Three Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee had their personal phone numbers and home addresses briefly posted on Wikipedia.
During Thursday's confirmation hearing for Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, the home addresses and personal phone numbers for Republican Sens. Lindsey Graham (S.C.), Orrin Hatch (Utah), and Mike Lee (Utah) were briefly published on Wikipedia.
While the Washington Post was able to confirm most of the addresses and phone numbers as being legitimate, at least one listed as Graham's home phone number was actually the number for an LGBT advocacy group.
On Twitter, White House spokesman Raj Shah called this “outrageous” and urged those involved to “[p]lease stop.”
This is outrageous. Please stop https://t.co/kkByAg49qs
— Raj Shah (@RajShah45) September 27, 2018
“It’s shocking that someone would post Senator Hatch and other Judiciary Committee Republicans’ home addresses online, putting their families at risk,” Matt Whitlock, a spokesman for Hatch told TheBlaze. “That it happened as they were asking questions in a Supreme Court confirmation hearing is just another indication of how broken this process has become.”
The Wikipedia pages for all three senators show that they were edited yesterday, and then those edits were quickly undone by Wikipedia administrators. The edits were also locked so that people with editor status cannot go back and view the original edits.
The edits to Hatch's page were up for 25 minutes. the ones to Lee's page were up for two minutes. Graham's page seems to have been corrected almost immediately. All these changes were made between 9 p.m. and 10 p.m.
According to the Post, the Twitter bot @congressedits, which automatically tweets any Wikipedia article edited from any congressional IP addresses, tweeted out all three of these pages. The account said that the pages were “edited anonymously from US House of Representatives.”
This would mean that whoever doxxed the senators did so using the internet at the U.S. Capitol. It does not mean that the pages were edited by a member of Congress, just by a person present at that location. These tweets have since been deleted.
