FBI police car (illustration)
FBI police car (illustration)iStock

The FBI has launched a probe into the hacking of the Democratic National Committee's (DNC) emails, it announced Monday.

"The FBI is investigating a cyber intrusion involving the DNC and are working to determine the nature and scope of the matter," the agency said in a statement quoted by Politico.

"A compromise of this nature is something we take very seriously, and the FBI will continue to investigate and hold accountable those who pose a threat in cyberspace," it added.

The publication of the approximately 20,000 emails showed a DNC favorable to Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders.

The leak led DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz to announce her resignation on Sunday, effective at the end of the party's convention this week.

On Monday, however, she bowed out of the convention altogether.

“I have decided that in the interest of making sure that we can start the Democratic convention on a high note that I am not going to gavel in the convention,” Wasserman Schultz, the chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee and a Florida congresswoman, told her hometown newspaper, the Broward County edition of the Florida Sun-Sentinel.

The Clinton campaign suggested on Sunday that Russia had played a role in the affair, noted Politico, with campaign manager Robby Mook saying that the Kremlin is trying to help Donald Trump.

On Monday, Mook pointed to reporting by The New York Times citing researchers who have concluded that two Russian intelligence agencies had breached the party's servers.