Reports from BuzzFeed News indicate that the FBI never performed an independent forensic analysis of the Democratic National Committee's hacked servers, instead relying on data from the third-party security firm CrowdStrike. Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern criticized this reliance, noting that the NSA has not provided evidence linking the Russian government to the dissemination of the emails. Critics argue the lack of direct government access to the hardware undermines the intelligence community's certainty.

