The “he said, she said” allegations being exchanged by the FBI and the Democratic National Committee continued Thursday, with the FBI insisting that the DNC would not allow direct access to its hacked servers, leaving the FBI to rely on a forensic analysis performed by a third party.

BuzzFeed reported Wednesday that the DNC said the FBI “never requested access” to its servers and thus had never examined firsthand the computers that were allegedly penetrated by Russian hackers.

DNC deputy communications director Eric Walker told BuzzFeed in an email that the FBI never requested access to the DNC’s computer servers. Instead, the FBI relied on an analysis done by security firm CrowdStrike, which investigated the breach for the DNC.

NBC’s intelligence and national security reporter added this information to the mix.

On Thursday, however, BuzzFeed’s Ali Watkins tweeted that the FBI claimed that it had requested direct access to the DNC’s servers, but the DNC refused, leaving the FBI no choice but to rely on third-party analysis.

Watkins added that DNC “brushed off” Wednesday’s report in advance of the FBI’s statement with the caveat that having direct access to the servers wasn’t really “an important thing.” Seemingly in an effort to kill off the last of the DNC’s credibility, the DNC source added, “There are always haters out there.”

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Now, Democrats seem more convinced than ever that FBI director James Comey, once a hero for recommending that Hillary Clinton not be indicted, really did try to derail her campaign in its final stretch. Either that, or the DNC really didn’t want whatever was on its servers exposed to the FBI.

So where does Putin fit in to all of this?

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