Not finished with Russia, spy chief says
‘Steps are being taken’ to protect elections, intelligence director Coats says
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s administration is weighing further retaliation against Russia for meddling in the 2016 election and interfering in the affairs of the United States and its allies, the top U.S. intelligence official said Wednesday.
“This is under considerable consideration and more things will be done — and soon — above where we are right now,” National Intelligence Director Dan Coats told reporters at a breakfast briefing. “I would just say stay tuned on that. I think we are becoming more and more aware of the potential for Russia to continue to engage in any number of ways relative to our elections, and a lot of steps are being taken.”
Russia has been accused of meddling in the 2016 presidential election and of being behind the March 4 nerve agent attack on ex-Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury, England.
The poisoning plunged relations between the West and Russia to their lowest ebb since the Cold War. More than two dozen Western allies expelled more than 150 Russian diplomats in a show of solidarity with Britain. Russia responded by ordering the same number of their envoys out.
Russia has denied being behind the nerve agent attack. Sergei Naryshkin, director of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, the top KGB successor agency, said in Moscow on Wednesday that the poisoning was the latest example of the U.S.-led efforts to undermine Russia, adding that the Russia-West chill is comparable to the Cold War.
Coats said the U.S. agrees with British Prime Minister Theresa May, who said that Russia is the only nation state capable of using the nerve agent in such an attack.
“[The Russians] either instituted it themselves or they lost control of it and somebody else did it. When you look at the history of it — the Russian malign activities and so forth — it’s not hard to come to the conclusion that the Russians were out to send a signal to their other spies who have come out of the cold. Or [it was] just a continued power play by [Russian President Vladimir] Putin just prior to his election,” Coats said.
Putin was pushing hard to get as many votes as possible in his re-election bid, so the attack might have been his way of “playing Mr. Strongman” and persuading voters into thinking he is the leader to bring Russia back into power after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the USSR in the early 1990s, Coats said.
He described Putin as “shrewd” and “calculating” and said that when dealing with the former KGB officer, the U.S. needs to “go in with eyes wide open and with a high degree of skepticism.”
Coats was asked why the U.S. decided to retaliate against Russia by closing its consulate in Seattle, which was near a submarine base, Naval Base Kitsap, as well as Boeing Co. operations.
The Russians didn’t decide to open a consulate in Seattle because of “the climate or the nice living conditions,” Coats said. “One could assume that they went there because there were [intelligence] collection opportunities.”
On Tuesday, in his last public remarks as Trump’s national security adviser, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster denounced Russia for its aggression around the world and declared: “We have failed to impose sufficient costs.”
His comments come a little more than a week after he was ousted by Trump, who is replacing him with former U.N. ambassador and conservative firebrand John Bolton.
And they came hours after Trump, in a White House news conference with Baltic state leaders, stated, “Nobody has been tougher on Russia than I have.”
Despite a series of recent actions taken by the Trump administration against Russia over the poisoning, election interference and global cyberattacks, Trump has been criticized by Russia policy experts and Democrats for refraining from forcefully condemning Moscow for such actions.
“Russia has used old and new forms of aggression to undermine our open societies and the foundations of international peace and stability,” McMaster said Tuesday evening at the Atlantic Council.
Alluding to Russia and other countries, he said, “We are now engaged in a fundamental contest between our free and open societies and closed and repressive systems. Revisionist and repressive powers are attempting to undermine our values, our institutions and way of life.”
Trump, for his part, was more restrained in his remarks about Russia.
“Ideally we want to get along with Russia,” he said at the news conference. “Getting along with Russia is a good thing, not a bad thing. Maybe we will, maybe we won’t.”
Russia has been accused of meddling in the 2016 presidential election and of being behind the March 4 nerve agent attack on ex-Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury, England.
Information for this article was contributed by Deb Riechmann of The Associated Press and by Ellen Nakashima and John Hudson of The Washington Post.