More: Earlier on Tuesday, news broke that a relatively new NLRB staffer claimed that DOGE not only accessed data from his agency but also took a substantial amount of sensitive data with them, according to a disclosure shared with Congress that read, "around ten gigabytes of data are, quote, the equivalent of a full stack of encyclopedias worth if someone printed these files as hard copy documents."
Daniel Bertulis appeared on The Lead, joined by his attorney Andrew Bakaj, and explained the details of how he apparently uncovered a massive amount of missing data from the NLRB following DOGE's efforts. He ostensibly mocked a White House statement touting the transparency at play, noting that none of the code used by DOGE technicians has been shared publicly.
But the most shocking allegations came from Bakaj, who not only claimed that accounts based in Russia were using newly created DOGE usernames and passwords to access sensitive data, but also directly tied the effort to Elon Musk and his Starlink concerns, which has a relationship with the Kremlin.
"There are two data points that I wanna point out that should give everybody pause," Bakaj said. "The first thing, what Dan witnessed was that within 15 minutes of DOGE employees creating user accounts, i.e. Usernames and passwords, within 15 minutes of those accounts being created, somebody or something from Russia tried to log in with the right username and right passwords " that is to say " the right credentials. And that happened over 20 times."
"The second data point, which is really critical, is that DOGE has also been using Starlink as a means to exfiltrate data," he continued. "What that means is that, from our understanding, Russia has a direct pipeline of information through Starlink, which means that anything going through Starlink is going to Russia."
"We also know that this is not unique to the NLRB," he said. "This is happening government-wide. And then the other thing that I wanted to flag for everybody is that right now that, I don't want to say that this is intentional, it could very well have been a mistake, is that critical infrastructure databases and many government agencies, as we understand it, have been exposed to the open internet, which includes critical databases at the Department of Energy, which includes a lot of our nuclear regulatory agency material."
"So right now the real concern is that this not unlike Chernobyl," he concluded. "And all of the control panels lighting up after the meltdown. This is serious and I just wanna commend Dan for coming forward to bring this to everybody's attention because this really is the tip of the iceberg."