White House says no politics in U.S. cyber threat investigations

The White House said on Thursday  that partisanship plays no role in how the United States counters cyber threats affecting Americans.

“When it comes to our national security, we’re going to do everything we can to protect the American people without regard to which political party they belong to,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest said.

He was responding to a question regarding Donald Trump’s previous day’s remarks, during which the Republican presidential nominee invited Russia to dig up tens of thousands of “missing” emails from Hillary Clinton’s time at the U.S. State Department.

The remark vexed intelligence experts and prompted Democrats to accuse him of urging foreigners to spy on Americans.

However, Earnest said the controversy would not affect Trump’s access to national security briefings as a presidential nominee.

“The director of national intelligence has indicated he intends to conduct those briefings pursuant to that long-standing tradition and he certainly is supported by this administration and this White House in doing so,” Earnest said.

“The administration is confident that they can both provide relevant and sufficient briefings to the two major party presidential candidates, while also protecting sensitive national security information,” he added.

Earnest also said the FBI has not revealed any information about who was behind the hack of Democratic Party emails.

Trump has dismissed suggestions that WikiLeaks’ release of the embarrassing emails last week was engineered by Russia to help nudge the U.S. election in his favor.