Exclusive: More than 100,000 sensitive parliamentary emails and documents were handed to a private company that had been the victim of a massive cyber hack by Russian criminals, despite warnings that granting such access posed an "extreme" risk.

9News, The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald can reveal that federal parliament's second most senior bureaucrat ordered her department to surrender a search of all emails, Microsoft Office files and Teams chats over a 10-month period in 2023 in a bid to investigate potential wrongdoing by senior colleagues, including her then boss.

Jaala Hinchcliffe, then deputy secretary of the Department of Parliamentary Services (DPS), last year twice oversaw an order for the IT team to give the department's lawyers, HWL Ebsworth, access to parl

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