State Dept.: No ‘Operational Link’ Between ISIS and ISIS Headhunters

BLITZER: “Let's get back to that supposed ISIS threat to these 100 members of the U.S. military, that they're now on a hit list. They're encouraging their supporters, lone wolves or whatever here in the United States or if they're based overseas, to go out there and attack them, not only attack them but kill them and behead them.”…

HARF: “I think there is still a lot of questions about this. This is clearly a propaganda effort by someone, whether they're actually affiliated with ISIL or not, but clearly what they want is attention. They want to draw potential lone wolf attention to this. And it's certainly something we take very seriously.”

BLITZER: ‘And they said, ‘You know what? The best thing’ -- to their supporters in the United States – ‘is if you could come over here to Iraq and Syria and fight with ISIS, but if you can't, go out, grow up, find these 100 individuals, and kill them.’ … But as of this point you don't know for sure whether this is really ISIS. They said it was an ISIS hacking department, whatever they called it, or just some other person pretending to be ISIS. You're still investigating that. Is that right?”

HARF: “We are. And I think the Defense Department has said there's not -- there's no evidence there was a data breach, even though they call themselves a hacking group. We think they found information online and pieced it together. But there are a lot of these groups that have popped up, even in places like Yemen, as Barbara Starr just reported. We don't know if they're operationally linked to ISIL. They claimed this name probably to get more attention and more followers, but we just don't know yet if there's an operational link.”