A lawyer representing MSNBC host Joy Reid said Wednesday night that the FBI is investigating whether Reid’s blog was hacked.
“We have received confirmation the FBI has opened an investigation into potential criminal activities surrounding several online accounts, including personal email and blog accounts, belonging to Joy-Ann Reid. Our own investigation and monitoring of the situation will continue in parallel, and we are cooperating with law enforcement as their investigation proceeds,” attorney John H. Reichman said in a statement provided to TPM by MSNBC.
Reid’s team has alleged that newly surfaced homophobic blog posts were the result of a hack and were not actually written by Reid herself. The Internet Archive, the group that hosts the archive of Reid’s defunct blog, says that they did not find any evidence that their archived versions of Reid’s blog posts were tampered with. However, a cybersecurity expert working for Reid said that he found indications that her blog was tampered with in some way.
An MSNBC spokesperson said Wednesday that Reid will remain on air while any law enforcement investigations unfold and said that the network will let such an investigation play out, suggesting that the network itself is not reviewing the matter at this time.
