Beto Hacker Reporter Sat On Story For Months

Democrat Presidential candidate and former Texas Rep. Beto O'Rourke was a member of a famous "hacktivism" group as a teenager, a Reuters report revealed Friday.

O'Rourke joined the group, called the Cult of the Dead Cow, when he was in high school, Reuters reported, citing interviews with members of the group.

The Cult of the Dead Cow, which still exists today, released a pair of tools in the late 1990s that hacked into computers that used Windows operating systems. The move caused Microsoft to increase security for their products, according to Reuters.

But O'Rourke told Reuters that he had stopped participating in the group by the time he enrolled at Columbia University in 1991.

According to The Hill, the report is an excerpt from an upcoming book by Reuters reporter Joseph Menn titled "Cult of the Dead Cow: How the Original Hacking Supergroup Might Just Save the World."

O'Rourke wrote pieces for the group under the username "Psychedelic Warlord." The posts are still online.

Among the pieces he wrote were critiques of racism and a fictional piece describing hitting two children with a car.

O'Rourke on Friday acknowledged that he was part of a hacking group as a teenager, saying he is not "proud" of the fact.

The former Texas congressman told reporters in Iowa while on the campaign trail that the hacking group was something "that I was part of as a teenager, not anything that I'm proud of today," according to the Texas Tribune.

"That's the long and short of it," he added.

Meanwhile, The Daily Caller reports  the Reuters' reporter Joseph Menn, who has a forthcoming book about the CDC, first learned that O’Rourke was a member of the group over a year ago in late 2017.

Reuters explained in a “backstory” article late Friday that Menn held onto the story until after O’Rourke’s high-profile Senate race in exchange for an on-the-record interview. Menn says he was on leave from Reuters at the time in order to work on his book.

Menn had been looking into the CDC for years and “found out that they had a member who was sitting in Congress … and then I figured out which one it was.”

However, Menn said the CDC wouldn’t confirm that O’Rourke was the member in question unless the reporter agreed to hang on to the information “until after the November election” in 2018. After agreeing to the group’s terms, Menn approached O’Rourke for an interview with the promise that it would not be published until after his Senate race. O’Rourke agreed.