One lawmaker is taking the Trump administration to task over allegations that it’s forcing senior White House cybersecurity officials to resign from their posts.
On Friday, Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Calif., demanded the White House offer an explanation for the recent exodus of cybersecurity officials from the Office of the Chief Information Security Officer. The request came days after reports that more than a dozen high-ranking cyber officials had left their roles under pressure from the White House, which sought to purge the office of Obama-era staffers.
In a letter to the president’s acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, Lieu voiced concerns over the administration’s handling of its cybersecurity wing, arguing the loss of institutional knowledge could leave the White House vulnerable to attacks.
“A White House data breach would give our adversaries an untold advantage in almost every foreign policy and national security matter,” Lieu wrote.
The Office of the Chief Information Security Officer was created after a 2014 incident where Russian hackers breached the White House’s unclassified computer network, and in the years since, the group served as the primary coordinator for the White House’s digital networks. But according to recent reports, organizational changes are slowly stripping the office of its teeth.
In an email obtained last week by Axios, Dimitrios Vastakis, former branch chief of the White House computer network defens ..
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