A whistleblower’s lawyer has made explosive claims about a major security breach tied to DOGE at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). In an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper on Tuesday, he said Russian operatives recently accessed U.S. government secrets — and pointed the finger squarely at DOGE.
Earlier that day, Congress was briefed on a report from a new NLRB staffer who said DOGE took a massive amount of sensitive government data. According to the report, “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.”
The whistleblower, Daniel Bertulis, appeared on The Lead alongside his lawyer, Andrew Bakaj. Bertulis explained how he uncovered the missing files. He also criticized the White House’s claims of transparency, pointing out that DOGE hasn’t released the code its techs are using.
But the most alarming claims came from Bakaj.
“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.”
Bakaj also said the data may have been funneled out through Starlink — Elon Musk’s satellite internet company.
“The second data point, which is really critical, is that DOGE has also been using Starlink as a means to exfiltrate data,” he said. “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.”
He didn’t stop there.
“We also know that this is not unique to the NLRB,” Bakaj 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.”
He ended with a grim warning.
“So right now the real concern is that this not unlike Chernobyl,” Bakaj said. “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.”
Watch the full segment below via CNN.
