dollars, you're not logging into that account every day to see what expense was made where. And campaigns have a lot of weird expenses at expensive places. I mean from hotels and flights to electronics, stereo equipment, liquor stores, resorts, entertainment, those are all legitimate expenses for some reason. And they're weird. They're all in different places. You travel a lot, you have different expenses in different places. So it's not gonna trigger the red flags like it would with a personal bank account. But whatever the reason these cyber thieves are targeting these Republicans, it does need to be investigated.